There must be zillions of family photographs in the world. Here are a few from my collection.
As you can imagine families featuring military personnel abound from both world wars and we can only guess whether they all survived the conflicts. In the second of these photographs you can see the man with a pipe in the upper left has been cut out of another photo and pasted in. Was he someone lost from the family?
This one was dated 29th Nov 1916. The message on the reverse is in German and addressed to a family in the Netherlands.
Days out at the seaside is a popular theme.
This good-looking bunch are almost too good to be true. Are they performers of some type?
I know families used to be much bigger but I’m not sure these are all from the same family.
The photographer looks like M Hotz of Honfleur. This photograph is much larger than a standard cabinet card.
Another plus sized card but no information on the photographer or the family.
This is probably what most people think of when imagining Victorian maidservants.
“Parlour maids” is written in pencil on the back of this cabinet card but that was probably added recently. I suspect they were a mixture of different types of maid from a household as servants each had different functions – scullery maid, chamber maid etc. The two girls seated at the front look rather young but girls started in service as young as eight.
This is rather more Downton Abbey (not that I’ve ever watched it) and again what you’d expect. Note there’s a dog amongst the maids too.
Being a maid was not a glamorous job. The hours were long, the jobs dirty and demanding and women in service would be miles away from their families and rarely given time off to visit them. Nevertheless some families thought well enough of their maids to have them photographed.
Troupes of “maids” were a popular entertainment in the music halls though they bore little resemblance to real maids.
For some reason there was a mania for dressing as dairymaids.
Maids on stage are popular to this day. Hard to date this one but probably the 1930s or 40s.
And here’s Gladys Cooper attended by her maid in the play Excelsior from 1928. I’ll write about Gladys in a later blog. She was arguably the first woman to exploit her image on postcards and sold hundreds of thousands of them. It was said that nearly every soldier in the first world war trenches had a postcard of her in his tobacco tin.
[There’s a whole subculture of Victorian working women such as pit brow women. There’s also a fascinating book on Victorian Working Women by Michel Hiley which covers pit brow women, women miners, fishergirls, milkwomen, gymnasts etc]
If something was called The Book of the Dead I’d expect to see something scary like this ventriloquist and his dummy. (If you’ve ever seen the film Dead of Night you’ll know why this scares me!)
What I wouldn’t expect is to see a Victorian photo album like this:
Photo albums, with or without themes, were very popular in Victorian time. This Tennyson themed album has lots of cut outs to contain CDVs and cabinet cards. This one’s rather charming I’d say.
I mention this because some time ago I attended a commercially organised “ghost hunt” which took place overnight. It was at the school I’d attended as a teenager so I was already familiar with the place and had not been aware of anything particularly spooky associated with it. As it turned out the whole event was rather silly with the facilitators trying hard to conjure up supernatural events, cold spots and the like. To put it kindly it was utter nonsense.
At one point in the night I found myself in a small room with several other participants trying to make contact with “spirits”. The organiser of this session gave out roles to each of us. She asked for a volunteer to sit with the “book of the dead.” As everyone else was wary I volunteered only to find that the book was actually a Victorian album full of cabinet cards and CDVs. I was delighted of course and could see nothing negative about sitting with this album. My frustration was that because we were operating in very dim lighting I couldn’t see the contents properly. No spirits were contacted or harmed during the seance.
For the most part I find nothing creepy about my interest in old photographs. I see the process of collecting and preserving these photos as a valuable and worthwhile activity, hopefully ensuring that other people can see and appreciate these wonderful social documents. I am perplexed when my partner or other people think there is something creepy about my hobby and refer to it as collecting photographs of dead people. I think those people should be remembered and celebrated not discarded and forgotten.
On the other hand there are some creepy items in my collection though I suspect what I find creepy is not what everyone finds creepy. The photo at the head of this blog for instance is creepy to me as are all films and photos of ventriloquists and their dummies.
Dolls are another thing that can be disturbing. I know I share this with many other people from the feedback I get but sometimes I see a photo featuring a girl and a doll and think it’s creepy whereas others find it delightful. The massed dolls with at girl at the centre is a good example. Creepy or endearing? Only you can decide.
This on the other hand is definitely creepy.
Sometimes the subjects of photographs have a rather haunted look about them. This could be caused by the fact that early photographic techniques required the subjects to be still whilst the exposure was taken but sometimes the subjects look haunted anyway. Taken in Malta this military man and his daughter have a decidedly haunted look.
And sometimes there’s just something wrong or odd about a photograph that makes you wonder what was really going on.
Does the man behind the children look menacing to you?Haunted or cute?
Considering most of these photographs come from the early nineteenth century it is almost certain that the subjects are all now dead but I prefer to think of these old photographs not as items in “The Book of the Dead” but as a celebration of people’s lives.
It is well known that dogs have owners and cats have staff. This cat has four attendants and a table of cat treats waiting to be eaten.
Here’s a cat already having four young girls training to be its personal staff.
It seems that cats often choose women to work for them though it is not just the preserve of females to undertake the taxing work of cat herding.
You’ll have to look closely at the left photograph to see the cat behind the woman. That cat on the right has made her staff member wear a uniform to better serve it.
I have had the pleasure of being the head butler to many cats and here are some of their kittens. You may object that this is not a vintage photo but it is over 40 years old and possibly considered vintage to some – there’s even some highly collectable vintage hi fi in the background!
People have always liked having their photo taken with their pet dogs. The sun is definitely over the yardarm for this couple and their dog.
