Geoffrey Bevington’s Photograph Album

Chair

Good evening everybody, and a very warm welcome to you on this beautiful sunny day. I think we’re in for a bit of a treat, because this is an extraordinary piece of detective work that we’re going to hear about this evening. We have Philip Boys, who I’m sure is familiar to you, and Sarah Vey, both of whom are stalwarts of our Heritage group.

Well, I think we’ve got an awful lot to get through. At the last count, I think there were 205 slides on the presentation. We’re aiming to finish by 8 o’clock — that’s the aim, let’s see how we get on. We will have time for Q&As at the end. But for now, I’ll hand over to Philip.

Philip Boys

Geoffrey Bevington’s photograph album: 1860–1870. This is a History Boys Magic Lantern show. That’s Geoffrey up there — the first image in his album. As you can see from his dates, he didn’t live very long, but he did take an awful lot of absolutely fabulous photographs.

This is a photograph taken in Ivy House, which we will see is at the northern end of the Common. I’m Philip Boys, this is Sarah Vey, and this is 30th of April. All of the photographs I’m going to be talking about — and that Sarah will be talking about — are on my website. I’ll be talking about how it was constructed later, but if you want to view all the photographs large, there’s a slideshow at historyofwandsworthcommon.org/gba. That’s the front page — you can see there are 16 pages that look just like that.

So our story begins at the County Arms on 23rd January 2019 — before COVID. There was an inaugural meeting of the heritage group of the Friends of Wandsworth Common, and there were a number of people there who didn’t know each other. In conversation, people were saying “You know, the Scope was the world’s largest telescope in the 1850s.”

And I said rather provocatively, “You know, there wasn’t really a telescope there.” Because John Buckmaster — my great hero, who is commemorated around here for defending the Common — wrote in his autobiography: “Six acres of what we now call the Scope were enclosed for a telescope that was never put up.” I was really intrigued by this. John Buckmaster was one of the foremost science educators of the 19th century, and he had lived in the area since 1841 and knew it really well. So why does he say the telescope was never put up?

Somebody said, “Yes, I know, but there’s a website put together by somebody called Greg Smythe-Rumsby.” It’s a brilliant, brilliant website — unfortunately he has taken it down, or allowed it to lapse, but if anybody wants to view it, I have ways and means. And people would say, “Yes, but there are maps, and the maps say Observatory.” I said, “Yes, but I know this is a Stanford map, and Stanford often made things up — not lied, but they would often lay out streets that were never built, or put them in the wrong places. So was the observatory never built?”

The Time Team came with their geo-phys and claimed to have found some bits of brickwork in that circle. I was never very convinced. And somebody would say, “Yes, but what about the Illustrated London News image?” It says underneath it: from an original photograph by Beard — Beard being a very prominent photographer. But was it made up?

The telescope is this cigar-shaped thing that goes up there — a terrible, terrible structure. Anyway, I’d rather spoil the story now: after Greg Smythe-Rumsby had finished his work and uploaded his website, a couple of years later he added this note: “On 6th January 2004, an email was received saying a photograph did exist.” He was very, very thrilled. And that’s the photograph — taken by Geoffrey Bevington, unknown date, but presumably late 1850s or early 1860s. It looks absolutely fantastic. You can’t doubt it. Greg says the photograph met all the criteria of an image that was special despite its tiny size — only 60mm on the side. It showed remarkable detail right down to the individual bricks.

So I found this unbearably exciting. If he lived around here and could take a photograph as good as this, he must have taken loads of other photographs of Wandsworth Common and the area. So I went on the hunt.

The short of it is, I could find practically nothing online. This is probably his most famous image — it’s actually on the English Croquet Society’s website as an example of very early croquet playing. It says: Croquet on the lawn, Ivy House. And in fact that is Geoffrey himself, and other members of his extended family, on the lawn.

