Bedford Lemere’s archive photographs in An Age of Confidence at the Lady Lever Gallery in Wirral

Feb 2 2012 Flintshire Chronicle

Brick by brick the stately home was moved – each piece carefully numbered and transported on the whim of a homesick shipping tycoon to a location on the other side of Wirral.

Some 25 years earlier, when a different industrialist was in charge of its fate, Bidston Court was pictured in its original spot by the nation’s foremost architectural photographers.

In those days the process was still in its infancy and the photographer would have had a long wait on his hands while the glass plate captured the intended image.

Slowly, the black-and-white half-timbered house, built in Tudor style by the soap manufacturer Robert Hudson, would form on the thin piece of glass ready for development.

The resulting photograph is fascinating now, not just because of its crisp quality, but also because it shows the building in its original location, before it moved to Royston Park and became Hillbark.

Bedford Lemere & Co, the company which took the picture, was based in London yet Merseyside was its second most photographed location.

In the 19th century, when Liverpool’s port was booming, merchants’ bank accounts were bulging and there seemed to be a new building springing up every few months, there was plenty to record.

Ocean liners, factory assembly lines and fine architecture were all seen as fitting subjects for the most highly regarded architectural photographers in the country.

Forty-three of these will form the exhibition An Age of Confidence, which can be seen at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight until June.

“At the time the company was working, Liverpool was such a rich and vibrant city and the amount of work they did here reflects that,” said Sandra Penketh, head of the Lady Lever, who worked with English Heritage to select the images on display.

The charity took property of Bedford Lemere & Co’s archive, including 21,800 large-format glass negatives, through a merger in 1999 and is working its way through conserving, cataloguing and scanning them.

“We look at these pictures and think of them in historical terms but a lot of the buildings being photographed were new,” said Penketh. “There’s a nice synergy between the sense of pride we feel about some of the new developments in Liverpool today and how people felt in the past.”

The company was also employed by another Merseyside soap manufacturer – the Lady Lever Gallery’s founder William Hesketh Lever. Pictures of a soap packing room in 1897 show female workers in typical Victorian dress boxing up packets of Sunlight Soap while watched by a foreman.

The trading hall of Liverpool Cotton Exchange was also given the Bedford Lemere treatment. It was pictured in 1907, a year after it was built to the designs of architects Matear and Simon who commissioned the picture. A glass roof tops the now demolished grand hall, which is flanked with pillars and has fireplaces at each corner.

“It was purpose built and the north side of the building was constructed with cast iron so that it could have very big windows,” said Penketh.

“Those working there needed to inspect the cotton samples in the best light possible. Most cotton used in the Lancashire cotton industry was brought in through Liverpool so this was a very important building.”

More lively is a photograph of the High Explosives theatre troop, taken at Cunard’s Shellworks in Bootle in 1917, where three quarters of the wartime workforce were women.

“Despite quite a bit of research we’ve not been able to identify exactly who the group might be,” said Penketh.

“The facilities at the Shellworks included a purpose-built theatre so we can only assume there was a performance going on. There’s such a contrast within the picture because it shows an exciting and fun event taking place in the midst of the First World War.”

Bedford Lemere’s work was not restricted to dry land. The company received many commissions from shipping companies including Cunard and the White Star Line, both of which were based in Liverpool.

One of the photographs on display shows Titanic’s sister ship, Olympic, moored in Liverpool’s docks in 1920. Another, taken four years later, shows a child’s nursery on board SS Mont Laurier, a German warship that had been allocated to Britain in war reparations and converted into a liner by a Canadian company.