A day at the beach in Aberystwyth, Wales

Jeri Bass is an antiquarian bookseller in Canada who is interested in old photo images. She recently sent me this large format (approximately 215 x 165 mm) mounted print by photographer E.R. Gyde of Aberystwyth, showing what appear to be several families on a day's outing to the beach. My interest in this particular photographer is because, although he had an Aberystwyth studio for over forty years, he also briefly operated a studio in Babington Lane, Derby, around 1889, which he took over from J.W. Price.


However, this group portrait was not taken in Derby. The bottom margin of the front of the card mount is printed with "E.R. Gyde, Aberystwyth," suggesting that he was operating from the Welsh studio at this time. An examination of the photograph itself shows a large group of men, women and children, arranged rather haphazardly on and in front of a rock face, characterised by well defined, tilted strata. Many of the children have buckets and spades, which strongly suggests that they are at the beach. The style of dresses worn by the adult female members of the party, with leg of mutton sleeves, dates this photo to some time in the 1890s.

Since Gyde's studio at 20 Pier Street, Aberystwyth was close to the waterfront, I thought it possible that the photograph might have been taken not far away. The location and distinctive rock formations providing a backdrop offered a good starting point to search. I used the web site geograph, a project which "aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland," and is doing a pretty good job, at least for some areas. I used the search page to look for "beach" near "Aberystwyth," which resulted in 80 images. Browsing through these, I hit paydirt on the second page with this excellent photograph entitled, "Tilted Rock Strata," taken by Bob Jones in March 2008.


© Copyright Bob Jones and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
The rock face is located at the northern end of the beach and promenade immediately north of Aberystwyth town centre, below Constitution Hill. The hard bands of lighter coloured rock appear to be almost identical to those visible in Gyde's portrait taken over a century earlier. According to my copy of the Geological Map of Great Britain, Sheet 2 : England & Wales (2nd Edition, 1957, prepared by the Geological Survey & publ. Ordnance Survey), this area is underlain by grits and mudstones of the Tarannon and Llandovery Formations of Silurian age. The location of both Gyde's studio and the old photo are also shown in the Google Maps image below.


View Larger Map
Locations of E.R. Gyde's studio at 20 Pier Street,
and the group photograph shown above

A group of railway navvies near Sheffield, Yorkshire

Itinerant photographers were in a good position to take portraits of groups of men working outdoors, particularly those labouring further afield from the main centres.


This roughly trimmed cabinet card photograph from my collection shows a group of five young men who appear to be railway navvies. They are certainly dressed suitably for the job, with rough working clothes and heavy boots. They are excavating a channel which may be a railway cutting, although it could well be for some other purpose, such as a canal. They have picks and shovels, and two of the men are leaning against the skips used to transport excavated material away from the rock face, on the rather crooked rails visible in the foreground.


Andre Hallam has very kindly provided me with a digitally repaired image of this photograph, for which I am most grateful.

Derived from the terms "navigation engineer" and "navigator," the word navvy (plural navvies) was originally used to describe the workers who excavated the earth for canals in the development of the British canal network during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fortunately, as the great canal-building period was waning, the rapidly growing railway construction industry in the 1830s and later created a huge need for suitable workmen, and navvies filled this need perfectly. Much of the work was done by hand, although explosives were employed when harder rock was met with, particularly in tunnels. (Source: Wikipedia)


This photograph shows navvies building a railway cutting in a London street in about 1861 (Courtesy of the National Museum of Science & Industry's ingenious web site and the National Railway Museum). The article accompanying the photograph described the navvies thus:

By the standards of the day they were well paid, but their work was hard and often very dangerous. The railway navvies soon came to form a distinct group, set apart by the special nature of their work. They were assembled in huge armies of workers, men and women from all parts of the British Isles and even continental Europe. Many were fleeing famine in Ireland, and some were the ancestors of the 15,000 travellers who live in Britain today. Tramping from job to job, navvies and their families lived and worked in appalling conditions, often for years on end, in rough timber and turf huts alongside the bridges, tunnels and cuttings that they built. In the 1840s there was no compensation for death or injury, and railway engineers like Brunel resisted all efforts to provide their workers with adequate housing and sanitation, or safe working conditions ... The harsh conditions and communal living meant that navvies evolved a lifestyle, culture and even a language of their own. They built a reputation for fighting, hard living and hard drinking. ‘Respectable’ Victorians viewed them as degenerate and a threat to social order, but much of the criticism was unjustified. Despite cruel exploitation and extreme deprivation the navvies achieved amazing feats of engineering, equipped with little more than gunpowder, picks and shovels.

The image above clearly shows the working clothes of railway navvies, one of whom appears to be in his mid-teens, somewhere in America, possibly New York (Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company and The Warder Collection, NY), probably taken in the 1890s or early 1900s. Their tools include shovels, spades and a wooden wheelbarrow.


This photograph commemmorating the driving of the last spike in the Canadian Pacific Railroad at White Horse, Yukon in June 1900 (Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada) includes some railway navvies dressed similarly to those in my photograph. They have rough working clothes, wide-brimmed hats or flat caps, and some appear to be carrying picks and shovels.


The mount of the cabinet card is stamped on the reverse with a floral design in purple ink containing the photographer's name, Albert Dixon, and his location, Midhope Hall, Sheffield. I don't know anything about this photographer, and would appreciate any information about him, or the possible location of the photograph at the head of this article. Also, if you have an old photograph showing working groups in similar or related professions, I would be happy to feature them in a future article on Photo-Sleuth. (Email)

A ladies' day excursion, location unknown

I've posted this carte de visite as a comparison with the cabinet card of a mens' excursion near West Hartlepool that I used a few days ago. Unfortunately this one has no photographer's name or location on the card mount, so I have no idea where it was taken.


There are fifteen people in the photo, all female, ranging in age from two children about eight years old to a couple of middle-aged women, perhaps in their fifties. Because of the variety in ages, it is difficult to know whether it is some type of extended family group, e.g. grandmothers, mothers and grandchildren, or whether they are unrelated. There are no clear family resemblances evident.

As with the previous photograph of a excursion, little attempt has been made to arrange the members of the group in a formal pattern, and it would have been difficult anyway, considering the irregular jumble of rocks on which they are sitting. I estimate from their clothing, hairstyles and hats that the photograph was taken in the late 1870s or early 1880s, perhaps between 1878 and 1884.

A gentlemen's day excursion near West Hartlepool, c.1890

The groups for which the cabinet card portrait was ideally suited did not have to be family groups, of course. I have come across many other types of groups, and hope to present some of these here in the coming weeks.


This group of twenty-three men are on an excursion somewhere, presumably somewhere near West Hartlepool (Durham), as that is where the photographer is from. Roughly half of them are bearded, and most of the remainder have moustaches and sideburns or Dundreary whiskers - only one young man, possibly in his mid-twenties clearly has neither. Many have bowler or homburg hats, although they have taken them off for the portrait. One has an umbrella and at least a couple have walking sticks.

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with Durham and the area around West Hartlepool at all, so I can't begin to suggest where it might be located. However, it may be that the cliff backdrop to the photograph immediately suggests a spot to someone with local knowledge - if so, I'd be pleased to hear from you (Email). I think it was taken in the late 1880s or early 1890s but, as I'm not particularly adept at dating men's clothing fashions, I'm quite likely to be out by a few years either way.


The photographer Robert Leithead was primarily a chemist, druggist and proprietor of a hairdresser's salon, who appears to have carried on the photography as a sideline, perhaps only briefly, styling himself as "Lew." An 1890 trade directory (Kelly's Directory of Durham, courtesy of the University of Leicester's Historical Directories) shows him with a chemist's shop at 58 Milton Street, and a hairdressing shop in Murray Street, both in West Hartlepool. The 1891 Census suggests that he was also a wine merchant and photographer, and that his fifteen year-old daughter Isabella was working in the hairdresser's as a "shop woman."

