Coronet Cub1947

History

Coronet Camera Co. was founded in Birmingham and produced a range of inexpensive cameras primarily for the British mass market, with distribution concentrated through Woolworths and similar high-volume retailers. The company's cameras were consistently at the budget end of the market; the Coronet range during the late 1940s and 1950s included simple box cameras in 120 and 127 formats, the 3D stereo camera, and novelty types of which the Cub is one.

The Cub arrived in 1947, shortly after the end of World War II, in a market receptive to novelty consumer goods after years of wartime austerity and restriction. The subminiature format had a particular cultural cachet: spy thrillers and wartime intelligence work had popularized the idea of miniature cameras concealed in waistcoat pockets or cigarette lighters, and the Cub offered British consumers a cheap entry into that aesthetic. The actual photographic utility of the Cub was limited by its optical quality and the difficulty of having 16mm film processed, but utility was not the primary appeal.

16mm film in the 1940s and 1950s was primarily a motion-picture format, and obtaining still photographic 16mm film and processing for the Cub required either dedicated subminiature film suppliers or respooling from 16mm movie stock. This was an inconvenience that limited the Cub's use as an everyday camera but did not significantly affect its role as a novelty gift or curiosity item.

Coronet continued producing cameras through the 1950s and into the 1960s before eventually ceasing operations. The Cub was among the more collectible items in the range due to its unusual format.

Why It Matters

The Coronet Cub sits at the intersection of two postwar British enthusiasms: the demand for novelty consumer goods after wartime privation, and the popular fascination with miniaturization and "spy" technology that the war had intensified. The subminiature camera was a cultural object as much as a photographic tool in the late 1940s, and the Cub made that object available to working-class British buyers at Woolworths prices.

As a piece of industrial history, the Cub demonstrates Coronet's willingness to experiment with unusual formats alongside its bread-and-butter box camera production. Birmingham's light manufacturing sector in this period was producing a range of consumer novelties in Bakelite, and the Cub represents the photographic contribution to that broader culture of cheap, accessible consumer objects.

For subminiature collectors, the Cub occupies a specific niche: it is not a precision instrument like the Minox or the later Mamiya 16, but rather a toy-camera interpretation of the sub-miniature form, interesting for its origins, its Bakelite construction, and its position in British photographic history.

Sample Photographers / Notable Use

• Sold as a novelty gift and curiosity item through Woolworths and British high-street retailers from 1947 onward; used by British amateur photographers attracted to the subminiature format's "spy camera" mystique.
• Collected as an artifact of postwar British consumer culture, Birmingham light manufacturing, and the 1940s-1950s vogue for miniaturization.
• Occasionally used by contemporary film photographers and subminiature collectors as a low-cost representative of British submini camera history.

References

• Camera-Wiki: Coronet Cub -- specifications and historical context

Kodak Gold 200 is a daylight-balanced C-41 color negative film with warm color, moderate grain, and a classic consumer-film look.