By 1897, James Edward Ellam (1857-1920) had established a working relationship with the stereoscopic photography company Underwood & Underwood (U&U) and had relocated from Yorkshire to Essex.

From his new base, he was well placed to pursue his career as a photographer servicing newspapers in London’s Fleet Street with images.

Identifying the work of early press photographers such as James is difficult.

They were rarely credited individually by name and their work, in James’s case for 3D companies like U&U, was covered by a catch-all credit such as “taken from a stereograph by Underwood & Underwood.”

So I was delighted to come across these two stereos among the cache of 30 about which I have written this month.

There is no “J.E. Ellam” credit present or a title sticker featuring his distinctive handwriting, so there is only circumstantial evidence of their presence in this cache to point to James as their author. 

Both stereos show signs of ageing, but their 3D qualities are largely intact.

They are presented on different coloured cards of light grey and black, both of which we have seen during this blogpost-a-day series.

The 3D images relate to what was billed by The Scotsman newspaper as “The Great Gale” which swept across Scotland in mid-October 1898.

I’ve captioned them below with the text typed onto their versos.

This style of caption will be familiar to anyone who has encountered press photographs, particularly in the pre-digital era.

They provided a sub-editor with information to enable an image to be correctly captioned.

In this case though, the different spellings used for the Norwegian schooner would have triggered a double-check to verify it was, in fact, Alfen.

Whether James supplied these stereos to Underwood & Underwood, or he was working in a freelance capacity, is not known.

However, their existence provides an insight into the cross-pollination between 3D photography and the illustrated press either side of 1900.

“The Great Gale” was certainly a newsworthy story as is evidenced by The Sketch which published a photo of the wreck of the Alfen (2nd November, 1898), which was published without credit.

So far, the locations visited by James and featured in this series of blogposts have been confined to England, Scotland and Wales 

But as we will see in tomorrow’s post, stereoscopic photography  companies like Underwood & Underwood were interested in helping their customers travel the world in 3D.

Tomorrow: “St. Anton.”

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