What was lost is found family pictures from the 1860s

I am looking at a remarkable collection of photographs from the late 1860s.

The date alone makes them something special but that is not all, for these are a collection which were lost and found, and found in a way that makes you want to write about them.

The Willis family were not aristocrats, nor were they fabulously rich, just a typical upper middle class family which commissioned a series of photographs from 1864 into the next decade.

Now I know a little of the family’s history but today it is the story of those pictures that fascinates me.

Here looking back at us are a group of people of different ages and gender, some looking stern others  a bit preoccupied and yet others just a little bemused by the exercise of having a photograph taken.

The pictures were taken at a number of different studios across London and also as far afield as Belfast, Uxbridge and Oxford.

The most famous of the photographers was Vernon Heath who had studios in Piccadilly from 1865 to 1888, exhibited at the National Gallery, lectured to the Royal Institution, photographed various members of the Royal family and was declared bankrupt more than once, clocking up 19 county court judgements in thirteen years.

In his day he could stop the traffic when he took photographs and was considered one of the leading photographers of his day.

And in to his studios went one of our family.  The rest chose less humble photographers, although Edward Shayler who is also remembered accounted for four of the fourteen pictures that have survived form the 1860s.

And I say survive because the collection had chequered history.  Sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century they disappear only to turn up recently in Portobello Road.

They were found by Mark, a family historian who “had been drawn to the set of photos because they were all in an envelope together and the handwriting on them was in the same hand.”*

Most of them had surnames and with a bit of careful detective work he was able to trace them to my friend Jean and her distant cousin by marriage, Mary. Both are are descendants of the family:
Jean's link is the Willis/Cowley branch, Mary's is the wealthier Stanton/Hooper branch.

That done he passed the pictures on to them which I still think is an amazing example of generosity especially as he refused to take any money for them.

It is a nice story not only because the photographs are back with the family but because someone went out of their way to do the research to give them their proper home.

Now that is the sort of historian I like.

All material for the story from Jean Gammons.

*Jean Gammons

Pictures; from the collection of Jean Gammons

Coming soon; the Willis family by Jean