Post Script
Photo-Sleuth reader and contributer Nigel Aspdin has come up with a possible location for this photograph.

Maybe it could be High Force Waterfalls, which is further inland up the Tees, but it would be a day out trip from West Hartlepool. The Tees goes through Co Durham and exits into the North Sea at Hartlepool. We were there a few years ago but for some reason I have no photos of the falls, just [a photo outside the pub] at the top of the long path back up to the car park! If it was High Force, and I do think it quite likely, then I am sure your men had a pint or two at the same pub.

According to a Wikipedia article High Force is a waterfall on the River Tees, near Middleton-in-Teesdale, and was formed where the river crosses the Whin Sill: "The waterfall itself consists of two different types of rock. The upper band is made up of whinstone, a hard rock which the waterfall takes a lot of time to erode. The lower section is made up of carboniferous limestone, a softer rock which is more easily worn away by the waterfall. The wearing away of rock means that the waterfall is slowly moving upstream, leaving a narrow, deep gorge in front of it."


High Force waterfall, near Middleton-in-Teesdale, Tees Valley
Image courtesy of Wikipedia & Adrian Barnett/StoatBringer
Modern photos of High Force, such as this collection from Pictures of England, do show rock faces which are very similar to that in the background of Leithead's group portrait. It may even have been taken close to the lower right of this recent photo by Ben Gamble.


The spot is also shown on this satellite image from GoogleMaps:


View Larger Map
Ian West shows that the site is of some interest to geologists on his web site devoted to the Geology of Great Britain, hosted by the University of Southampton. It occurred to me that the group might be engaged on a geological excursion, but I think this is unlikely, as none are carrying hammers of any sort. A geological map of Durham on the same site shows that magnesian limestones outcrop for some distance to the north, west and south-west of West Hartlepool. Nigel and I are both of the opinion that the rocky outcrop in the background of the Leithead photo is probably composed of some kind of limestone. If this is the case, then it is still possible for the location to be closer to West Hartlepool than High Force, which has a dolerite sill overlying limestones and indurated shales, as shown in the portion of the geological map below.

The ROCHE and HERRIES familes of Te Aroha, New Zealand - Part 1

Several years ago I purchased these two cabinet card portraits on eBay, taken in the studio of John Robert Hanna at 134 Queen Street, Auckland, New Zealand. They were of an elderly man and woman, and were inscribed on the reverse, in what appears to be a contemporary hand, "Mrs Herries, Shaftesbury, Te Aroha, Auckland, New Zealand." This interested me, because the town of Te Aroha, nestled at the foot of the Kaimai Range on the eastern edge of the Waikato farming district, is not far from where I live. In fact, I can just see Mount Te Aroha (952 metres), with its TV mast, on the skyline from my front lawn.


My initial research centred on the Herries family. Sir William Herbert Herries (1859-1923) of the small settlement of Shaftesbury, near Te Aroha, was a farmer, race horse breeder and politician. The entry for him in the online version of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography shows that he was born in London, England into a wealthy middle-class family, went to Eton College and, because of an early interest in fossils and geology, studied for a natural science degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. After graduating in 1881, he emigrated to New Zealand and settled on a 900 acre property at Shaftesbury, where he farmed and "dedicat[ed] his leisure to what became a lifelong passion for horse-racing and bloodstock lines." In the 1890s he entered local, and then national politics, serving as a Member of Parliament in opposition from 1896 until 1921, with several years as a cabinet minister after Massey's party took power in 1912. He gained a well earned reputation as an inveterate purchaser of Maori lands.

