The photographic studio of J. Palmer Clarke, situated in Post Office Terrace, Cambridge, was in business from the 1890s to the 1930s. The studio had been home to a number of photographers from the 1860s before J. Palmer Clarke took over the premises, and would continue to be used by his successors until the 1980s. During this time tens of thousands of people visited the studio to have their photographs taken. These negatives have, for the most part, survived and are held in the Cambridgeshire Collection, the Local Studies Department of Cambridge Central Library.
The Studio
The first photographer arrived in Cambridge in 1844, and some twenty years after that the photographer Arthur Nicholls moved his business from All Saints Passage to Post Office Terrace. Nicholls took a remarkable series of photographs of Cambridge in the 1860s and 1870s and these can be viewed on a website created by Peter Lofts, the last photographer to operate from the studio, called Cambridge Revisited www.loftyimages.co.uk Nicholls was followed in turn by the photographers J.E. Bliss, Valentine Blanchard, and Colin Lunn, until John Palmer Clarke arrived c1894.
Each time the business changed hands the negative archive was passed on.
As well as studio portrait photography J. Palmer Clarke also undertook outdoor commercial work, and the detailed photographic survey of the First Eastern General Hospital, set up in Cambridge during the First World War, is an excellent example of this.
The business was run for many years by C.E. Goodrich and F. Sanderson and in the 1930s the studio was taken over by perhaps its most famous occupants, Lettice Ramsey and Helen Muspratt. Ramsey and Muspratt continued in business in Post Office Terrace until the 1970s during which they built up a national and international reputation for being the Cambridge photographers. Examples of their work can be seen at www.loftyimages.co.uk and at the America in Cambridge 1941 -1946 website.
Lettice Ramsey donated some negatives to the Cambridgeshire Collection, and it was from Nicholas Lee, who carried on the business after she retired, that Cambridgeshire Libraries purchased the glass plate negative archive of J. Palmer Clarke and his predecessors. Eventually, through the generosity of Peter Lofts, the final photographer to work in the Post Office Terrace studio, the more than quarter of a million portrait and commercial negatives taken by Ramsey and Muspratt were passed to the Cambridgeshire Collection, creating a unique archive of images taken by the Post Office Terrace studio from the 1860s to the 1980s.
The Cambridgeshire Collection
The first Public Library opened in Cambridge in 1855, and from the beginning collected and made available to the public a wide range of material relating to the history of the City, University and County of Cambridge. This became the Cambridgeshire Collection, a unique local studies collection of printed material dating from the sixteenth century to the present day, which includes books, journals, newspapers, maps, ephemera of all sorts, and not least some 400,000 illustrations, photographs and negatives.
The J. Palmer Clarke Negative Archive
The Archive consists of more than 50,000 glass plate negatives of studio portraits dating from the 1880s to the 1930s, housed in their original wooden boxes or loose. They represent a cross-section of Cambridge society over this period; family groups, children, businessmen, civic dignitaries, undergraduates and the university dons who taught them. Family pets also make an appearance along with some commercial work and the recopying of older photos. The name of the subject or the person who commissioned the photograph is written on each negative, often with an address, but rarely with a date. The Cambridgeshire Collection holds an index to the Archive based on this information.
This website forms the basis of a project that will eventually see all these negative images copied and made available to researchers and family historians worldwide. If you wish to contribute to this project and help to add more images to the website donations of any size will be gratefully received and acknowledged.
The FenPast Scanning Bureau
All of the images on this website were scanned by Cambridgeshire Archives Service's FenPast Scanning Bureau. FenPast specialises in the digitisation and electronic preservation of historical documents and artefacts.
Fenpast have proven experience in creating digital images, to preservation standards, of a wide range of archival and heritage assets, including archaeological finds, parchment maps, bound historical volumes, archival documents of all sorts, photographs of all ages and sizes, glass plate negatives, and museum objects. Our highly qualified team is trained in the handling and conservation of fragile items, and accredited archive storage facilities are available for overnight storage of work in progress.
For more details about FenPast's services and prices please visit http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/fenpast.
Christopher Jakes
County Local Studies Librarian
October 2005