In September 2023, a blog-a-day series of Pressphotoman posts featuring stereographs mostly attributable to the early press photographer James Edward Ellam (1857-1920) concluded with a question.
Was Ellam the man portrayed in one of the newly-discovered cache of stereos?
Though faded with age, a figure in full Highland dress pictured with a garden backdrop was captioned ‘His Majesty.’
The handwriting was immediately recognisable from the multiple copyright forms that Ellam completed during his career, whilst the title ‘His Majesty’ appeared to be a humorous reference to one of his best-known images.
Taken for Underwood & Underwood, it featured Edward VII and his grandchildren (including the future Edward VIII and George VI) at Balmoral following the King’s Coronation in August 1902.
These pieces of evidence seemed to point strongly, but not conclusively, in one direction.
For the past couple of years, Pressphotoman has been on the look out for photographic evidence that might corroborate this theory.
Thanks to Dr. Michael Pritchard, editor of the British Photographic History blog and The PhotoHistorian, journal of the Royal Photographic Society Historical Group, another photograph featuring Ellam has emerged.
It was taken in July 1908 when around 300 photographers, both professional and amateurs, gathered in Brussels for the 23rd Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom.
The choice of location was informed by the Convention president Sir Cecil Hertslet FRPS (1850-1934) who was His Majesty’s Consul-General to Belgium from 1903 to 1919.
In Brussels, the traditional Convention group photograph was taken outside the Palais de Justice.
There, much to my delight, between ‘Miss. C. Comley’ and ‘W.H. Harrison’ was ‘J.E. Ellam’ wearing a floppy sun hat.
When compared with the man pictured in the aforementioned ‘His Majesty’ stereo taken a few years earlier, the similarity is striking.
At this point in his career as a professional photographer, Ellam was nearing the end of a decade-long working relationship with 3D giants Underwood & Underwood based in London’s West End.
He had become a member of the Royal Photographic Society in 1907 and was also an active member of the West London Photographic Society, lecturing on stereoscopic photography at one of its meetings.
In 1909, as part of a display by the United Stereoscopic Society, he created a stereoscopic transparency displayed by lantern at the annual RPS exhibition.
By the following year, he was working for London News Agency Photos at 46 Fleet Street covering events like the Army Pageant of 1910 held in Fulham Palace Gardens.
The discovery of another photograph of Ellam helps bring a further dimension to several blogposts on this site that can be found by putting his surname into the search engine via the link below.
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