Martin Ridley

Martin John Ridley was born in January 1861, in Reading, the son of William Ridley, a timber merchant from White Notley in Essex, and Mira from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. He had four brothers: Ernest, Bernard, Thomas and Edward.

The 1871 census shows the 10-year-old Martin Ridley at boarding school in Staplegrove, near Taunton in Somerset. The 1881 census records the family living in East Gate House, Sonning, near Reading. Martin, then aged 20, was a Merchant's Clerk. Evidently, the family was quite well off as they employed a governess and two domestic servants. In 1888, Martin married Alice from Wrentham, Suffolk, and by 1891, they were living at 3 Victoria Buildings, Old Christchurch Road, Holdenhurst, Bournemouth with their children Walford and Winifred (born 1890 in Margate, Kent) and their housemaid. By this stage, Ridley's occupation is listed as Photographer.

By 1903, the Ridleys were living at 37 Haviland Road, Boscombe, Bournemouth and had a new son, Cecil Leighton, who was born in Boscombe in 1897, Walford having died in 1894, aged just five years.

At some point between 1891 and 1894 Ridley teamed up with Harry Alfred Miell from 45 Catherine Street, Salisbury. It may well have been Miell's influence that started the whole photographic partnership as Harry Miell's father, James, was a photographic dealer when Harry was still a young boy, and by the time of the 1881 census, Harry too is registered as a photographer. By 1901 Miell had moved to Bournemouth with his wife, two children and brother-in-law, and was listed as an employer in a photographic business. The 1911 census lists him as a photographic publisher. Winifred, Ridley's daughter, then 21, is also mentioned and has "Photo Printing & Colorist" as her occupation.

Harry Miell and Martin Ridley formed Miell & Ridley, Bournemouth & Bristol with premises firstly at the Ridley home and then at 90 Old Christchurch Road, Bournemouth. It seems that Miell did mostly portraiture in the studio while Ridley concentrated on landscapes, townscapes and seaside shots – often for the purpose of producing Cartes de Visite.

Picture postcards made from Ridley's photographs are still highly collectible items and are frequently found on eBay and at postcard fairs. The cards are mostly coloured and would have been hand-tinted as part of the production process, which mostly happened in Germany, presumably ending with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Not much is known of Ridley after this period except that his health was failing and much of the work of the photographic business fell to his daughter Winifred who also struggled to keep it going, having to cope with nursing sick relatives as well as homing wartime refugees. It appears that the Ridley & Miell partnership may also not have survived past the First World War. Portrait photographs from 1928 exist and bear the name “Miell & Miell”, so it may be that Harry Miell set up in business with his son. Ridley himself died in Bournemouth in June 1936, aged 75. Son Cecil married in 1921 and lived to the age of 89, dying in Manchester in 1985 without children.

After 70 years of being the Ridley family home, 37 Haviland Road, Bournemouth, was to be redeveloped. So in May 1964, Martin Ridley's daughter, Miss Winifred Ridley, began the enormous task of disposing of her Father's photographic materials. The Bournemouth Library took many of the printed cards and some of the local glass-plate negatives. The remainder of the glass plates – probably more than 6000 – were to be destroyed by burial in a hole in the garden. Hearing of the impending destruction of these plates, Mrs Pamela Mole, a Bournemouth businesswoman, bought the collection from Miss Winifred and rescued the condemned glass plates from the tarpaulin where they were about to be tipped into the hole. She put them into storage until such times as she could consider what to do with them. Retirement in 2007 finally gave her the chance to claim the plates back from storage and decide what to do with them. Over the years, some of the plates had gone missing and some decayed, but the current collection of about 5000–6000 is safe and the vast majority render superb images.

Now living in Cambridge, Mrs Mole teamed up with local architect and photographer Bruce Stuart, and university lecturer John Martin to begin the task of capturing the glass images onto modern digital storage media, while also attempting to identify and catalogue the images.

As of 2015 a significant number of the glass negatives are owned by the NetXPosure Image Library[1] and many can be viewed online. The glass negatives have been scanned at a very high resolution and are going through the digital restoration process.

Photography was born some 35 years before Martin Ridley, so he cannot be described as a pioneer of the artform. However, Ridley was active as a photographer when the medium was still very much in its Golden Age. His photographs are a fine record of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, showing the dress, transport, industry, architecture, social life and obsessions of the time. Those interested in trams, early motorcars, Welsh collieries, steamships and bridges will not be disappointed. A few photographs clearly show post-Great War developments and it can be assumed that Ridley continued to photograph into the 1920s or maybe even slightly later. The collection is smaller than the better-known Frith Collection, but Frith covered much of England whereas Ridley never seemed to go further north than Oxford.

A few true gems of history are also to be found in the collection. For example, a photograph of Stonehenge taken in c1901 shows that the world-famous stone circle was very different 100 years ago. Many of the buildings that Ridley photographed were subsequently destroyed in World War II. The small sub-section of Bristol scenes demonstrates this nicely. The Roman Baths in Bath were being renovated in Ridley's time, and he has captured images during that period that will not be seen again.

Very curiously, there are a few photographs taken in Australia. It is not known if Ridley visited Australia himself or if these few photographs are copies he made from the work of others.

Over 800 of the photographs are of locations in Wales. They range from landscapes and townscapes to castles, docks and collieries. The Welsh section of the collection is the first to be catalogued and stored on digital media. The vast majority of the Welsh photographs are annotated. Ridley meticulously recorded the subject and location in ink on the glass plates themselves – something which, unfortunately, he did not do with many of the English photographs, presumably through familiarity.

In circa 1905, Ridley was responsible for the publication of a booklet entitled 'Sixty-One Views of The Rhondda Valley'[2] It is not yet clear if these photographs are part of, or in addition to, the collection currently discussed here. Cardiff, Abertillery, Penarth, Newport and Cowbridge also feature heavily in the Welsh section.

In February 2009, the Welsh section of plates was sold to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.[3]