‘Lost’ archive of pioneer woman photographer’s …...When pioneer woman photographer Catharine...

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Registered Charity No: 223382

www.kentarchaeology.org.uk

www.kentarchaeology.ac

From: Paul Tritton, Hon. Press Officer

Email: [email protected]

Telephone: 01622 741198

‘Lost’ archive of pioneer woman photographer’s pictures

found at Kent Archaeological Society

When pioneer woman photographer Catharine Weed Barnes Ward (pictured above by Edward S Terry in 1890) of Golden

Green, near Tonbridge, Kent, died in 1913 she left 10,000 glass plate negatives of pictures of landscapes and historic

buildings taken during her 27-year career.

More than 300 of them illustrated two travel books written by her husband, Henry Snowden Ward, and published in 1904 –

The Real Dickens Land, describing locations in Kent and elsewhere that were the settings for Charles Dickens’s novels; and

The Canterbury Pilgrimages, featuring places visited by medieval pilgrims as they made their way to Thomas Becket’s

shrine.

The negatives of these historic and irreplaceable photos were thought to have been lost forever – until a recent discovery

at the Kent Archaeological Society’s Library in Maidstone Museum.

There, while scanning and collating thousands of glass plates, volunteer Ann Pinder came across a view of the ballroom at

the Bull Inn, Rochester (now the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel) credited to Catharine Weed Barnes Ward.

29th November 2013

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Research by Ann and colleagues in the society’s Visual Records Group revealed Catharine’s collaboration with her husband

on The Real Dickens Land. The ballroom photo was found on page 73, captioned with a description from Pickwick: ‘A long

covered room, with crimson-covered benches and wax candles in glass chandeliers’. Eventually 52 negatives were

discovered that exactly matched pictures of places in Kent elsewhere in the book.

Next, the group identified the negatives of 23 of the 33 photographs that Catharine took in Canterbury for The Canterbury

Pilgrimages, and collated more than 100 other negatives of Kent scenes that circumstantial evidence suggests were her

work.

Ann Pinder (centre) inspecting Catharine Weed Barnes Ward’s negatives

with KAS colleagues Helen Orme (left) and Pat Tritton

The negatives had not been identified before due to an arson attack on Maidstone Museum in 1977 in which about ten per

cent of the KAS’s books and other collections (which fortunately had only recently been revalued and reinsured), stored in a

room next to the one where the fire started, were damaged. The Visual Records collection alone consists of some 20,000

images in various formats and dates back to the early18th century.

No one knows how many glass negatives were beyond repair and had to be thrown away when the collection was salvaged,

but hundreds were saved. Unfortunately, when they were cleaned and repacked after the fire they were rearranged into

“place” and “subject” categories and their original boxes were discarded, along with any vital papers they may have

contained saying when and by whom the pictures were taken.

‘Some of the negatives were scorched and water-stained but their images could still be seen,’ said Ann.

The images of the Dickens locations are important because they were taken less than 40 years after he died in June 1870

and show them much as they were when he wrote his novels. Furthermore, The Real Dickens Land was the first book about

Dickens to be fully illustrated with photographs. Glass plate negatives were then in common use, becoming obsolete in the

late 1920s.

By coincidence the cache has come to light during a revival of interest in Catharine’s achievements among photographic

historians in the USA and Britain, and soon after the republication of The Real Dickens Land (Nabu Public Domain Reprints,

2012).

Dr Margaret Denny, lecturer in photographic history at Columbia College, Chicago, hailed the discovery as ‘exciting news’.

In the 2012 edition of History of Photography she wrote: ‘At a time when Victorian women’s roles held firmly to the

domestic, Catharine set a model for women through her photographic imagery, writings and public speaking in America

and Great Britain’.

For Professor Elizabeth Edwards, director of the Photographic History Research Centre at Leicester’s De Montfort University

and author of The Camera as Historian, published in 2012, the find is ‘massively exciting’. ‘Catharine did much to further

the cause of photography as a suitable profession for women’, said Elizabeth. ‘I especially like her picture of the Pickwick

Room in the Leather Bottle pub - all those images on the wall! - and the hugely long exposure, leaving the ghosts of people,

perhaps Kentish labourers, who walked through her frame. She was too good a photographer to make mistakes with focus

and exposure. The clarity of the negative is superb’.

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The Pickwick Room in The Leather Bottle

Catharine (or ‘Catherine’ as she was sometimes called) was born in Albany, New York State, in 1851. In 1886, aged 35, she

started studying photography, intending to make a career in a male-dominated profession. Some medical ‘experts’ even

considered that such ‘advanced learning’ would overtax young women ‘before their brains are sufficiently developed’.

Catharine joined a photographic society at a time when few of them accepted women members, one reason being that the

prospect of women developing their negatives in darkrooms also used by men was considered positively scandalous,

especially if they were given their own latchkeys for admission to the darkrooms!

