As a picture library specialising in history, it's natural that a large portion of our content is made up of pictures of well-known people. But this week we're digging down a bit further to bring you a newsletter about people specifically found in the ILN archive because, quite frankly, it's just an absolutely brilliant resource for this.
To remind you, the ILN archive consists of eight different weekly illustrated publications: the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, the Sketch, the Sphere, the Tatler, the Bystander and Britannia & Eve. We house and manage the original, physical archive here at the library and have done since 2007. Before that, our Head of Sales & Research, Luci, managed it as a separate picture library, so we know it well, and, we hope, know how to get the very best out of it. In 2014, it was digitised page by page, making it much easier to search and find names in its hundreds of thousands of pages. We are very happy to search it on your behalf, but anyone with a subscription to the British Newspaper Archive can access it, and come to us if they find something they'd like to use. We retrieve the volume from the archive and provide a hi-res to your specifications, usually on the same day. Before all this digital wizardry, we relied entirely on the archive's indices and a whole lot of patience and tenacity!
The fact that Tatler launched in 1901 with a note to contributors requesting photographs, 'of notable people…or of anything of an eccentric or uncommon nature likely to arouse interest,' tells you all you need to know about a magazine that is still going strong today. But all of the so-called 'Great Eight' titles strived to cover everything about everyone. And while you can pick up any volume between 1910 and 1960 and find pictures of Winston Churchill, or see that the late Queen featured in most issues between 1930 and 1990, what we really want to highlight is the unusual or unexpected. We've got celebrities in caricature, upper crust types in colour, eccentrics and notorious ne'er do wells, plus quite a few famous figures when they were very young. If you're looking for an obscure 1920s playwright, then the ILN archive may well have it. The same applies to political pioneers, fashion designers, explorers, dancers, inventors, sporting greats or wartime heroes. Whether you want one-armed 1890s tennis champion, Hilda Hitchings or Daphne du Maurier smoking a pipe, Queen Camilla as a young bridesmaid, band leader Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson, Vita Sackville-West with her pet bear, or Mr J. R. B. Branson of Battersea , who existed on a diet of grass during the war, we've found some terrific pictures of notable names through the years.
Some of these images end up on our website because they've been requested by clients, who have found them via the aforementioned searchable archive on the BNA. But often, we find some astonishing pictures ourselves when simply leafing through a particular volume. In the last few weeks, this combination has resulted in us scanning and adding to the site: Virginia McKenna as a baby (with her very glamorous mother); wartime gardening guru and radio star, Mr. Middleton; Harold Wilson as a youthful cabinet minister, aged 31; 1930s cricketer and Brentford footballer 'Patsy' Hendren (plus Aboriginal fast bowler Eddie Gilbert); George VI's speech therapist, Lionel Logue, and Nancy Mitford with her Boston Terrier. That's the kind of intriguing and eclectic mix of humanity you can expect.
So if you're on a quest to find a certain character from history, get in touch. We hope that they'll be there, somewhere, in the depths of this unique and endlessly surprising archive. For now, we've pulled together a selection of 500 examples for you to browse. We really do recommend saying 'hello' to some of them.
We hope our newsletters give you a glimpse of how our library can help with whatever you're working on. For research requests, quotes or any other queries, you can get in touch by emailing [email protected] or calling 020 8318 0034.