Librarians Bring Back To Life A Fascinating Victorian Photo Album

Published on: 14 Dec, 2018
Updated on: 15 Dec, 2018

Librarians at the Guildford Institute in Ward Street have brought back to life a large Victorian photograph album after years on a dusty shelf in its basement. Here, volunteer librarian Jo Patrick tells the story of the album and the research into the people associated with it.

Victorian photographer Samuel Bourne.

A library volunteer recognised the photographs in the rather heavy and dull looking album to have been taken by Samuel Bourne (1834-1912). He was a well-known Victorian photographer travelling through India with his camera and regaling English audiences with his tales of derring-do. 

Another volunteer then recognised the tiny signature in the front of the album as being that of Lieutenant Macclesfield Forbes Colonel Coussmaker (1843-1941), whose family had lived on the Westwood Estate in Normandy since the 18th century. 

The signature on the album’s frontispiece: Presented by Colonel M F Coussmaker, July 1927.

A volunteer undertook to find out more about Coussmaker and in the course of her research in the British Library came across a reference to him in a copy of the early to mid 20th century periodical The Guildford City Outlook.  

In it Coussmaker vividly recalls his childhood on the Westwood Estate and life in Guildford before the First World War. 

Westwood Place, Normandy. Picture courtesy of Normandy Historians.

He remembers how his admission into a military college came about: “…at the age of 16, I passed into the East India Military College at Addiscombe. My nomination was given by Mr Ross Mangles, an old East Indian civil servant and a friend of my father. Mr Mangles wanted to be elected to the Board of East India Trading Company, so my father arranged to purchase sufficient shares to give him considerable voting power at the election, and give them in Mr Mangles’ behalf. This was done. When they had served their purpose, my father sold the shares again. They managed things conveniently in those days!”

Once commissioned, Coussmaker served in India with the 23rd Native Light Infantry. However, his interests in engineering led him to work on the mapping of India, known as The Revenue Survey and he spent months travelling all over the country. 

Lt. Col. M. F. Coussmaker. Picture from the Guildford City Outlook, 1937.

He returned to England in 1889 due to ill-health and retired to Guildford, moving to Fircroft in Lower Edgeborough Road where he lived until his death. 

His knowledge of India and its regions would certainly have been a good reason for him to own this collection of photographs taken by Samuel Bourne. 

Having a camera was prohibitively expensive and it was common practice to bring home an album of photographs taken by professionals to grace and impress the drawing rooms of retired colonial civil servants and military personnel. 

Manirung Pass in Himachal Pradesh on the Tibetan Plateau is India’s highest mountain standing at 21,000 feet. This photograph was taken by Samual Bourne in 1868. He climbed to the head of the pass at 18,600 feet, the highest altitude a camera had ever been used.

Along Coussmaker’s album is a photograph of the ‘Manirung Pas’ (sic), something he may have been inspired to bring home to Guildford as a contemporary of geologist and mountaineer Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen (1834-1923).

Godwin Austen, whose family lived in Shalford Park and were well acquainted with the Coussmaker family, crossed paths with Coussmaker during their time in India.

Austen was also working on the Revenue Survey in India, a project begun in 1812 in Madras by the British East India Company. In his interview with The Guildford City Outlook, Coussmaker refers to their meeting in his regiment’s mess for dinner when Austen was surveying the region where India borders Tibet.

This area is well known to mountaineers as K2 and Mount Everest towers in icy splendour over the Himalayas. K2 is of special interest here as it is also known by another name, although not much used these days. That being Mount Godwin-Austen. The Royal Geographical Society disapproved of the name and it was never officially adopted.

Bourne’s India is a place of harsh and soaring landscapes, Victorian heritage and the juxtaposition of ancient and imperial cultures. He wasn’t the first photographer in India, nor the collectors’ favourite – but his dedication to the medium and the breadth of his oeuvre set him apart. 

Cashmere (Kashmir) View on the canal, 1865.

Bourne journeyed from Varanasi and Delhi to Agra and Bombay (Mumbai), among many other places, all the while making a photographic record of the country. As recently recounted by Trevor Fishlock in the Daily Telegraph: “He endured terrible cold in the mountains, his hands aching from pain caused by frost and chemicals. He travelled heavy: 42 coolies carried his cameras, darkroom tent and chests of chemicals and glass plates. He worked with wet plates, mixing chemicals and applying them to glass, ensuring that the emulsion stayed damp throughout long exposures and development. In the Himalayas he once worked for days in sub-zero temperatures to get just four negatives.”  

The building that was the Bourne and Shepherd studio, Kolkata.

Bourne captured public imagination as the archetypal Victorian traveller, willing to endure danger and hardship to get the perfect shot. The quality of his photographic skills are as evident today as they were then and it is thrilling to have unearthed this collection at The Guildford Institute. 

The original studio of Bourne and his partner, Shepherd, only closed in June 2016 after 176 years of successful commercial trading.

For more details of the wonderful and unique collection of historical documents, photographs, and much more, held at the Guildford Institute, click here for details.

The library is open from Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 3pm, and on Saturdays from 10am to 2pm.

Tel: 01483 562142.

Email: library@guildford-institute.org.uk

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