While advocating that women photographers should be treated as men’s equals, Catharine fought to abolish so-called

‘ladies’ diplomas and prizes’ in photographic competitions and exhibitions, saying: ‘Do not admit a woman’s pictures

because they are made by a woman but because they are made well’.

Overcoming prejudice, Catharine rose to the top of her profession. She specialized in travel photography and her pictures

of landscapes and buildings of historical importance, many associated with great writers and their works, were published in

countless books and periodicals and shown during her lectures to photographic societies.

In 1890 she joined the staff of American Amateur Photographer magazine in New York. Meanwhile, in London, her future

husband, Henry Snowden Ward, was editing and publishing his new magazine, The Practical Photographer, and had

become an authoritative writer and lecturer on the works of Chaucer, Dickens and Shakespeare. Catharine and Henry’s

paths soon crossed. In January 1892, possibly for the first time, they met at her office in New York. Later that year she spent

several months touring England and Scotland, taking 1,500 photographs. In November 1892 she surprised her friends back

home by announcing her engagement to Henry, who was described in the New York Times as ‘a gentleman of cultivated

tastes and an enthusiastic photographer’.

Catharine recalled how Henry (who was 14 years younger than her) caught her eye almost every day as ‘a sturdy,

knickerbockered figure tramping eastward along The Strand in London [with] a countrified whiff of aggressive, healthy

athleticism exhaling, so to speak, from his attire … a honey-coloured beard … and two blue eyes above a “pushful” nose –

all of which chimes naturally with knickerbockers in The Strand’.

American Amateur Photographer, December 1891.

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Henry Snowden Ward

Charles Dickens, from the frontispiece of The Real Dickens Land

They were married in July 1893. After a honeymoon at Niagara Falls they resumed their careers, as a husband-and-wife

creative partnership. In 1901 they moved from what was evidently a boarding house for the professional classes at No 185

Cromwell Road, Kensington, to Falklands, Golden Green, a large house (now called Leigh Court) in Three Elm Lane, with five

bedrooms, three reception rooms, an orangery, servants’ accommodation in the attic and several acres of gardens.

Falklands, Golden Green

The Wards took time to become part of Kent life. Henry joined the Kent Archaeological Society, built a rifle range in his

garden for Hadlow Scouts and Hadlow Church Lads’ Brigade, and supported the bellringers at St Mary’s, Hadlow, his parish

church. In 1908 he presented them with a peal board (still displayed in the belfry) inscribed with the names of the ringers

who for the first time for 54 years completed a peal of 5,040 changes at the church. When shopping in Hadlow the Wards

met Freda Barton (1867-1940), whose husband Fred worked at the village drapery store. Taught and encouraged by Henry,

she became a highly successful commercial photographer, working from a studio in Police Station Road, West Malling, and

in Kent is more famous than either Catharine or Henry.

The Wards joined the Royal Photographic Society and the National Photographic Record Association. Catharine drafted the

rules for the NPRA for its founder, Sir Benjamin Stone, an eminent politician and prolific amateur photographer. She went

on to help organize the National Photographic Record and Survey of buildings of architectural and historical importance in

counties, towns and cities throughout England, launched in 1897.

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As specialists in travel photography the Wards were burdened with heavy cameras, tripods and boxes of fragile negatives

wherever they went. They travelled to distant and remote locations by train and carriage, starting their journeys at their

local railway station at Tonbridge, four miles from home. During a trip to Devon their pony-drawn ‘trap’ overturned, leaving

Catharine with a broken wrist and other injuries. She was unable to resume working for a long time.

Catharine and Henry’s first joint venture was Shakespeare’s Town and Times (1896), a book with 110 photographs by

Catharine, followed by The Shakespearean Guide to Stratford-on-Avon (1897), The Real Dickens Land, The Canterbury

Pilgrimages, Photography for the Press and, in 1906, The Land of Lorna Doone.

The Wards also launched and edited a new magazine, The Photogram (published in London and New York) and Henry

somehow also found time to present lectures, notably on Charles Dickens; experiment with X-rays (discovered in 1895);

help found the Roentgen Society; write numerous books and articles on radiography and photography – and edit My

Experiences as an Executioner by James Berry, public executioner from 1884 to 1891, in which he described his methods

and the final moments of some of his victims!

Their sudden but happy marriage lasted only 18 years. In October 1911, after many years’ success as a writer and lecturer

and with engagements to fulfil as the Dickens Fellowship’s Special Commissioner in the USA and Canada, he embarked on a

five-month tour of North America to coincide with the Dickens Centenary celebrations in February 1912. An hour before he

was due to lecture on ‘Dickens in America’ he was found unconscious in his bed at the National Arts Club, where he stayed

while visiting New York City. Blood poisoning was diagnosed and despite an emergency operation he died soon afterwards,

on December 7 1911, at a private hospital at 26 West 61st Street. Catharine was at his bedside. He was 46.

