[VICTORIA: DIAMOND JUBILEE.]
Photograph album: ‘Hampton Court “Jubilee” July 1, 1897’.
Hereford, F. Preece, 1897.
Large quarto album, with nine gelatin silver prints c. 150 x 200 mm, mounted on white paper and then on pale blue-grey card with a textured border, on linen stubs; photographer’s credit and address on the mount; in a binding of maroon roan by Adams and Sons, Hereford, with their ticket, cover lettered directly in gilt, brass clasp, patterned cloth endpapers; covers rather worn and scraped, spine defective at head.
An attractive album memorialising a garden party in honour of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria held at Hampton Court Castle in Herefordshire under the sponsorship of John Hungerford Arkwright (1833–1905), later Lord Lieutenant of that county. The photographer, Francis Preece (1853–1928), was active in Hereford from the 1880s to the 1920s.
Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, the first ever for a British monarch, on 22 June 1897, with an enormous procession in London, a thanksgiving service attended by global royalty and representatives from across the Empire, and a ‘Festival of the British Empire’; the next two weeks saw street parties across Britain, memorial banquets and garden parties, and the erection of towers and memorials.
The photographs here show large crowds of locals in straw hats and boaters, many sporting jubilee medals, gathered in front of the house, on the side wall of which has been erected a large plaque reading: ‘May her long and glorious reign be continued for the benefit and happiness of her people’. Boys with sticks perform to the accompaniment of a piano, children do calisthenics with weights, and crowds gather to watch events playing out tantalisingly off camera. In one image a photographer is caught hauling his equipment past a crowd watching a Punch and Judy show – another shows the laughing faces of the audience.
The fifteenth-century manor house of Hampton Court, Herefordshire, was in the possession of the Coningsby family from 1510 until 1781, when it passed by marriage to Viscount Malden, and then in 1810 was sold to the industrialist heirs of Richard Arkwright, who had it remodelled by Sir Jeffrey Wyatville.
