THE PHOTOGRAPH

THE PHOTOGRAPH ON THE MANTELPIECE       

by Richard Banks

It belonged to Granny Walker, my maternal grandmother, who claimed that it was a hand-me-down from a long-forgotten ancestor, in other words, a family heirloom. Ever since I can remember it had hung from a nail firmly embedded in the chimney breast of Granny’s parlour, a framed photograph of an unknown road empty of both traffic and people.

         Now she is no more.  Her downstairs maisonette had to be cleared of her possessions and those not considered to be of any use or value were unceremoniously consigned to a skip. Had the photograph been allowed to stay there until the following day it would have been collected by the skip man and never seen again.

         According to my father, that would have been no bad thing. What, he said, was the point of an old black and white photo when you can have something modern and in colour.

         My mother disagreed. It was a valuable antique, she insisted, a link with the past, part of our family history. Father, who was not in the best of moods, snorted his disapproval but reluctantly consented to its removal from the skip on the condition that it did not sully the walls of their 1960s semi. This did not, of course, exclude other walls including those of my new flat which is why a week later my mother arrived at my door with a home warming present that comprised a cheque for £50 and the photograph.

         “It would look so nice over there,” she said, pointing at an oblong of unfaded wallpaper previously shielded from the light of day by a picture or photograph hopefully better liked than the one being foisted on me. “Oh look!” mother continued with the enthusiasm of someone gripped by divine revelation, “there’s even a hook in the wall.”

         Although nothing was said that implied that the £50 was conditional on me accepting and displaying the photograph it seemed ungrateful to take one and not the other. Having inserted the cheque into my wallet I put the picture on the mantelpiece and departed to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. I returned to find mother attempting to hang the picture on the hook only to discover what I had already discovered, that the metal chain at its back had come adrift from one of its fastenings. I returned it to the mantelpiece promising to make the necessary repair but a month later it was still there, unfixed and unappreciated.

         I mean, I did try to like the photograph, after all, it was a family heirloom but what this view of an unfamiliar road had to do with my family was far from obvious. It was a grand sort of street, the kind you would expect to find at the centre of a large city but what it was called and where it was to be found were questions to which I had no answer. Another unanswered question was why the street was devoid of traffic and pedestrians; on what was obviously a warm, sunny day surely someone would have been about. Was this, I conjectured the view of an event rather than a street? But what could cause a city centre road to be so empty? As my curiosity grew my need for answers finally stirred me into action.

         On a wet Sunday afternoon, I completed my ironing and with nothing else to distract me examined the photograph in the light of my dining room window. If there were secrets to be found the photograph was keeping them well hidden, but then this was not entirely the fault of the photograph. After many years of coal fires in my grandmother’s parlour, the glass cover of the frame had acquired a grimy film that in time might have completely obscured the image behind it.

         Armed with a bottle of Windowlene and a jiffy cloth I set to with a vigour that in addition to removing some of the grime also parted one side of the wooden frame from the rest. My initial horror that I had irretrievably damaged my mother’s gift was soon replaced by the realisation that the damage could be made good by a single application of glue. All that was needed was the separation of frame from glass cover and backing, the insertion of said glue and the reassembling of the several parts. It was a blessing in disguise I told myself. Once the glass was free of the frame it would be so much easier to clean. And so it proved, but another blessing was soon to follow. Having removed the wooden backing, for the first time I saw the reverse side of the photograph and two of my questions were instantly answered. In dark blue ink was neatly written, ‘Me on the Boulevard Du Temple, Paris 15th of June 1838, the first man to be photographed’ There followed an exclamation mark and below this the writer’s name, ‘Frederick Hunter Ayling’.

         My heart skipped a beat. Ayling was granny’s maiden name. So this really was a family heirloom. But where was he? This was the picture of an empty street. With trembling fingers, I teased the photograph away from the glass and carefully turned it face up. If I expected to see the photograph transformed into one of my ancestor I was at once disappointed. Although now much clearer it was still that of a deserted street. For the best part of a minute, I stared at it taking in only what I already knew to be there, and then I saw it, a matchstick silhouette in the left foreground that had been rendered invisible by the smoke and dust of many years. A tall, slimly built man was standing at the pitch of a shoeshine boy, one foot on the platform provided the other firmly anchored to the pavement, an unremarkable scene made remarkable by the claim of my ancestor and the eerie solitude of the two persons there present.

         In the space of a few minutes my indifference, bordering on dislike for the photograph had been replaced by an eager determination to find out everything I could about my ancestor and the photograph that had captured his image.

         The research I undertook before the days of internet search engines was initially conducted at my local library which had a microfiche copy of the International Genealogy Index compiled by the Church of Latter Day Saints. While the index was by no means comprehensive it contained the event I most wanted to see - the baptism of Frederick Hunter Ayling at Holy Trinity Church, Clapham on the first of July 1816. In what seemed like a windfall of good fortune the same microfiche also recorded his marriage to an Elizabeth Badham in 1840 and the birth of a son, George Frederick, in 1842. After this, the Aylings featured only infrequently in the index with no obvious link to the persons already mentioned.