So I thought I’d better go looking for Ivy House. Where on earth was it? I spent a very long time looking for it. Eventually found it. This is the north part of the Common — there’s St. John’s Hill, there was a big lake called the Black Sea, and a road across there called Marcelli Road or St. Ann’s Road. This is 1840 — the tithe map. And there it is again a bit later, in 1862, imposed on a modern aerial photograph so you can get an idea of its scale. The 1868 Ordnance Survey map was a 60-inches-to-the-mile map — very detailed; every single tree is shown. So you could actually reconstruct his house and garden using his photographs and that map. Then 1898, and of course it got knocked down and a terrace was put in its place, as you would expect, facing the Common.

In the Second World War, a V1 hit it and annihilated it completely. When I was young there was just a great big hole there — that whole length of Ivy House and the house next door, Easthill House, was just empty for a very long time. Eventually Alexander Court was built on it. I often wonder: did anyone ever go digging in that lawn and find anything interesting?

So I then started to look more seriously for Geoffrey’s photographs, and found practically none. The Coleraine Museum — a few vaguely nautical themes. The National Gallery of Art in Washington — ferns. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston — workers; it says Bevington and Sons Tannery. And the V&A. I got very excited — they have an image of Bevington’s and Sons, a very early photograph of the factory in Bermondsey. But that was pretty much the limit of the V&A’s collection. So I thought: if they’ve only got three pictures, maybe nothing remains. But their website had lots of placeholders for photographs they knew of but hadn’t got round to digitising. Each one said: no image — photographed by Geoffrey Bevington. Something like 16 pages of nothing.

Anyway, when I contacted the V&A, they said, “Oh yes, we do have the album — it’s recently been conserved. You can come to see it if you want.” That was very, very thrilling. So we went to see the album at the V&A. It’s like a family bible — a very big, big thing. Geoffrey on the left, and we’ll look at some of these pictures in more detail later.

So I went to the V&A in 2019, with a funny little camera I hadn’t bothered to charge. It ran out really quickly, but I did get a rough idea of the extraordinary richness of the volume. I talked about it — maybe some of you have heard me before; I gave a talk to the Wandsworth Historical Society in the early days — and I eventually found Tim Wren, who is in the room tonight. Tim and I went to the V&A, where he has a super-duper camera and had actually charged his battery. So these are the pictures we took, just to give an idea of what might be in the book. And very exciting — there is the original of the Greg Smythe-Rumsby image that you saw. Very, very tiny.

We weren’t allowed to use artificial light, weren’t allowed to use a tripod, and couldn’t flatten the pages out. These were very crinkly old pages, so the angles got a bit funny. So here’s a brief explanation of what I did with the images Tim gave me. First of all I would level them up. Then I would use various graphing mechanisms to twist, turn, and crop the image as best I could. And because they’re often very dark, I would tweak them in Photoshop to get something a bit brighter and crisper. I didn’t alter the pictures fundamentally — I was trying to get as much information out of the images as I could.

So I then built a website: www.historyofwandsworthcommon.org/gba. Let me give you a little idea of the kinds of images there are. This is his dad; this is his brother Samuel, the elder brother; this is Samuel’s wife; this is his father with Samuel and wife’s child, a little boy — because they were always dressed like little girls until they were seven. You can see a kind of sensibility already, I think, in these pictures of his family. This is his mother, and she features in a great number of the photographs. She’s very photogenic.

James Buchanan, whose great-grandfather was a director at Bevington’s, has been looking at old letters and has come across an absolutely fabulous letter from James Bevington — born about 1808 — to his mother in Bermondsey, saying: “I’m in Northern Ireland; I’ve met an Irish woman and I want to marry her, and she’s accepted.” It’s a beautiful letter which, in the fullness of time, we will publish. She is often appearing in the garden — she loved her garden — and here she is with her bees, her swarm of bees. They made beehives differently in those days.

But the person who features most frequently — maybe — is Geoffrey himself. And this presents a problem, because who was taking the photograph if Geoffrey is the photographer? In some of these pictures, you have to spot him. He loves these jokey images — there he is holding up a tree in Richmond Park. He’s an artist; he varies in age as you can see. He contemplates a flower. He has a top-of-the-range telescope. He takes photomicrographs — very interesting ones. He goes to Switzerland and wears a Tyrolean hat, looking very dapper. He’s a jokester, as we’ll see with his friends.

