My maternal grandfather, Allan Cunningham, was an enthusiastic amateur photographer, active between 1918 and 1930. His work spanned intimate family portraits – including my mother and her sister as young children – to evocative landscapes of Hampshire and Dorset. Among his most historically significant images are carefully composed studies depicting life in the Royal Navy. By sheer luck, he survived his wartime service as a submariner during the First World War, narrowly avoiding tragedy when two of the vessels he had been assigned to were lost with all hands – each time, circumstance had prevented him from sailing.
Although I held a partial album of prints from that period, I had no idea any glass negatives had survived – until February 2016. While clearing my late father’s loft, I unearthed a box hidden beneath a stack of miscellaneous papers. Inside were five original containers from the Imperial Dry Plate Co. Ltd., Cricklewood, London, each filled with half-plate glass negatives – around sixty in total.
Remarkably, despite having spent at least thirty years in the loft – enduring dramatic shifts in temperature – the emulsion on the plates appeared to be in excellent condition. I purchased a low-cost LED light box and digitised the negatives using a digital SLR, resulting in the print set displayed below.
Life's vicissitudes 