         My research shifted to the Family Record Centre then located in Finsbury near Sadlers Wells. Here were located the Victorian Census returns and the register of births, marriages and deaths began in 1837. Within a year I had discovered other landmark events in Frederick’s life, the births of three more children – two girls and a boy - the death of the second son, the addresses of their houses in Kennington and Camberwell and Frederick’s profession which in 1841 was described as a civil servant and in later censuses as a diplomat. The personnel records of the Foreign Office in the Public Record office yielded the additional information that in 1838 Frederick was working at the British Embassy in Paris. Between 1855 and 1857 and again in 1866 he was in Prague. Otherwise, he worked in Whitehall, no doubt commuting to his work across the Thames in a horse-drawn omnibus. Back at the Family Record Centre, I traced Frederick’s descendants through the male line until I came to the birth of Caroline Annie Ayling, my maternal grandmother - Granny Walker.

         So, Frederick was my great, great, great grandfather. That much was proven but what of his claim to be the first man to be photographed. Nothing at the Family Record Centre was going to tell me that but a friendly member of staff suggested that the Victoria and Albert Museum might be able to help.

         I arrived there with the photograph back in its frame intending to say nothing about Frederick’s claim which I reasoned would label me a crank. Instead, I asked what, if anything, they knew about the photograph - a photograph, I added, that had been in my family for many years. The young lady at reception knew nothing but on phoning their photography section a Mr Northcote consented to see me. He was, he later told me, only intending to give me ten minutes of his time. When I left at half-past four I had been in his company for over two hours.

         It is, he said, one of the earliest known photographs and in its way the most remarkable. Taken in 1838 by Louis Daguerre, it was reputedly the first photograph of a human being. The following year Daguerre demonstrated his photographic method to the French Academy of Science at which time he issued a limited number of prints. If this was one of them it would be a significant artefact of interest to collectors in this country and abroad. He asked if he could detach it from the frame and, on my consenting, immediately came across the notation made by my ancestor.

         “Is this true?” he asked, his voice rising several octaves.

         I told him what I knew, that my ancestor was a middle ranking civil servant who in 1838 was working at the British Embassy in Paris. What he looked like I had no idea. Even if I knew, the man in the photograph was too small and indistinct to be identified.

         “Would it be possible,” I asked, “to enlarge the photograph so as to produce a larger, clearer image of the man?”

         Mr Northcote smiled. “Yes, it’s been tried many times but the clarity, or rather the lack of it, remains the same. We will, I’m afraid, never know for certain the identity of the man but in the absence of any other contenders, your ancestor’s claim can never be disproved. Tell me, how old was he in 1838?”

         “Twenty-two,” I answered.

         “About the same age as yourself,” he said, “and every bit as tall and lean. What a pity we don’t know more.” For a few moments, he seemed lost in thought. “He must have enjoyed his time in Paris. Then, as now, it was one of the ‘go to’ places to visit. So much to see and do. In 1838 the Boulevard du Temple was at the centre of Parisian theatreland. Possibly your ancestor was on his way to a show when he stopped to have his shoes polished. Perhaps he had a young lady he was wanting to impress.”

         Mr Northcote seemed flustered by his flight of fancy. “I’m assuming, of course, that he wasn’t married.”

         I smiled and assured him that in 1838 my ancestor was a bachelor and would remain so for another two years. “Does the Boulevard du Temple still exist?” I asked.

         “Indeed it does, much changed of course but still, the busy, vibrant place that it was then.”

         “Busy?” I said. “But the photograph shows it to be almost deserted. It’s a bright, summer’s day but apart from the two persons in view there’s not a soul to be seen; the road should be full of horses and carriages, but it’s not.”

         “Oh, but I assure you they were there. You see the taking of a photograph then was not the work of a split second as it is today. Daguerre’s method required an exposure time of seven minutes.  Seven minutes for the light of day to register an image on the silver-surfaced plate that he used. Anyone or anything in motion would not have been in the same place long enough for an image to form. But the man having his shoes polished and the boy doing it were sufficiently still for them to appear. One wonders if the shoeshine boy knew anything about his moment in history; he, of course, was the first boy to be photographed. As for your ancestor, he was an employee of the Foreign Office and better informed than most about what was happening in Paris at that time. Perhaps he was at the Academy of Science when Daguerre announced his invention to the world, or maybe he just read about it in a newspaper. Either way, it was probably then that he put two and two together and identified himself as the man in the photograph. Let’s hope he made four. It’s a fascinating tale. Keep digging, sir, who knows what else you may discover.”

         I took his advice but, after my early success, new information proved difficult to find. Twenty-two years after my meeting with Mr Northcote there is no further evidence linking Frederick with the photograph.

         In 1879 after a long and successful career he retired from the Foreign Office having achieved the rank of Senior Principal. Frederick lived on for twelve more years. His grave can be found in Camberwell Cemetery at the foot of an imposing monument featuring an angel with outstretched wings and an inscription which, while listing his many virtues including truth and honesty, has nothing to say about photography.

         As for Daguerre’s photograph, it now hangs on my dining room wall beside one of my own showing Frederick’s inscription. They are my most treasured possessions. 

Copyright Richard Banks