Here are some more disreputable types out on the town and taking their dogs with them.
Everyone likes to be seen with their dogs from the country gent to the fashionable lady.
Someone’e really gone to town on this one, dressing the girl as Diana, Goddess of the hunt, with her dog and arrows. The whole thing hand tinted. Probably not her personal pet.
This girl and her dog are much more believable.
More women and their dogs. The couple with their dog come from a series of photos of women on holiday in the 1920s with a distinctly Sapphic vibe. The sole woman and her dog looks very 1960s.
From a collection of over 200 photographs, all of Ina posing for the camera. The photographer is not seen in any of the shots. He is obviously obsessed by Ina and she is more than happy to be photographed. A few shots are dated in the late 1950s but there is little else to identify locations etc. though there a few at popular UK sites and a handful in Germany.
Apart from Ina herself there are just 3 photos with her mother and two with her sister.
Ina is seen in a variety of poses and she seldom looks less than happy.
As I often remark, it always seems sad that collections of photographs that obviously meant a lot to someone and their families just disappear in house clearances and salerooms. At least it’s possible for collectors to preserve some of the social history contained in such photographs.
Or Visiting Cards to you and me. Popular from the 1860s they were mostly replaced by cabinet cards in the 1870s and onwards. CDVs were smaller than the later cabinet cards so could easily be given as visiting cards. They were cheap to produce, hence a person could have a photo taken in a studio and then have multiple reproductions made. There was a mania for collecting CDVs and albums were produced for collections to be stored.
Often the elaborate backs of CDVs can be more interesting than the photographs themselves.
Look past the girl and the dog and you can see that the chair has a jugenstil design and the reverse of the card is clearly influenced by art nouveau.
I’m not sure many of the CDV portraits did justice to their subjects. Many men in particular come out looking stern and rigid. (They had to stay very still for exposures so this goes some way to explaining why they come out the way they do).
CDVs were also used to illustrate national costumes and what were then referred to as “racial types,” a topic perhaps for another discussion. The Dutch lady at the head of this post is a good example of national costume.
It’s going back some years now but finding this photograph got me interested in collecting old photos in the first place. Like many people I had some topographical postcards but this was the first time I started thinking about the social history to be explored in old photographs and real photographic postcards (RPCCs).
I found it in a box of old photos at a table-top sale in the Community Centre, Cromford, Derbyshire. It was with a bunch of other unrelated photos and postcards at a stall selling general bric-a-brac and antiques. There’s nothing to identify who it is or where it comes from and it’s a real photograph, not a postcard. There’s no studio name on it either. So it’s all a mystery still even though other people have tried to find out more about it.
Looking again at the man’s outfit it doesn’t seem very authentic. Her clothes probably place the time as somewhere in the Edwardian era. The backdrop says it’s a studio but why would the man dress up like this? Was it for a play or theatre review or was he with a visiting “Wild West” show though these were more popular in the late Victorian era?
It’s unlikely I’ll ever know the true story but if you have any ideas then do contact me.
Having a favourite photograph, old or new, is as absurd as having a favourite film or book. The item at the top of the list is likely to change from day to day, month to month, year to year. However this photograph has consistently been a favourite of mine.
Why? Because it’s mysterious and spooky and the atmosphere is made partly by the scratches and blemishes. What’s the girl smiling at and what does she have behind her back? It could easily be a still from a David Lynch film (Lynch would also be top of my favourite directors).
The photograph is bound inside a small generic cover with five other photographs, each 8cm by 8cm. On the reverse of the cover it shows “Processed by Rothgeb* Photo Service of Youngstown Ohio” who are apparently a member of the Master Photo Dealers and Finishers Association.
(*Rothgeb sounds like one of the Ancient Ones from an H P Lovecraft story doesn’t it).
In the original Darkness Begins blog I shared details of my writing. The first novel in a projected trilogy is Alchemists of Time. Here’s some information about the first two books and an update on what’s happening with book three.
1859 Benjamin Strutt and Jane Taylor practice the occult sciences and conjure demons. Daisy is trying to escape from the squalor, the violence and life as a prostitute in the dangerous rookeries and backstreets of a Victorian town.
1959 When Alex and Maxine move into an old house, Alex finds himself transported back to the time when Benjamin Strutt lived in the house. Unless he can learn the alchemical and occult arts that Benjamin teaches him he can never go home to his own time. And Bella Nightingale is already threatening the stability of time itself with a killing spree lasting more than a hundred years.
After ten years living as a Victorian, Alex Harrison is not sure whether he wants to return to his own time of the 1960s. Maxine, Alex’s girlfriend, can’t even remember him after her timeline was altered. When an old enemy reappears the life of Alex and everyone he holds dear comes under threat and he must unite his Victorian family and his friends in the 1960s to defeat an evil that threatens to warp the very fabric of time.
What to expect in book 3 Well of Time*
It’s six months since the apocalyptic events at the end of book 2 and all is not well. Two of the Victorians find themselves transported to the late 1960s, Benjamin Strutt has disappeared from the 1869 house and those remaining are in disarray and under siege from fresh enemies. Meanwhile Alex and friends find they need to revisit their assumptions about time paradoxes to ensure their survival.
It’s early days in the writing process for book 3 so don’t hold your breath! I’ll try not to do a George RR Martin and leave it hanging for years and years.
I’ll update you on Loake and Patel book 3 in a later blog.
(*Potential for confusion with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time I know).
