Killing Three Birds With A Sea Urchin

My brother Roger sent me an email earlier today complementing me on the new Blog lay-out, and asking me to try and feature more of my old negatives and more old family photographs. I am able to kill two birds with one stone because, by chance, the next strip of negatives awaiting scanning features family members - indeed, none other than my brother himself. The six photographs on the negative strip are featured in the composite image below, and they were all taken during a family holiday to Scotland in the 1960s. 

The featured photograph at the top of this post shows Roger in a rowing boat, on - I think - Loch Levan, and holding a sea urchin shell which he had just pulled from the Loch. I am not entirely sure of the year - my best guess was 1963 - but by featuring the photograph here, there is a good chance that a comment will appear from my brother on the other side of the world, identifying the time precisely. Thus I will be able to date the negatives and kill three birds with one simple negative stone.

A Second Look At Harry Elk

This is Harry Elk. We know that because someone has kindly written his name under his photograph. A date would have been nice, an address would have been better, perhaps even over generous. A quick check of census records results in nobody of that name with a date of birth around the turn of the twentieth century. Whoever he was, Harry was a thoughtful chap who deserves a second look a century later.

The Test Of Time

There is something slightly fake about this Victorian photograph: the quality of the print is a little too good, the line between the foreground and the background is just a little too sharp.  I have examined the print carefully, and as far as I can make out, it is a genuine studio photograph from the 1880s. It is just that she has stood the test of time rather well.

At One With His Pipe And The World

I seem to attract old and lost negatives and photographs that gather together in the nooks and crannies  of my room, in search of company, in search of someone to love them. And love them I do: however old, however prosaic they may be. Give me an old negative of a man lighting his pipe against the backdrop of an over-stuffed coat rail, and I am a happy man. Just like the happy man in this photograph: at one with his pipe; at peace with the world.

Five From Slaithwaite 5 : Blue Days, Black Nights

The fifth and final £1 buy from the Slaithwaite antiques shop is an intriguing Edwardian studio photograph of a lady, some cushions and a telephone. Such photographs were common in the Edwardian age, but were normally featured on the picture postcards that were popular at this time. This is a print, not a postcard: and there are no studio details printed on it. Although telephones were a Victorian invention, it wasn't until the early years of the twentieth century that they began to be featured in popular culture. 

It is a great image to finish on, and as we zoom away from the Slaithwaite second-hand stall, the music of the Electric Light Orchestra fills the air. 

Blue days, black nights
I look into the sky (the love you need ain't gonna see you through)
And I wonder why (the little things you planned ain't comin' true)
Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight

Five From Slaithwaite: 4. Enlarged To Any Size

There is something slightly reminiscent of that great British comedian, Les Dawson, about this fine Victorian lady, who is the subject of the fourth of my five studio portraits bought from a second-hand stall in Slaithwaite. The portrait is the work of James Wright who had studios in both the Lancashire mill town of Oldham and in the seaside resort of Blackpool. The only reference to James Wright I have been able to find, is an small advert in the Warrington Guardian of 12th July 1873, and the style of the dress suggests that our image dates from around this time. Many of the early northern photographers had studios in both the mill towns and the seaside resorts that were becoming more and more popular with working class day-trippers. 

Les Dawson (1931-93) was born only a stones throw from Oldham and went on to find early success in the summer shows on the Blackpool piers. On the reverse of this Carte de Visite of a woman of substantial proportions, it says "copies may be ... enlarged to any size"; which is just the kind of comment Les Dawson would have taken great delight in!

Five From Slaithwaite: 3. Lady Ormonde

My third £1 purchase from the second hand stall in Slaithwaite was this delightful nineteenth century carte de visite from the London Studio of the society photographers William and Daniel Downey. William Downey (1829-1915) was born in South Shields and worked as a carpenter and boat builder before opening his first photographic studios in South Shields in the 1850s. By 1872 he and his brother Daniel had opened several studios in the North East, and William made the move to London to open studios on Ebury Street. He photographed both Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales and received a royal warrant in 1879.

This particular photograph is a great find because, not only is it a fine example of the work of the Downeys, but it also records who the sitter was: Lady Ormonde. Elizabeth Harriet Grosvenor was born in 1856, the daughter of the 1st Duke of Westminster, one of the richest men in Britain at the time. In 1876 she married James Edward Theobold Butler, the 3rd Marquis of Ormonde and was styled the Marchioness of Ormonde. She would have been around 26 years old when this photograph was taken, by which time she had two daughters – Beatrice and Constance. Her husband was a regimental colonel, a Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron, a Vice-Admiral of Leinster and just about everything else you could make up, and remained so until he popped his aristocratic clogs in 1919. His wife survived him by nine years, before finishing up as just a photographic memory on a Slaithwaite second-hand stall.