Herries married Catherine Louise Roche of Ohineroa, a neighbour's daughter, on 4 December 1889. She died in 1912 on board ship returning home from a trip to England and they had no children. "In his latter years, unhindered by the demands of farm and family, [he] was left to pursue his addiction to politics, horse-racing and alcohol." Cambridge University Alumni 1261-1900 shows that he was the eldest son and heir of a barrister Herbert Crompton Herries (1829-1870) and his wife Leonora Emma Wickham of Frimley Park, Surrey, and grandson of Major General Sir William Lewis Herries, CB, KCH, (1785-1857) of the 68th (Durham) Regiment of Foot. His younger brother Robert Stansfield Herries, F.R.G.S. (186-1941) of St Julian's, Kent, followed his father to the bar, was a Director of Spottiswoode's, Ltd. and President of the Geologists' Association from 1906 to 1908.


The photographs of Sir William Herries included in his DNZB biography (see above) taken in the late 1890s and in 1916, respectively, don't show many similarities with the portrait by Hannah. The very full sleeves worn by the elderly woman in the Hanna portrait suggest that it was taken in the 1890s, probably between 1892 and 1897. Auckland City Libraries' Photographers Database shows that Hannah operated a studio at this address from 1885 to 1895, after which he moved to 196 Queen Street. Although card mounts are of slightly different design, it seems likely that they were both taken at around the same time, and almost certainly between 1892 and 1895.

Since they obviously weren't of Sir William Herries and his wife - they would have been in their mid- to late thirties at the time these portraits were taken - who were they? There was no evidence that Sir William's parents had ever come out to New Zealand - besides, his father died in 1870. It occurred to me that they might be of Catherine's parents, and to this end in February 2006 I posted a query on the Rootsweb New Zealand Mailing List asking for any information about the Roche family of Ohineroa. While I didn't receive anything directly relevant, one list member suggested I check the local newspapers of the period, which of course I should have done previously. I then browsed the appropriate sections of Te Aroha & Ohinemuri News & Upper Thames Advocate on Papers Past, a collection of more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals from the years 1840 to 1915, hosted by the National Library of New Zealand, and found the following article in the issue dated Saturday, 7 December 1889 (page 2):

"On Wednesday last Mr. W.H. Herries (who recently bought out his partner's interest in that valuable farm at Shaftesbury, until then the property of Messrs Thompson and Herries), was married to Miss Roche, daughter of Mr E.F. Roche, J.P., of Ohineroa, Shaftesbury. The wedding took place at the residence of the bride's father, Rev. F.G. Evans officiating. The event was celebrated in the quietest manner possible, as, beyond Mr Roche's family, Mis Purchas (bridesmaid), and Mr E.C. Meysey Thompson (best man), only a very few intimate friends were invited. The happy couple in the afternoon drove direct to their future home, the residence of Mr. W.H. Herries; which has been recently greatly enlarged and newly furnished in preparation for the wedding. We join with many others in wishing the newly married couple long life and much happiness and prosperity."

This didn't tell me a great deal beyond what I already knew. It was possible that the elderly couple in the photos were Catherine Roche's parents, but there was no way to be sure. In the mean time, I exchanged the two original cabinet card photographs with fellow collector of old photographs, Peter Koninsky, who had located and previously sent me several cartes de visite by Derbyshire photographers, my main area of interest. He was very grateful:

"The Brisbane CDV and the two Auckland, N.Z. cabinet cards survived the journey unscathed. Thank you!! These are my first New Zealand cards, and are appreciated as much because they offer a slight glimpse into the past in a distant and interesting location, as they are because they seem to be so scarce and difficult to obtain."

That was almost two years ago. Go to Part 2.

References

Belgrave, Michael. 'Herries, William Herbert 1859 - 1923'. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007

Cambridge University Alumni, 1261-1900. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 1999. Original data: Venn, J. A., comp.. Alumni Cantabrigienses. London, England: Cambridge University Press, 1922-1954.

Database of New Zealand Photographers, from Auckland City Libraries.

Te Aroha & Ohinemuri News & Upper Thames Advocate, Saturday 7 December 1889, page 2, on Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand.