Travels of a Victorian Photographer – Selected by Roger Hudson

On August 18, 2026June 25, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

The third and last of this brief series by The Folio Society turned the original concept on its head. Whilst the first two were in turn a book and then a collection of writings both were illustrated by contemporary photographs. This time it is the photographer that is featured and the images are illustrated by selected texts. For me despite the fact that this is supposed to be a book of photographs there simply aren’t enough of them and they are somewhat overwhelmed by the text presumably in an attempt to match the balance of text to images from the first two volumes which is somewhat unfair to the great Francis Frith. With that in mind I have selected six images that I think show what Frith was doing and why he is was important not just for photographing so much that is now lost but for his impact on the developing tourism industry and indeed without ever knowing it, the postal service.

Fortunately I knew the name of Francis Frith many decades before I read this book as I was a deltiologist (a collector of postcards) from a child and as I got older and took it more seriously was a founder member of The Potteries Postcard Society in Stoke of Trent back in 1983, so I was really looking forward to this book when it came out in 2001 as Francis Frith was a pioneer in the field of souvenir images. Firstly may I apologise for the reproduction of the pictures, the book really didn’t want to lie flat so the sharpness of Frith’s work is sometimes not as I would like with these handheld pictures of the quite glossy pages. Oddly this is in tune with the book itself as despite it being ostensibly a book about him, Francis Frith is only mentioned in the introduction and it is the texts by twenty nine different writers such as Beatrix Potter, Charles Dickens, Francis Kilvert and Henry James that makes up the bulk of the contents so I would like to right that wrong in the next paragraph or two.

Francis Frith was born in 1822 and started his career as a wholesale grocer in Liverpool which was so successful that he could sell the business at the age of 34 and effectively retire as what would now be the equivalent of a multi-millionaire. On the proceeds he started to travel and went to the Middle East and the Holy Land where he indulged his new hobby taking advantage of the very early days of photography which had only been invented in 1839. With the success of selling prints from his work he decided to set up the worlds first photographic business F Frith & Co.and started supplying shops with high quality photographs of their local sites for them to sell as souvenirs, this new business also went on to be wildly successful with Frith employing numerous photographers to travel the UK taking photographs and by 1886 the catalogue listing the images available ran to 670 pages not just of British locations but selections from around the world which Frith bought in to increase the available range. Sadly Francis Frith died in 1896 so never saw the fame his business would achieve when international regulations changed on the layout of postcards in 1902 to allow writing on the same side as the address and the resulting explosion in sending postcards from wherever you went which Frith & Co. were ideally placed to take advantage of with their vast archive..

Frith & Co. were one of the leading UK companies in postcard production and there was a good chance that a seaside view postcard sent up until the 1960’s would have the name Francis Frith on it, I know I still have lots. But in 1970 with no family members still involved, and the then managing director about to retire, the decision was made to close the company and that might have been it, indeed the factory was due to be demolished in 1971 and the priceless historical archive of over 300,000 images, a lot of which were on glass plates, destroyed; but fortunately it was saved with just a week to spare before the bulldozers went in and we can still admire the work of Francis Frith to this day, as just ten years ago (2016) the digitisation of this enormous body of work was completed. The last 200,000 photographs were scanned in just two years and they are being cleaned up as and when somebody orders a print which is obviously a more practical way of prioritising the work and photos were still being released to the online archive up until 2023. The physical collection is now housed near Salisbury but the website is available to everyone.

Stratford Upon Avon – Shakespeare’s birthplace circa 1850 before its extensive restoration

As I said the book barely mentions Francis Frith and certainly doesn’t give the prominence due to his work. It is split into counties and Dorset for example occupies thirteen pages on which there are just five photographs and none of those are quite the size of a half page. The rest is mainly given over to sizeable extracts from the novels of Thomas Hardy, apart from a couple of pages quoting from the diary of William Allingham regarding a trip to Lyme Regis with Alfred Lord Tennyson and Francis Palgrave. What it did do though is introduce me to the works of authors I had heard of but never read before and I particularly enjoyed yet another Francis, The Reverend Francis Kilvert, who was a clergyman based near Hay on Wye just over the Welsh border but in this extract from the 1870’s he was down in the farthest south west of mainland England.

After dinner Cept. P. took Miss Lewis and me down to Land’s End, a little triangular point of rock reached by passing round to the seaward side of a tall upright shaft of cliff. The accomplishment of an old dream.
Coming back we met a noisy rabble of tourists, males and females, rushing down the rocks towards the Land’s End as if they meant to break their necks, and no great loss either. The rest of the insufferable snobs had of course been endeavouring to insult the ladies and Capt. Parker suggested that a kicking might tend to mend their manners.

I’ll definitely have to read more of Kilvert’s Diary, it appears to be a lot funnier than I expected, it’s a great pity he died so young.

