THERE is something of the Rorschach test about our main picture today – how you view it may depend upon your mood and disposition.

Opinions on the Timeout team upon unearthing the 1950s photograph have varied – with some saying it paints a jovial picture of men and boys working with their hands, in a Boys Own adventure kind of way.

There is even a suggestion they may be building a log bridge or building a bonfire.

Others though find the image rather eerie, the smoke drifting across the image giving it a rather apocalyptic, chilling feel.

And who, they ask, is the shadowy figure in the background?

Meanwhile this portrait photograph taken next to a sign for an orchestral performance contains a significant clue as to the identity of the subject.

The poster promises a performance by an orchestra whose name we cannot see, under the baton of conductor Sir Adrian Boult.

Boult was a pioneering conductor who established the BBC Symphony Orchestra with the BBC appointing him director of music in 1930.

When he retired from the corporation, Boult took on the chief conductorship of the London Philharmonic, retiring as as its chief conductor in 1957, and later accepting the post of president. Although in the latter part of his career he worked with other orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and his former orchestra, the BBC Symphony, it was the LPO with which he was primarily associated.

Under his name on this poster the solo pianist is billed as Iris Loveridge, who is clearly the woman in the picture. Born in West Ham, Essex, in 1917, Loveridge specialised in British contemporary music, including piano sonatas by Arnold Bax, and Edmund Rubbra.

In 1947 she gave the UK premiere of William Schuman’s Piano Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

She retired in 1995 and died in 2000 – but where was she on this day in the late 1950s when The Argus took her photograph?