Holy Week leading to Easter is marked by congregations of believers around the world as the climax of the Christian calendar.
With this in mind, a number of 3D views of English cathedrals offered for sale on eBay recently caught my attention.
They were branded The “B-P” Series and three examples have now joined the Pressphotoman collection.
The first card featured a scene with which I was already familiar.
York Minster dates back more than thousand years and has long been a popular subject for photographers.
In this case, the stereoscopic effect is heightened by the line of railings running from the immediate foreground.
The photograph below was taken from a similar vantage point during the 1850s when building works in the vicinity were underway.
© Private collection, Zurich.
The second stereo shows Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford along with a number of figures recorded by the camera operator.
A smartly-dressed man is striding confidently across the road without fear of being run over.
To the extreme right, a male cyclist is in conversation with a man on the pavement whilst further down the road, a horse-drawn carriage can be glimpsed.
Closer inspection reveals a horse is enjoying a nosebag though its contents remain unknown.
The third “B-P” Series stereocard reveals the west front of the cathedral at Salisbury.
Taken on a summer’s day complete with trees in full leaf and shadows in the immediate foreground, a figure in the doorway provides a sense of scale.
Thanks to a thoughtful eBay seller, these cards arrived complete with the blue-coloured cardboard envelopes in which they had originally been sold (and presumably stored) in the decades since.
The verso of the box offering ‘No. 21 Salisbury’ revealed that views had been sold in sets of 12 offering a variety of English locations as well as four featuring the Isle of Man.
The presence of three sets of ‘South African Views’ (numbers 13, 15 and 16), including two that were advertised as “all appertaining to the Seat of War,” related to the conflict between the British and the Boers between 1899 and 1902.
This evidence helps pinpoint the dating of all three of the cathedral cards in this post to the turn of the 20th century.
As regular readers will already know, this was a moment when stereoscopic photography was undergoing one of its periodic revivals thanks to American companies like Underwood & Underwood and Keystone View.
To be fully enjoyed, these cards needed a 3D viewer.
To complete their range of products, “B-P” offered a portable pocket stereoscope that, its manufacturers claimed, offered “adjustable focus for all sights.”
As to who was behind this entrepreneurial enterprise, all will be revealed in the next Pressphotoman blogpost.
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