I suspect that the lack of focus on Frith despite what the average reader would expect from the title is partly what ultimately killed off this short series from The Folio Society after just three volumes and I have greatly enjoyed reading the first two J B Priestley and Sir John Betjeman but I was disappointed by this final volume. So I will finish with a view of The Lake District in north west England as a carriage which had been converted into a mobile darkroom by Frith & Co can be seen, it was probably also temporary living quarters in some of the wilder parts of the UK for the luckless photographer assuming he could squeeze in with the dangerous chemicals and bulky equipment which would take priority for space.

Kirkstone Pass – The Lake District – with one of the Frith mobile darkrooms on the road

Next week I’ll be exploring the capital in another collection of writings selected by Roger Hudson for The Folio Society.

Betjeman’s Britain – selected and edited by Candida Lycett Green

On August 11, 2026June 8, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

This is an excellent companion volume to last week’s English Journey by J B Priestley. Whilst Priestley was covering the depths of the depression and concentrates largely on the people he encounters on his journey around England in 1933, this book is a selection of Betjeman’s writings between the late 1930’s and the mid 1970’s selected by his daughter, Candida, and ruminates mainly on landscape and architecture. The photographs that illustrate the book are also literally lighter in tone being sepia renditions rather than the harsh black and white of the Priestley volume. Earlier this year I read ‘Trains and Buttered Toast‘ which was also a collection of Betjeman’s talks and essays but there are very few duplications between the two books, in fact I can only think of one, which is the 1937 BBC talk entitled ‘Cooke of Cookesborough’ which is so well written and amusing it was certainly no hardship to read it again. Trains and Buttered Toast is mainly drawn from his BBC talks but Lycett Green has chosen far more widely so we get newspaper articles and longer sections from books he wrote, such as the 1958 ‘English Parish Churches’ and, of course, the Shell county guides several of which he edited along with artist John Piper and others with both of them contributing heavily to the text and photographs. The first book in the series was written by Betjeman and was dedicated to his beloved Cornwall and the West Country represents the first 79 of the 318 pages in this book, Priestley was a novelist and playwright and wrote beautifully but Betjeman was a poet and you can tell by his love of words.

Stepper Point from Polzeath, Cornwall by John Gay

I just want to quote a passage from his 1949 BBC talk about Port Isaac in Cornwall:

Can it really be that a town is half a mile away? I have walked between high Cornish hedges from St Endellion, once the parish church of Port-Isaac. The tower dwindles. The land winds. The slate of the hedges is overgrown with grasses, bedstraw and milky-pink convulvulus, pale-purple scabious and here and there darker valerian. From several places, standing on a hedge of looking through a gate, I can glimpse the sea. The sea is there all right, the great Atlantic, emerald green, wrinkled, glittering, sliding streaks of water, spotted dark blue here and there with reflections. It was a full tide, tamed and quiet for the moment, sliding around this inhospitable coast of North Cornwall, with white crescents of surf floating close inshore. From here on these high up fields, where blackthorn is sliced by the sea wind and leans inland, I can see all along the rocky cliffs to Tintagel Head. Behind me is even grander coast to the Rumps Point and Pentire. Cliffs and ocean are fine to watch, from these high windy fields as cloud shadows race over them. But where can there be a town? Less than half a mile and still no sight of it!

Eventually he does see his destination, but the beauty of the description of that short walk almost puts me beside him on the way to it.

St Pancras train shed, London by John Gay

Betjeman is probably best know for his enthusiasms for railways and churches and there are many lovely descriptions of both throughout the book, the chapter on London illustrates this perfectly as it consists of seven pieces, three of which are railway stations, two churches along with two others:

Westminster Abbey – from his preface to the eponymous guide published 1972
Paddington Station – Wheeler’s Quarterly Review, Spring 1968
King’s Cross Station – Wheeler’s Quarterly Review, Autumn 1969
St Pancras Station – Wheeler’s Quarterly Review, Winter 1969
Middlesex – Daily Telegraph, 12 August 1963
Bedford Park, Chiswick – Daily Telegraph, 22 August 1960
St Paul’s – Daily Telegraph, 25 May 1957

The article on Middlesex bemoans the encroachment and eventual swallowing up of what was once a fertile county by the ever spreading London conurbation, whilst Bedford Park is a purpose built Victorian suburb of the city which is largely praised for it’s overall plan. But it is his descriptions of the abbey, cathedral and magnificent railway stations that Betjeman really comes into his own.

May Day punting on the River Cherwell, Oxford by Thurston Hopkins

The other big difference to last week’s book is that this time we get out of England, visiting Wales, Scotland, Ireland and even the Isle of Man where he seems perfectly at home in a tiny country that always feels slightly more foreign than it’s location would suggest, enjoying the ceremony of Tynwald Day and the unspoilt countryside and of course the trains away from the crowds of holidaymakers in the capital, Douglas. It was a really fun read, even more enjoyable than ‘Trains and Buttered Toast’, the choice of longer articles than in that other book, especially the ones from Architectural Review, gave Betjeman more room to express himself and the selection by Lycett Green was impeccable letting her father’s writing shine through and including several of his poems.