Henry was buried in Albany Rural Cemetery, close to the home of the Weed Barnes family in New York State. In his Will,

written in 1907, and witnessed by his secretary, Ethel Moyes and housekeeper, Fanny Warren, he left his property and

effects to various relatives. His estate was valued at £857.1s.10d (about £85,500 in today’s money). Catharine inherited his

‘photographic instruments’. She returned to Golden Green but due to the shock of Henry’s death, the after-effects of her

road accident, and failing health, she was unable to work again. She died at Falklands on July 31 1913, aged 62. She was

cremated and her ashes were interred in Henry’s grave.

Catherine left £2,257. 8s. 3d (about £225,000 in today’s money). In 1907, six years before she died, she wrote a Will,

witnessed by Fanny Warren, Ethel Moyes and her housemaid, Daisy Barham, in which she left her ‘photographic

instruments’ to Henry. Two months before she died she amended the Will, omitting any reference to ‘photographic

instruments’. However, in May 1912, five months after Henry died, she deposited 40 photographic prints, mostly of

Canterbury, with the National Photographic Survey and Record’s Kent portfolio in Maidstone Museum.

Most of the prints are identical to the pictures she took for The Canterbury Pilgrimages, so the negatives recently

discovered at the KAS were probably given to the society when the prints were deposited at the museum. It is possible,

though, that more negatives made for this and her other books await discovery. In The Real Dickens Land, Henry wrote:

‘We have left, in our negative boxes, a still greater number of equally interesting subjects’.

The negatives Catharine made during her tour of England and Scotland in 1892 are among 2,202 in her archive at the

International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York State. This was regarded as the only

significant collection of Catharine’s negatives to have survived the 100 years that have elapsed since she died. It had been

assumed that most of her other negatives were lost or destroyed long ago. However it now appears that the Kent

Archaeological Society has the second largest collection of Catharine’s negatives – 75 for certain, 219 if the circumstantial

evidence can be proven.

Henry is remembered in Hadlow by a plaque in St Mary’s Church. Sadly, Catherine has no memorial. Her Kent images are

now on the KAS website at http://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/Research/Libr/VisRec/01/Ward%20Collection%20catalogue%20V3.pdf and

http://tinyurl.com/prwpx3k . Those at George Eastman House are on http://www.geh.org/ar/strip13/htmlsrc/ward_sum00001.html and

http://www.geh.org/ar/strip14/htmlsrc/ward_sum00001.html

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Memorial to Henry Snowden Ward in St Mary’s Church, Hadlow.

With thanks to Professor Elizabeth Edwards; Dr Margaret Denny; Alistair Cook; Dr Michael Pritchard (Royal Photographic

Society); Christine Baldock and Anne Hughes (Hadlow History Society).

Continued/…

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Images from The Real Dickens Land

For JPEGs email [email protected]

Dickens’s home c. 1817-1821 at No 2 Ordnance Terrace, Chatham: second house from left. (Ref no B0024.0008)

No 2 Ordnance Terrace today

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The Leather Bottle, Cobham. ‘Really, for a misanthrope’s choice, this is one of the most desirable places of residence I ever

met with’.- Pickwick. (Ref no B0004-09)

The Leather Bottle today

The Pickwick Room at the Leather Bottle, Cobham. ‘A long, low-roofed room ... with a large number of chairs’. – Pickwick

(Ref no B0004-02)

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The ballroom at the Bull Inn, Rochester. ‘A long covered room, with crimson-covered benches and wax candles in glass

chandeliers ... the musicians were securely confined in an elevated den’. – Pickwick (Ref no B0027.0001). The caption on this

plate was the clue that led to the identification of Catharine’s negatives at the KAS.

The Bull Inn, Rochester. ‘Do you remain here, Sir? ... Good house, nice beds’, - Pickwick (Ref noB0004 0006)

The Bull (now the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel) today

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Restoration House, Rochester: ‘Satis House’ in Great Expectations. (Ref no B0034.0002)

‘Mr Tope’ – a character in Dickens’s last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood - at Rochester Cathedral. (Ref no B0030.0012)

Crispin and Crispianus, Strood. ‘So should we lie that night at the ancient sign of the Crispin and Crispianus ’. – The

Uncommercial Traveller (Ref no B0024.0012)

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Crispin and Crispianus today

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Images from The Canterbury Pilgrimages

For JPEGs email [email protected]

The Westgate and (right) the City Police Station. (Ref no B00350014)

The Chequers of Hope and Mercery Lane. (Ref no B00350012)

Christchurch Gate. (Ref no B00390010)

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St John’s Hospital (Ref noB00410010)

River Stour and the Weavers, from The Friars bridge (Ref no B00350003)

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