Five From Slaithwaite: 2. In The Limelight

There used to be a a shop in Huddersfield called something like “Global International Mobile Phones And Repairs“, which sounded all very grand, but was no more than a little chap in a broken down room with a counter made from a piece of wood balanced on two packing cases. Trades and industries that are in the first, heady stage of growth, tend to be drawn to such grandiose descriptions; and H Osguthorpe’s “North of England Photographic Institute” is a perfect case in point. Mr Osguthorpe made a living from the Institute during the mid 1880s, but by the end of the decade he appears to be looking elsewhere to make his fortune, as he placed several notices in The Stageadvertising his services as a “Limelight Worker”. Such workers operated the intensely bright spotlights in theatres and music halls, which were created by burning calcium oxide – or quicklime – at high temperatures. Sadly, Mr Osguthorpe was moving into the industry just as the limelights were just going dark: – to be replaced by the new, more convenient and more powerful, electric lights. Osguthorpe would have been better sticking to taking fine portraits of Victorian gentlemen in their wide-lapelled smoking jackets.

Five From A Slaithwaite Stall : 1 Pendlebury Wave

We were in Slaithwaite yesterday visiting the excellent Slaithwaite Art Festival, and afterwards called in one of the many antique emporiums in the village. There I found on one of the stalls a fine collection of old Victorian photographs. I managed to limit myself to just £5's worth, and came away with five excellent examples of the genre. I thought I would share them with you all over the next few days.

Carte de Visite of Unknown Woman : Studio of I Horne, Pendlebury

I know very little about this first photograph other than it comes from the studio of Israel Horne of the Lancashire town of Pendlebury. All I know of Israel Horne is what can be discovered by the usual trail through the census records. He was born in Summerseat, Lancashire in 1843, the son of a hand loom weaver, and he started work in the local cotton mill. By 1881 he had moved to Pendlebury and set up business as a grocer, and shortly after that he jumped on the photograph wagon that was one of the great growth industries of the time. In 1891 had an established studio in Pendlebury and a decade later his son and daughter were also working as photographers in the family business. By 1911 he had retired and three years later he was dead.

This photograph of a young Victorian lady with a very pronounced hair wave must date from the early years of the studio - probably the mid to late 1880s.

Thought For The Day

Mary The Beekeeper And The Flight Of Fancy Simulator

The thing about playing around with old, lost and forgotten photographs is that it provides a vigorous workout for the imagination. It is like a well equipped gym of thoughtfulness set inside a state of the art flight of fancy simulator. You can look at a picture that stopped time a century or more ago and let your mind sketch in whatever detail it desires. The person is happy, the person is sad; the person is rich, the person is poor; the person goes on to lead a full and happy life, the person gets run over by a tram as they leave the photographers' studio: any narrative is potentially possible. And occasionally, just occasionally, through some combination of luck and "big data", you get to check out your imagined narrative against reality.

This is a small Victorian Carte de Visite of a young girl which was taken in the Carnarvon studios of the photographer Hugh Humphreys. It shows a sad looking young girl aged about ten years old and a first guess would suggest that it must have been taken in the 1880s. However, look carefully on the reverse of the CdV and you find that some kind soul has written a name - Mary Dagmar Sillar. And what a name: if it had been Jane Smith or Mary White, you might have had difficulty; but Mary Dagmar Sillar - there's something to get your data-hungry teeth into.

Mary Dagmar Sillar was born in Lewisham, London in 1873, the second daughter of John Charles Sillar and his wife, Jane Ellen Jones. Her father was a tea broker and worked in the City of London buying and selling tea on the international markets: a job which no doubt allowed a comfortable lifestyle for himself and his family. Tragedy arrived in young Mary's life when she was just two years old and her mother died aged just 26. The response of most Victorian fathers to such events - which were not uncommon in an age when childbirth was a perilous activity - was to find another wife and stepmother double quick: but John Charles Sillar did not follow that particular route, he moved his small family to North Wales to live with their maternal grandmother.

It is in this period that Mary had her photograph taken, and the sadness in her eyes reflects the sadness of her short life. A second tragedy struck in 1895 when she was just 22 years old and her father died. By the turn of the century Mary and her sister Gwen were living in a boarding house in Colwyn Bay in North Wales. No occupation is listed in the census returns and therefore we can assume they had what at the time were called "independent means".

Both sisters disappear from the records by the time we get to the 1911 census, but by 1914 they are back again, and Gwen is getting married to, presumably, a cousin Ernest Gemmil Sillar who is a tea planter. Mary - by now in her early 40s and still unmarried - is one of the witnesses at the wedding. We catch a final glimpse of Mary in 1939 - at the time of the pre-war 1939 Register - when she is living in retirement with her sister and brother-in-law in Hailsham, Sussex. Finally we get a clue as to what she has been doing all her life because her occupation is listed as a retired "poultry and bee expert"! The final record available is that of her death in 1963 at the age of 90.

However good your flight of fancy simulator was - you would never have made that story up.