My guess is that he was always somewhat ill, and the family knew it. So they supported him by giving him a top-of-the-range camera, giving him opportunities to do things with what little life they knew he had remaining. But he paid it back amazingly, because they gave him the camera not just to keep himself and his family amused, but to take photographs of the workplace. Bevington’s and Sons — the tannery — he took lots of photographs there, which were exhibited around the world and particularly in big international exhibitions.

Just to give you a flavour of Ivy House: the conservatory; the house; they’re playing croquet again. You could reconstruct their life in great detail. He even photographed them building the billiard room — a great big hole, and you can see the men at work.

The album, which was made after his death to memorialize him, has no sequence I could detect — not in alphabetical or any kind of numerical order. There are quite a few errors of attribution, but it does say here: April 4th, 1865 — as far as I know, just one of the very few photographs that we can date. This is the conservatory, which doubled as his studio, because he needed as much natural light as he could get. You’ll see a trellis framework in the background appearing in quite a number of pictures.

He also experimented with stereoscopic photography. Here are some moody photographs taken in the conservatory. Now here’s an example of Mary Bevington, Miss Woodward, and Louisa Bevington. Completely incidentally — the strangest people turn up — Louisa Bevington, his cousin, was a very prominent anarchist in the late 19th century, a friend of Peter Kropotkin and others. She’s a poet; she corresponded with Darwin and all sorts. Anyway, that’s Louisa Bevington — you might have your theories about why she went that way, given the opulence of the family.

He had a particular friend, U.J. Lawler, who was an artist. I’ll flick through because they’re such beautiful images — he’s posing, but in such a witty, interesting way. Just gorgeous pieces. They went on holiday together. He’s an artist, and there he is sketching. But most of the time he’s posing.

This is Lola dressed up as, I don’t know — a Greek, a Turk, something like that. This would have been in the 1860s. They love dressing up, as you will see when Sarah speaks. He’s pointing his gun at you. He experimented with shots taken so close together that you could almost imagine them as a moving picture.

I thought I’d just show you a few of the gorgeous frocks. If somebody was interested in 19th century women’s fashions, it’s an absolute encyclopedia of them. Not easy getting around, I think, as a Victorian woman.

Oh, by the way — they were originally a Quaker family. When they ceased to be Quakers, I don’t know. But quite a number of the family members still seemed to be thinking in a Quaker-like way. Mary Bevington went to a Quaker school in Clapham and wrote a brilliant letter in Quaker-type English which I won’t go into.

So this is daily life in the Bevington household with their relatives — either in England or going to Ireland, because the mother, Mary Bevington, was a Knox from Portrush in Northern Ireland.

It’s appalling to go through them this quickly, but I just wanted to give you a rough sketch. You can see how he’s arranged them all, and you can see the trellis in the background, like a stage set.

Nearly finished these. This is another stereoscopic one. These are called “the lilies” — if you look closely it’s a most beautiful mirror image. He also took photographs of the servants, who don’t in the main get surnames. So this is Ellen, and Mary, and M. Quite striking, aren’t they? Really quite striking.

Now, just two or three minutes to tell you about the material basis for this life — Bevington’s and Sons, Neckinger Mills in Bermondsey. They all grew up in Bermondsey, but an enormous number of the affluent Bermondsey middle classes moved to Wandsworth. There are several Bevingtons around here, and other families too. You could get to work relatively easily from Ivy House.

Leather is made from animal skin — sheep, cattle and so on. You have to take the skin off the animal; it’s got all sorts of horrible things on it, smells terrible, and you have to get rid of that. To get rid of it, you need lime — alkaline of different sorts. And the chief source of that was dog dung. So the Bevingtons employed 20 or 30 people just scouring the streets of London picking it up. They were called Pure Finders, which is very funny. Henry Mayhew writes about the Bevingtons’ Pure Finders — and the best money was in the dry white stuff.

You need lots of water to wash the hides afterwards. These are the limesmen — sometimes called pit men — soaking the skins in lime. It’s remarkable that he’s taking pictures of the material bases of his family’s affluence. He also takes these gorgeous pictures of the workers which have a kind of Pre-Raphaelite feel — always arranged in a particular way, showing the different stages of leather production. The wool dressers; the curriers and shavers. And this is a thing called a “skiver” — now, we all know a skiver is somebody who bunks off. Well, a skiver has its origins in a machine that splits the leather to make it thin for gloves and fancy shoes.

