Sepia Saturday 176: Erasmus Bostock, Photographer of Schools &c.

A wealth of topics are suggested by this week's Sepia Saturday image prompt depicting a scene very familiar to me from my school and university days, although I must admit that my efforts in the chemistry laboratory were never very successful. The plethora of bunsen burners, tripods, glass beakers and a shelf of bottles containing reagents are almost enough to overwhelm the class of teenage boys and their teacher, but it is school children to which I'll direct my attention in this post.

Vintage school photos have long intrigued me, and I must confess to a degree of sympathy for the nineteenth century photographer who was called to his neighbourhood school for the annual class portrait sessions. Anyone who has tried to photograph a group of school children will appreciate how tricky it is to capture the attention of all individuals simultaneously, and to prevent any of the more unruly in the class from pulling funny faces just as the shutter is released.


Unidentified class portrait by Erasmus Bostock of Derby, c.1889-1892
Large format print (157 x 100mm) mounted on card (166 x 108mm)
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
This class of 55 children - I make it 22 girls and 33 boys, but am unsure of the gender of a few of them - are being very capably supervised by a severe looking older woman at far right, who has one little miscreant firmly in her grasp, and her eagle eye on a troublesome group of boys in the centre. The younger teacher on the left, perhaps an assistant, also has her hand on a young girl's shoulder. The photographer's "hold still" command or some other attention grabbing signal (he's very unlikely to have asked them to "smile for the camera" as smiling wasn't part of the portrait convention for the Victorians) has produced a very successful response. Only two of the children were moving when he eventually exposed the glass plate.

And that is before the complicated processes involved in collodion or wet-plate photography are taken into account [1]. There is evidence suggesting that Erasmus Bostock started his career as a scholastic photographer in the mid-1870s, apprenticed at the Derby studio of William Pearson [2], when wet-plate photography was still very much the norm. Although the gelatin dry-plate procedure was first described by Maddox in print in 1871, it wasn't until March 1878 that an improved technique was published by Charles Bennett in the British Journal of Photography. The new dry plates could be prepared in advance of the sitting, and then processed later, but an additional benefit was that the new gelatin emulsion were considerably "faster," reducing exposure times to as little as a tenth of a second. [3]


Unidentified class portrait by Erasmus Bostock of Derby, c.1889-1892
Large format print (162 x 104mm) mounted on card (166 x 107mm)
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
The second portrait, the pair having been purchased together on eBay, was probably taken on the same day, and appears to be a class of 49 slightly younger boys (24) and girls (25). This time there is only one smartly dressed and coiffured school mistress, who is looking after a rather fidgety boy, but the remainder of the class seem pretty well behaved, if a little glum (apart from a talkative girl who moved her head sharply just as the exposure took place). My guess is that somewhere in the two group portraits are two siblings, although there is no indication which school this was and all provenance has sadly been lost.


Thornton-Pickard Triple Imperial Extension camera, c.1903-1910s
Image © and courtesy of the Tauranga Heritage Collection
Photographic manufacturers began to produce dry-plates over the next few months from March 1978, and within a few years, the wet-plate process had by and large been abandoned. By the time Bostock took these two portraits around 1890, he would almost certainly have used a dry-plate camera. The dimensions of these prints (roughly 6¼" x 4") suggests that he may have taken two exposures side-by-side on a full-plate (6½" x 8½") device, perhaps something similar to the slightly later Thornton-Pickard Triple Imperial Extension folding bellows camera, shown below, that I recently photographed in the Tauranga Heritage Collection. Many models of folding stand cameras were produced in Great Britain from the 1870s to the 1890s [4], and the excellent Early Photography web site has a wide selection of such field cameras on display [5].


Reverse of card mount by Erasmus Bostock of Derby, c.1889-1892
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
Derby had several photographers who were prepared to visit schools - I have seen examples from George Holden, Thomas Lewis, R.K. Peacock, Gervase Gibson & Sons and George Bower [6-9] - but Erasmus Foster Bostock appears to have been the only practitioner to have specialised in scholastic portraits. As evidenced by a class photo taken c.1881-1882 [7], Bostock used a hand stamp rather than cardstock pre-printed with his name for at least a decade. Although this was slightly unusual for a photographer who remained in business in one location for more than a couple of years, it would have been slightly cheaper and would have given him the added flexibility of being able to trim card mounts to suit particular photographs.


Unidentified class portrait by E.F. Bostock of Nottingham, c.1900-1902
Large format print (209 x 155mm) mounted on decorated card (261 x 209mm)
Image © and collection of Brett Payne
Between 1891 and 1894 Bostock moved with his family to the nearby town of Nottingham, where he again set up a practice as a schools photographer, operating out of his home at 76 Burford Road (1894-1901) and 32 Maples Street (1901-c.1902) [10-14]. It is during the latter period that I estimate he took this very competent, albeit now somewhat damaged, class photograph of 36 children (28 boys and 8 girls). While the card stock now has a printed design surround the photograph, he was still printing his name and location on the mount.

