Catalogue of the Edis Photographic Negatives

Reference code: GB-0033-EDI
Title: Edis Photographic Negatives
Dates of creation: ca. 1860- ca. 1960
Extent: ca. 1,840 items
Held by: Durham University Library, Archives and Special Collections
Origination: Edis photographers (Durham)

The Edis firm

The Edis family's photography business flourished in Durham for almost seventy years, from the 1890s until 1964. The survival of the Edis negatives now in Durham University Library owes much to the initiative and energy of Dr. C.W. Gibby. The Library's collection is a selection from the firm's stock made by him, together with Dr. A.I. Doyle, at the time the firm was being wound up. Working in considerable haste, they attempted to pick out negatives relating to the city of Durham, people associated with it and places near it. The University Library bought the negatives they chose, together with the copyright. Further selections were taken by the Cathedral Library and the University's Department of Archaeology. The remainder of the stock, consisting largely of portraits, was acquired by what is now the Beamish North of England Open Air Museum.
John Reed Edis, founder of the firm, was born in London in 1860 and became one of the first students at Quintin Hogg's newly founded Polytechnic, where he trained as a photographer. About 1885 he moved to Darlington where he worked in partnership with another photographer. In the 1890s he set up business in Durham, at first in the Sherburn Road. By 1897 however he had moved to Saddler Street where the firm remained for the rest of its existence, initially at no.53, from 1898 to 1932 at no.52, and from 1933 at no.51. Edis became official photographer to the Dean and Chapter of Durham, to the colleges of the University and to Durham School, and also established a reputation as a landscape photographer. After his death in 1942, the firm was carried on by his daughter, Mrs. Spence, who had joined her father in the business in 1901, while still in her teens. As "Daisy" she was familiar to generations of Durham schoolboys and undergraduates as the photographer of their school and college groups, but she was also a specialist in portrait photography, becoming an associate and then fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and a fellow of The Institute of British Photography. Her portraits were widely exhibited, in the U.S.A. and Japan, as well as in Britain. These details of her career and of her father's are based on recollections communicated to Dr. Gibby by her son, Rev. J.E. Spence.

The University Library's Edis collection contains about 1,840 glass negatives, comprising mainly Durham City and University subjects, with a great number of portraits. Negatives of buildings and views in Durham City constitute a large part of the collection. Only a minority are dated, the earliest two views of the interior of St. Giles Church in 1910, the latest a picture taken in 1963 of the cottage at the end of South Bailey, a site now occupied by St. Cuthbert's Society. The negatives record many other buildings now demolished or much altered. They include a fine selection of period-piece shop fronts, views of the market-place decorated for the coronation of George V in 1911, showing the pant still in position there, and a photograph of its demolition in 1923, prior to its removal to Wharton Park. Perhaps the most striking photograph in the collection is one of the Durham headquarters of the British Union of Fascists, with four blackshirts on guard outside. The Durham negatives also include many of the Cathedral and Castle, a number of them recording paintings from the latter. Among the portraits are numerous school and university groups, and pictures of the staff of local firms and of local organisations from the Langley Park Rechabites to a Durham branch of the Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers.
Outside Durham there are negatives of Newton Hall and both the exterior and interior of Coxhoe Hall, showing some of the furnishings. Others record collieries in the Durham neighbourhood and interiors of miners' cottages, council housing, road works and bridge repairs. Engineering, industrial, and surveying pictures taken for Durham County Council and other institutions and companies in the 1920s and 1930s, and for Siemens of Hartlepool, Spennymoor and elsewhere in the 1940s and 1950s, make up significant groups.
Since the collection was originally acquired by the Library three further groups of negatives have been added to it by donation. Two of these, both given by Dr. Gibby, are entirely unconnected with the Edis firm. First is a group of about 20 stereoscopic negatives ("Stereo pairs") which seem to date from the 1860s, and which Dr. Gibby acquired through William Arthur Bramwell, the Durham City amateur photographer of the first half of the century. The second group consists of about 50 glass negatives mainly of Durham Castle and Cathedral by Reuben Green, a butler at Durham Castle in the first half of the 20th century. (These are mostly identified by a green ink numeral in the corner of the glass). The third group consists of some twenty glass negatives, mostly of Ramsden's Yorkshire pubs, found (in poor condition) in an outhouse of Miss Edis's house in Gilesgate by a later owner, Professor Frank Spooner; only the place in which they were discovered connects them with the Edis firm.

Accession details

Arrangement

The negatives are generally shelved in sequence. When, usually because of its size, a negative is shelved out of sequence, its number is given an asterisk (*) suffix. It is helpful if users of the collection can include this in their citations.
The work of identifying and arranging the negatives in the collection was begun by Dr. Gibby, and has been completed by Roger Norris of the University Library staff, who has compiled this handlist (a revision and expansion of the earlier list by Mrs. Christine Purcell). The collection's arrangement, originally devised by Dr. Gibby, is broadly alphabetical by the subject descriptor assigned to individual negatives. Material on Durham Castle is grouped in class Ca, and on Durham Cathedral at Ch; portraits and groups are at Pi. Class X contains negatives of so far unidentified subjects. Some inconsistencies in the use of descriptors and in choice of terminology mean that the resulting sequence does not itself produce a satisfactory subject guide to the collection, and a subject index is therefore provided at the end of the list. (This has been thought preferable to a rearrangement of the collection, since the location numbers assigned by Dr. Gibby had already been used for citation purposes when the University Library took over work on completing the cataloguing of the collection). The X class has been indexed under the most general headings; users of the collection may find these negatives a challenge to their local knowledge, and the Library would greatly welcome any improved identifications users can supply of these and other items in the collection. Indexing of photographs of industrial machinery of the 1930-50s has proved particularly difficult, and the Library staff hope that users of the collection who recognise the processes involved will provide corrections and amplifications of the descriptions in the list.
A complete visual index of 5" x 3" prints of the negatives, arranged in the same order as the collection, is available for users of the collection in the Palace Green Library's Special Reading Room. This is largely the work of Dr. Gibby and Mr. D.V. Kelly.

Related material (internal)

There are Edis photographs in many other photographic collections at Durham.

Related material elsewhere

Parts of the Edis firm's stock went to Durham Cathedral Library, Durham County Record Office and Beamish Museum.