There’s also politics in one intriguing photograph — I can see a banner for Layard for Southwark, which dates it to the 1860s. Layard is the so-called discoverer of Nineveh, who went into politics and became MP for Southwark.

Because this is the end of the sequence, you wouldn’t want to be left with those nasty smells — so here are some of his family gatherings: three weddings, but no funerals. That’s actually in Wandsworth. Very lovely it is, too.

So that was Geoffrey Bevington’s photograph album. And now — Sarah, thank you.

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Sarah Vey

Philip got me involved, and what we needed to try and do to start with was: we’ve got 800 photographs, and a lot of them are not labelled at all. Some have got names, as you’ve seen, and we’ve identified those people easily, but a lot of them had only initials — because of course the person putting the album together knew exactly who they were. All we really knew was that he took the photos between about 1855 and 1872, when he died. But could we narrow it down?

I started looking at the photographs and categorised them broadly into landscapes and plants, people and portraiture, and places and buildings. For the purposes of our research, we just ignored the first category. For people and portraiture, some of the images are labelled with names and initials — but how reliable are they? Because the album was not put together until after Geoffrey died.

In order to try and start the process of identifying the subjects, I set about creating a family tree starting with Geoffrey. I used online genealogy resources — Ancestry, FindMyPast and so on — which took a very long time, but involves a kind of detective work that I find enormously satisfying. I then used a genealogy software programme called Family Tree Maker, which synchronises with Ancestry’s website and allowed me to share the online tree with other interested parties, principally Philip. I do get occasional messages — what I call messages from beyond the grave — where other people doing research contact me and ask, “How are you related to Geoffrey Bevington?” I have to disappoint them and say I’m not.

By establishing the names of his relatives both on the Bevington side in south-west London and his maternal Knox family from Northern Ireland, a great many individuals could be identified and put in context. But he had a huge family, and it seems that he spent a lot of his time with them.

So, this one is entitled The Cousins: Miss Fibs, MK, Cecilia, GB, and HF. GB is Geoffrey. Miss Fibs actually married Mary Knox’s brother, and you’ve got Cecilia Knox on there, who was Mary Knox’s sister. And HF was Henry Foster, who I think we’ll see a little more of later.

Then we’ve got this one, which is Mrs. Ellington. She was Eliza Foster, sister of Henry — first cousin of Geoffrey — and she married Henry Leonard Ellington in 1865. So in trying to date the photograph, we can say it’s post-1865 because it’s labelled Mrs. Ellington and she’s wearing a wedding ring. In 1888, her husband Henry was accused of fraud and tried at the Old Bailey, although the case was thrown out. He and his wife never lived together after that date.

Then this one is one of my favourite photos, because it linked up an awful lot of the research I did. Her name, although she’s Mrs. Hook, was Mary Blackmore as her maiden name — one of the daughters of Martin and Fanny Blackmore, who were great friends of the Bevingtons and, I think, Quakers. They had a holiday home in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight. Mary Blackmore married Andrew Hook in 1862 in Bonchurch.

The album contains several views of Carisbrooke Castle, which initially I assumed was just another place that Geoffrey visited on his holidays. However, Carisbrooke Castle in the 1860s was not as it is today — it was in a very sad state of repair and leased to Mary’s husband as a farm. Carisbrooke Castle wasn’t saved for the nation until 1903 by William Waldorf Astor. Mary’s husband Andrew died in 1866 — they’d only been married four years. There are lots of images of her as a widow, because she’s wearing black, sitting with her sisters who are not. One of her other sisters married Andrew’s brother in 1864, and that wedding took place at Carisbrooke Castle, so Geoffrey probably attended.

So then Philip referred to this before — we’ve got a little selection of silly and humorous pictures. That one’s entitled The Boar’s Head, and that’s Robert Foster. They were messing around at the boat club in Coleraine in Northern Ireland. We did discuss whether there was a gay angle to all of this, but I think maybe they just liked having a lot of fun — they didn’t have TV and film, did they? They had to make their own entertainment.

Right. So then I moved on to looking at some of the places he took pictures of — and there’s going to be a quiz in a minute. Do people recognise that? — There’s a clue: it says Tooting Church. I used Google Image Search to establish which church, and it’s Holy Trinity on Trinity Road. This image is taken pretty much from outside where the fire station is today. We’ve got one from outside the old police station, and another from what’s now the BP garage. Spot the difference — exactly. The church was built in 1855, the organ was added in 1857 — made by a firm called Bevington and Sons. We got very excited, but established pretty firmly that there was absolutely no connection between the two families at all. The tower was added in 1860. Several of his cousins got married there.

So, back to the Isle of Wight. This house really fascinated me — it looks quite new but is very much of a Regency style. And this is where you need to buckle up, because it gets really, really exciting. There are loads of pictures of Bonchurch. The Blackmore family had a holiday home there, and the Bevingtons obviously spent several summers in rented houses there. But this one is much more substantial.

I used Google Image Search again and found an image of a hotel in Bonchurch now known as Peacock Veil. What I established was that at the time the photo was taken, in the 1860s, this house was known as Upper Mount. It’s still standing — Grade II listed. The house was built between 1830 and 1840, and the owner when this photo was taken was Captain Samuel Dick, Royal Navy.

And the story gets really interesting at this point, because there is a very strong connection to Charles Dickens, specifically David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Dickens spent much time in Bonchurch in 1849 and was a friend of Captain Dick and his son Charles. Now — quiz time. A Miss Katherine Feane Haviland moved to a big house, Ashlee, in Bonchurch in 1852 and constructed a coach house and stables in the grounds of that house, now known as Haviland Cottage. And one of Samuel Dick’s daughters, Margaret Katherine Dick, was jilted at the altar on the morning of her wedding in 1860 at Holy Trinity Church, Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight. She left the family home at Upper Mount to live a reclusive life in Maderà Hall, which was opposite Ashlee, the home of Miss Haviland.

Dickens returned to the Isle of Wight in late 1860 and would have heard about Margaret’s unfortunate aborted wedding from the family, and about the arrival of Miss Haviland. It is generally considered that Margaret Dick’s failed marriage was the inspiration for Miss Havisham. Opposite Maderà Hall was Haviland Cottage — just as in Great Expectations — and the coach house and stables were probably Margaret Dick’s experience, while Miss Haviland’s name created Miss Havisham.

The Blackmore daughters — two of them got married in Bonchurch in 1861. So maybe Geoffrey was in Bonchurch at the same time as Charles Dickens. I won’t extrapolate any further that they were actually best friends.

So this is the balcony at the back of a beautiful house on Palace Road in Streatham — the home of Alexander Bevington, Geoffrey’s uncle, a wealthy underwriter at Lloyd’s. This photo dates from about 1870, when his daughter Adah was about 14. On the 1871 census, the family is shown living at Tower House, 9 Palace Road, Streatham — a road leading southeast off the South Circular, just after you go over the A23 interchange, where there’s a Grade I listed church, Christ Church, that diverts the course of the roads.

From examining maps from the period and finding information on the Streatham Society website, I found out that this was a substantial stone-built house with a balcony at upper ground-floor level, built in 1856 and demolished in 1880 — a very short life for such a lovely house. It was one of six or seven similar houses built as a speculation along the southern side of the road, then known as Green Lane but renamed Palace Road when the Crystal Palace moved to Sydenham. The development aimed to attract affluent residents, and the road was designed as a private one — it had a sign at the end saying No hawkers and no funerals, which is slightly random.

The coach house for number nine still remains at what is now number eight Hillside Road — I went and photographed it, and the stonework exactly matches the photo of the main house. And it’s now a five-bedroomed house — that was just the coach house for the coachman and his wife. So Tower House must have been incredibly opulent.

So this photo is called “Where the Hennings lived, Wandsworth” — but that is a transcription error; N’s and R’s have got muddled up, and it should read Herrings. Edward Herring and his family lived in Burntwood House. He lived there very briefly from about 1848 to 1851 — you do see it says where the Herrings lived in the past tense. Edward was then declared bankrupt and moved away.