The final picture in the book shows Sir John standing on the dunes at Trebethrick where he had a home and where he died in 1984. He was the only Poet Laureate to have already have been made a knight of the Realm before taking on the role, gaining the honour in 1969 before becoming Laureate in 1972.

John Betjeman at Trebethrick, Cornwall by June Brown

English Journey – J B Priestley

On August 4, 2026May 13, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

It’s time again for my August themed books and for this year I’ve chosen to feature some titles from The Folio Society starting with English Journey by J B Priestley. Annoyingly for a month that requires four entries the society only produced three books in this short series from the 1990’s so I have added a logical fourth to round them out as the books themselves deserve attention. Especially this first title ‘English Journey’ which is a classic analysis of the state of England in the depression years and particularly the year 1933 when Priestley undertook his travels across the country. The photographs used in this Folio Society edition are from the 1984 Jubilee publication by William Heinemann Ltd although eight pictures from that version could not be obtained due to changes in copyright. The photos are all contemporary to the text, so from the 1930’s

Halifax Townscape by Bill Brandt 1936 – From the chapter ‘To the West Riding’

The book begins and ends in places largely untouched by The Great Slump which had decimated the industrial north and was triggered by The Great Depression in America from 1929 to 1933. Priestley set off to find out how England had been affected by the economic collapse without realising he was seeing it probably at its worst and he started off in the south of the country where he saw some economic decline in Southampton and Bristol, far less in The Cotswolds but then as he heads north through Birmingham and The Black Country and then into The Potteries and Yorkshire poverty increases along with the dirt and grime of industry both past and present. A quote from his chapter on The Potteries and that nebulous new city of Stoke On Trent which doesn’t have a city centre that can be recognised and still doesn’t to the confusion of anyone who visits there. Priestley keeps struggling to work out where he is.

But the general impression is of an exceptionally mean, dingy provinciality, of Victorian industrialism in its dirtiest and most cynical aspect. The look of these places bears no relation to the work that goes on in them. It seems to me to be monstrous that good craftsmen, whose families have been working for generations perhaps with Wedgewoods or Adams or Spode, should be condemned to live in such miserable holes as these.

In the next chapter ‘To Liverpool and Manchester’ the great wordsmith finds himself lost for words when trying to describe what he found in Liverpool and the deprivation he found in the slums there and determines that “Miserably I decided that somebody else must give a plain fair account of this great city, the task, in the time, was beyond me”

Notts County v Nottingham Forest – Nottingham Guardian newspaper 1931 – From the chapter ‘To Leicester and Nottingham’

But it’s not all doom and gloom, Priestley manages to attend a football match, has great fun making very poor attempts at creating pottery items in Stoke, goes to Nottingham Goose Fair and even see rehearsals for one of his plays being put on at The Palace Theatre in Manchester, He admires the Bourneville district of Birmingham along with Chipping Campden and Boston on market day But its in the dark oppressive places that he really comes into his own and I don’t think I’ve read such a powerful text on squalor and deprivation largely caused by the decline of industry in the early years of the 1930’s

Phoenix Passage in Dudley photographer unknown circa 1930 – from the chapter ‘To the Black Country’

The longest chapter is describing a trip to the West Riding of Yorkshire, specifically to Priestley’s birth town of Bradford where he had arranged to attend a gathering of survivors from the First World War of his old regiment. Priestley himself was invalided out of the front lines in 1916 when the trench he was in was hit by a mortar shell and very few of his old comrades from that time were still around and able to attend the reunion but he did meet some and according to his account of the event a good time was had by all. But it is in this section that Priestley’s anger at the conflict and loss of life which had ended just seventeen years earlier is most on display, and for me some of his best writing in the entire book is in this chapter, a small section of which is shown below.

This is not a hugely positive book, how could it be when it is dealing with the early part of the depression and the waste of skilled men desperate for non-existent jobs to earn money to feed their families or the still ongoing aftermath of WWI with broken men struggling to cope with mental and physical issues. I refer to men as this was still a time when the roles of the sexes were largely differentiated, yes Priestley encountered women at work, largely at repetitive manufacturing such as he found in Birmingham and The Potteries, but the heavy industries in the north were on their knees and it was men that were employed there bringing in the income. I encourage everyone to read this book, especially now as who knows where AI and robotics are going to take us. A lot more unemployment looks to be not that far ahead as manufacturing increasingly replaces humans with machines that can work twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. I had not thought of Priestley as a social commentator before, for me he was a playwright and novelist, but he is a powerful writer especially when he rails against injustice.