Christina Broom Sold at Auction Prices

BROOM, CHRISTINA.

EXTENSIVE ARCHIVE OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND RELATED PAPERS An important collection providing a unique record of the Household Division during World War I and documenting the military, ceremonial, and public life of London in the early decades of the twentieth century, incorporating the photographer's own archive, and including in excess of 2000 vintage photographic prints, mostly in postcard form, over half of which are images of troops, chiefly from the Household Division, as well as glass-plate negatives, correspondence and other papers, and modern reproduction prints, housed in 8 albums, 4 small cases, 44 folders, 2 boxes, and with additional loose material Christina Broom (known professionally as Mrs Albert Broom) is thought to have been the first woman press photographer. Entirely self-taught, she capitalised on the postcard craze of the early twentieth century. She developed a particularly close relationship with the military, and her many photographs of troops during World War I is the particular focus of the current collection. She was appointed official photographer to the Household Division and ran a stall in the Royal Mews, in particular having a successful business taking photographs and selling the prints to the posing soldiers complete with an envelope to send them back to their families. The heart of this collection is therefore the remarkable and poignant record it provides, through hundreds of photographs, of men in the Household Cavalry and the regiments of Foot Guards posing for a photograph before heading off to the front. There are shots of individual soldiers and of men with their families, lines of troops in the parade ground and informally posed groups, men in dress uniform, crowds in khaki at Waterloo about to leave for France, and an extensive series of photographs taken at a Buckingham Palace tea party for the wounded held in March 1916. Among the thousands of faces recorded here are "My son Jack" Kipling (pictured opposite), whose death a few months after this photograph was taken so devastated his father, and Stewart Menzies, who went on to head SIS and was a possible inspiration for Ian Fleming's "M". Mrs Broom's access to the ceremonial heart of Britain meant that she captured such events as the lying in state of Edward VII and the unveiling of the Guards Memorial on Horse Guards, as well as generals and royalty - the best of which are her photographs of the twenty year-old Edward, Prince of Wales (later Duke of Windsor) in his Grenadier Guard uniform. Other subjects covered in depth by Broom's camera include the royal stables, including state carriages and servants in their formal uniforms, the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race (among her photos of 1922 Oxford Blues is one of A.C. Irvine, who was lost with Mallory on Everest in 1924), Lord Mayors' Shows, and Suffragette marches. This is not only the largest extant collection of Mrs Broom's photographs, but the residual archive of the photographer's daughter and assistant Winifred Broom. It includes ancillary documentary material that gives the collection unique historical significance. Many of the prints are the photographer's own copies, annotated on the reverse by Winifred Broom with unique information about sitters and dates. The collection also includes correspondence received by Mrs Broom and her daughter, press passes, biographical notes, numbered inventories and lists of negatives, and Mrs Broom's own album of cuttings of newspaper articles that used her photographs. For a full description of the collection please see the online catalogue or contact the department.