So this photo shows the front elevation of Burntwood House, for which to date we have not found any images. There’s been much written about the fact that Burntwood House was turned into a picturesque cottage by Pierce Walsh Porter before 1809. But my view is that it was a huge house — that main part to the left-hand side predates 1878. The trellis all around the house is just an attempt to unify what we can’t see, which is perhaps the part that was made to look like a cottage. So that’s a really wonderful photograph to add to our knowledge of the lost houses.

Right — I’m nearly done. So, on the face of it, that is a terrible photo — but all will be revealed. Many of you will have heard the talk given a while back by Henrietta, Mark, and myself on the five houses of Bolingbroke Grove, as part of the lost houses series. It was much lamented that no known photos existed of any of the five houses apart from Bolingbroke House, which became the hospital before being demolished in 1937. Henrietta commented to me words to the effect that someone somewhere probably has a photo or a drawing of one or more of the houses without necessarily even knowing what it was.

So — we should have had a drum roll before I showed you that one. But we’ve got not one but two. This is the Elms, house number four of the five. And that one is Bolingbroke House, number three. We reckon these photos were taken in 1864, although they’re not dated. You can see there’s hoarding here — a gate post and a decorative wall that would have been for the in-and-out drive — and here we have hoarding to the side of it too. So it indicates that something is afoot. We think Bolingbroke House was just about to be demolished.

The picture of the Elms is entitled simply Wandsworth Common. The one on the right is not titled, but if you zoom in on them, the shape of each house perfectly matches the 1840 tithe map. And there’s actually a coach house to the left-hand side — if you zoom in you can see it, which again perfectly matches the tithe map. And we have a plan of the Elms house drawn up by Sir John Soane’s pupil, and it just perfectly matches. So I’m throwing down the gauntlet — if anybody wants to disagree with me, we can take it outside. Right, that’s me done.

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Philip Boys

Thank you. So — anyway, you’ve seen the works. Just to say: I do these things called Chronicles of Wandsworth Common every month. I’ll put a piece of paper at the front here — if you don’t receive them and want to, just leave your email address. And do visit historyofwandsworthcommon.org — and /gba will take you to all the images. That’s it. Good.

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Questions & Answers

Questioner 1

You said you had a mystery as to who was taking the pictures. I might have an answer. Roll film was developed in about 1888 and had much faster emulsions. Prior to that, everything was done with collodion on glass plates, and typically those would expose in anything up to 30 seconds and beyond. So I would think a lot of people — because I used to do this professionally — would have a lens cap over the camera. He’d be sitting where he wanted to be, with a piece of string to pull the cap off. That would take his picture. And if it was a 30 or 40-second exposure, he’d have enough time to run back, put the lens cap back on, and he wouldn’t appear to be out of the picture, because in real terms he wouldn’t have been there for maybe 1/30th of the whole exposure. That, I suggest, is how he got into the pictures.

Philip Boys

So I’m going to present you with an additional enigma. He was obsessed with what he called “instantaneous photography” — what we would call snapshots. He deliberately takes photographs of things that are moving very quickly. For example, waves — there are lots of photographs of waves — and he achieves a remarkable degree of clarity even of waves coming in to the Northern Ireland coast. Yes, I just wondered if he had a sister he put to work, but there were no sisters that I know of. Anyway, the answer is almost anybody really could have been there for all the reasons this gentleman has just said. Geoffrey Bevington would be familiar with his very rudimentary camera — it would have been a box with a wet-plate negative in it and a very simple lens. As long as the person behind the camera could count to whatever Geoffrey had said the exposure length should be — between two and twenty seconds, say — that accounts for why everything is so posed, and why he liked ferns so much — because they don’t move.

Questioner 2

Was the album donated to the V&A by the family?

Philip Boys

Yes. In the Greg Smythe-Rumsby website, he talks about a woman who’s not a Bevington who contacted him with the photograph. So she must have had it, or a copy. But at the V&A, it says the album was donated by somebody called John Bevington, earlier this century. Maybe there are others — if you go to the trouble of making one big album, other members of the family might have wanted their own. And I’ve just discovered this week that the London Metropolitan Archive has an album of his photographs of the workplace. Very exciting.

