Victorian life in the UK revealed in amazing collection of 170,000 images
Dorset-based Francis Frith have now completed scanning of the entire archive – approximately 330,000 images.
Of these about 170,000 are online searchable by location, and the newly scanned images are being added at the rate of 6,000 to 10,000 per month.
In addition, the company invites website visitors to add personal memories inspired by photographs or locations.
The magnificent archive of historical photographs that Mr Frith and the Frith company photographers created between 1860 and 1970 bears fascinating witness to the changes that took place in around 8,000 cities, towns and villages throughout Britain over more than a century of incredible transformation.
The Frith company photographers returned to many towns and villages a number of times, so the collection often provides the opportunity to company the same locations in photographs taken decades apart, providing a fascinating insight into the changes that have occurred, or not, over more than a century.
This gallery of images are drawn from the archive, and range from an 1893 image of the hardy fishermen of Sheringham, Norfolk, to the romantic 1886 scene of a couple painting a landscape of Bolton Abbey.
Elsewhere is a hardscrabble scene of prisoners in 1890 pulling a cart at Dartmoor Prison.
John Buck, MD of The Francis Frith Collection, says: “We are hugely excited about the newly digitised images going online and the Frith archive being shown on our website in its entirety.
“Now, more than ever, we hope that even more people will visit our website and be delighted to find their own ‘special photo’. And we hope that our regular website visitors will keep coming back to see what else has been added – we’ll be publishing many thousands of new photos to the website every month until everything is online.”
Amazingly, the entire archive was almost destroyed.
When F Frith & Co closed down in 1970, the nostalgia market was in its infancy and the company had no idea about the potential value of the historic collection in its negative library.
One of Britain’s first historians of photography, Bill Jay (1940-2009), then Director of Photography at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, was alerted to the imminent closure of the company and informed that the Frith premises was soon to be demolished, and everything in it would be destroyed.
He decided to visit the Frith premises to inspect the archive.
He was delighted to find the original ‘master prints’ from which the Frith postcards were printed were still in existence, and in excellent condition.
He was astonished by the quantity, estimating there were about 250,000 original prints, all indexed and filed in thousands of cardboard boxes on racks of dust-covered shelves that lined the walls of several rooms from floor to ceiling.
They had been stored by F Frith & Co for decades; their dates ranged across the entire period the company was in business, and many were over 100 years old.
As well as the prints, he also discovered thousands of original glass negative plates stored in rusty tin boxes.
Bill Jay immediately recognised the importance of the Frith archive, both in the history of photography and as a record of social change, and was horrified that it might soon be thrown on a bonfire.
He was determined to save this historic collection from destruction, and began a high profile campaign to publicise its plight and find a purchaser for it.
Time to rescue this precious, irreplaceable photographic collection was running out fast, but at last Bill Jay’s efforts were rewarded at the eleventh hour when Rothmans, the cigarette company, agreed to buy and save the archive.
Rothmans moved the archive – hundreds of thousands of precious glass negatives and prints, ledgers and company records – and rescued it for the nation.
They were only just in time, as a week later the bulldozers arrived and the Frith premises was flattened.
Five years after Rothmans bought and saved the Frith photographic archive, a Rothmans executive, John Buck, persuaded the company to allow him to create a new business based on the Frith images.
F Frith & Co had offered photographic prints or postcards as holiday souvenirs, but John saw that every photograph in the archive was potentially fascinating to people who had not just been on holiday in that location, but who also had a personal connection to the scene depicted in the photograph – it might show where they had been born, or grew up, or been to school, or been married.
Realising the Frith archive documented hundreds of thousands of places that have helped create and shape our lives, with each photograph potentially representing an invaluable record of a part of someone’s life, he began to develop ideas to make the images available to the public in new and innovative ways.
In 1977 John Buck bought the Frith archive and embryonic business from the Rothmans company, and has run it ever since as his own independent business under the trading name of ‘The Francis Frith Collection’.
(The Sun, UK)
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