THE HENRY OWEN VAUGHAN EAST HENDRED PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION

P DX2049

1930s-1940s

The photographer Henry Owen Vaughan was born in Reading on 8 December 1905. When he was 12 years old his mother bought him a treadle fretsaw made by Hobbies of Dereham. Working with plans supplied by the same company, and with help of their film, paper and developers, he was able to make his own pinhole camera. In 1921, he started work in the darkroom of a photography firm where he came to understand the chemistry of photography. Alongside an evident aptitude and flair for photography, a robust and professional training was clear in his approach to the work. He did not use ready-made developers when processing but bought the requisite powders, mixing them to the precise requirements of his own negatives. During his professional life, Vaughan undertook wedding photography but also built and repaired crystal sets and other types of radio receiver, radiograms, televisions, tape-recorders, loudspeakers, and amplifiers. This combination of radio-engineering and photographic skills became his life's endeavour, the former providing him with a living and enabling him to buy his home at 18 St Peter's Road, Reading, and the latter providing him with enjoyment. However, it seems that Vaughan did not do any public photography other than weddings and is very unlikely to have done photographic work for the local press. The majority of his photographic work was purely for his own satisfaction. From about 1922 onwards, Vaughan travelled regularly into the Vale of the White Horse and to surrounding areas to undertake photography and to indulge in his passion for the countryside. East Hendred, which now lies in Oxfordshire, later became one of Vaughan’s most frequent destinations, with a special focus on Spark’s Farm, which lay within the bounds of the village and was home to members of the Stone family. Vaughan sold his house in Reading in 1953 and moved to a thatched cottage in Childrey called The Holloway. At this point in time he appears to have disposed of the bulk of his collection of negatives but he did bring with him around 200 3-inch glass lantern slides, which he had himself made either by contact print or by projecting the negative onto a light sensitive surface. During the 1970s and at the request of East Hendred resident Baden Stone, Vaughan used his talents to make duplicates of many photographs of local subjects and individuals that Stone had collected. Vaughan made copies of these photographs, often amateur snapshots and portraits, providing Stone with copy prints, keeping copy negatives for his own purposes, and with the original prints presumably being intended for return to their owners within the wider East Hendred community. Vaughan also loaned glass plate lantern slides of his own photographs of East Hendred to Stone, whose family then loaned them on to Champs Chapel Museum of East Hendred during the early 1980s.Sometime later, members of staff at MERL obtained copy negatives and prints of the slides that showed Lavinia Smith’s home and museum at Downside, East Hendred.

65 lantern slides