Questioner 3

And Geoffrey himself died in 1872? Do we know where he was buried, and the cause of death?

Philip Boys

He had a congenital heart condition. We don’t think we have found out where he’s buried. His father was buried at Woking — Brookwood Cemetery, the world’s largest, reached by a special train from Waterloo. They had moved away by the time Geoffrey died — Samuel had moved to Sevenoaks, taking his father with him. And Samuel was by this time the first mayor of Bermondsey, the president of the Theosophical Society, and the colonel of the East Surrey Regiment. Some people lead three or four or five lives in one.

Questioner 4

Have you come across any present-day Bevingtons, any descendants?

Philip Boys

No. But we do have two people in the audience whose families are connected. Mike Tuffrey — his father worked at Bevington’s before the Second World War. And James Buchanan — whose great-grandfather was in effect the managing director — has been exploring the archive of letters. And thanks to the miracle of AI, particularly Claude, we can transcribe these wonderful letters just like that — really accurately, astonishingly — so we can actually read letters that a historian would otherwise put to one side for another day. James has been sending me these transcripts. Mike, do you want to say anything?

Mike Tuffrey

When I saw the pictures of Neckinger Mills from Philip, I got very excited because I can remember going there as a ten-year-old — about 110 years later — and it hadn’t changed. I can remember the vats; they weren’t tanning there at that point, but there were piles of skins, and those rickety old offices hadn’t really changed, apart from the teleprinter chattering in the corner. This was about 1970.

I looked up the minute book from the 1860s and found the minute where the firm had bought the camera for Geoffrey to do the pictures for what they called the great exhibition — actually 1861, a kind of industrial exhibition, ten years after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Bevington’s had a display, a trophy and all sorts.

And — apologies to anybody who’s squeamish — the volume of production there is quite remarkable. In one week they had bought 600 Birmingham sheep pelts, 2,000 prime Edinburgh pelts, 1,350 Cape sheep, and they had determined that there was a sale coming up of 600,000 Persians — I didn’t know what a Persian was, but it’s an East India sheepskin — and they resolved to only buy 30,000 for next month’s production because they were too expensive. A quite remarkable volume of dead animals going through those vats.

Questioner 5

Geoffrey was obviously a prolific photographer at the time. How should we look upon him compared to other photographers of the day? Was he a pioneer?

Philip Boys

Tim Wren, who took the photographs for us at the V&A, says he thinks they’re remarkable — that his eye is great. There’s a huge range of his work here: some of it ephemeral, some of it not very high quality, but a lot of it incredibly high quality. He doesn’t rate very highly in histories of photography, but when you read those histories, you realise they hadn’t seen his photographs — they’d only seen three or four or five. Of course they haven’t seen the rest.

I think people would say his photographs of women in these wonderful frocks are quite something. What is rated, I know, are his plant pictures — which is why they’re found in American galleries. But particularly the series of workmen’s images, because it’s very unusual for people in the middle of the 19th century to be so attentive to workers and their craft.

Questioner 6

Now we’ve got all these images, do you think the V&A are going to put them up on their website?

Philip Boys

Something about the copyright. Because the photographs were never published, you could argue the copyright still resides with John Bevington, if that’s the person’s name, and whether he signed overall rights to the V&A, I don’t know. I’m slightly reluctant to have them say, “You’ve got to take it all down.” But I’ll try.

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Stephen Midlane

Right. In which case I will draw proceedings to a close, and thank Sarah and Philip very much.

If you don’t get Philip’s Chronicles, do write your email address on the sheet at the front if you’d like to. And just to say: the next thing to look forward to is the Wandsworth Heritage Festival, which starts on 23rd May and runs until 14th June. We’ve got a display of Dorrett and Martin’s photographs of the Common, which will be up in North Library throughout the festival. And then a walk on 30th May along Bellevue Road looking at the history of Bellevue, and a talk on 26th May covering the same topic — the shops and residences on that road over the last 160 years. Thank you very much for coming.