The imbalance between numbers of boys and girls, the wide range in apparent ages (from 7 or 8 to early teens), and the shape of the door in the background all suggest to me that it was perhaps a Sunday School class. A somewhat hirsute male teacher this time casts a stern eye over his well-behaved charges. I note that several of the pupils have medals pinned to their lapels or, in the case of the girls, bodices - one surprised looking boy has three of them! I hope this was the "Gregory" whose name is pencilled on the back. Apart from this, there are no clues as to location or identity of the subjects.


Samuel Collison (b. 1886), aged 17 or 18, taken c.1903-1904
Cabinet card portrait by E.F. Bostock of 24 Moorgate Street, Nottingham
Image © and courtesy of Simon Collison, Some rights reserved
Between 1902 and 1903, judging by entries in trade directories of the period, Bostock started operating a portrait studio with premises at 24 Moorgate Street, Radford (now a suburb of Nottingham) [15,16]. This appears to be the same premises occupied by well known Radford photographer Edward Carnell from 1879 until 1901 [14], and I suspect that Bostock took over the business from Carnell on the latter's retirement. That he already had some experience of studio portraiture is clear from the early 1880s portrait in my profile of Bostock. Perhaps he found that catering to schools alone was not bringing in sufficient business, or it may simply have been that he was weary of the seasonal and peripatetic nature of that work, but it seems that from 1903 onwards he concentrated on studio portraiture.

In 1915, he moved again to a studio at 44 Clarendon Street and in 1919, at the age of 61, Erasmus Bostock died after three and a half decades in the photographic business. [18,19] The studio was probably taken over by his son Erasmus James Bostock (1885-1970), who was working as a photographic assistant in 1911 and still described himself as a photographer when he emigrated with his wife and young son to Australia in October 1928. [20-23]

References

[1] Hirsch, Robert (2009) Pictures on Glass: The Wet-Plate Process, Chapter 4 in Seizing The Light (2nd edition), available online on Luminous Lint.

[2] Payne, Brett (2009) All lined up in the school playground in their Sunday best, Photo-Sleuth, 17 October 2009.

[3] Coe, Brian (1976) The Birth of Photography: The Story of the Formative Years, 1800-1900, Great Britain: Ash & Grant, p 38-39.

[4] Coe, Brian (1978) Cameras: From Daguerreotypes to Instant Pictures, United States: Crown Publishers, p 29-40.

[5] Field Cameras, on the Early Photography web site.

[6] Payne, Brett (2011) Sepia Saturday 97: Geo W Holden, Brother of the more famous Jack, on Photo-Sleuth, 20 October 2011.

[7] Payne, Brett (2008) More photos from St James' Board School, on Photo-Sleuth, 14 September 2008.

[8] Payne, Brett (2008) St. Chad's Church Schools, Derby, 1895, on Photo-Sleuth, 10 May 2008.

[9] Payne, Brett (2007) A Derbyshire photographer working afield, on Photo-Sleuth, 15 August 2007.

[10] 1891 Census for 102 Drewry Lane, Derby St Werburgh, Derbyshire Ref. RG12/2731/102/15/95, courtesy of Ancestry.co.uk.

[11] Anon (1891) Kelly's Directory of Derbyshire, Leicestershire & Rutland, and Nottinghamshire, Seventh Edition, 1891, London: Kelly & Co., courtesy of the University of Leicester's Historical Directories.

[12] Wright, C.N. (1895) Directory of Nottingham and Twelve Miles Round, Seventeenth Edition, 1894-1895, courtesy of the University of Leicester's Historical Directories.

[13] Wright, C.N. (1899) Directory of the City of Nottingham, Nineteenth Edition, 1898-1899, courtesy of the University of Leicester's Historical Directories.

[14] Heathcote, Bernard V. & Heathcote, Pauline F. (1982) Leicester Photographic Studios in Victorian & Edwardian Times, publ. Historical Group of the Royal Photographic Society.

[15] Anon (1903) Wright's Directory of the City of Nottingham including the Immediate Neighbourhoods, Twenty-First Edition, 1902-1903, London: Kelly's Directories Ltd., courtesy of Ancestry.co.uk.

[16] Anon (1904) Kelly's Directory of Nottinghamshire, 1904, London: Kelly's Directories Ltd., courtesy of the University of Leicester's Historical Directories.

[17] Portrait of Simon Collison, Image © and courtesy of Simon Collison's Flickr photostream.

[18] Anon (1916) Wright's Directory of Nottingham and Neighbourhood, Twenty-Sixth Edition, 1915-1916, London: Kelly's Directories Ltd., courtesy of the University of Leicester's Historical Directories.

[19] UK General Register Office Death Index entry for Erasmus F Bostock, aged 61, Dec Qtr 1919, Nottingham Registration District, Vol 7b Pg 356, courtesy of FreeBMD.

[20] 1911 Census for 32 Maples St, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, courtesy of Ancestry.co.uk.

[21] Anon (1920) Wright's Directory of Nottingham and Neighbourhood, Twenty-Seventh Edition, 1920, London: Kelly's Directories Ltd., courtesy of Ancestry.co.uk.

[22] Passenger Manifest for ship Hobson's Bay, London (England) to Sydney (Australia), 30 October 1928, in UK, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960 database, courtesy of Ancestry.co.uk.

[23] NSW Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages Index entry for James Bostock, 1970, Hornby, Reg No 14672/1970, courtesy of the NSW Government web site.