Review

ROGER FENTON 1819-1869. Lancashire’s Pioneer Photographer

On Monday 5 February, Judge Sir Peter Openshaw treated Clitheroe Civic Society to a very
interesting presentation of the photographs of Roger Fenton together with many interesting facets of
his life.
Roger Fenton’s grandfather, Joseph Fenton, was a Victorian industrialist who owned and operated
many cotton mills in and around Rochdale. He was a very enlightened employer providing a model
village for his workers who were known as the best fed, best housed, best clothed and best educated
in the area. However, Joseph had notions of being a country landowner and bought land in the
Chaigley/Hurst Green area in 1828 for £36,000 - a great deal of money in those days. He also bought
the rights to the Townley and Houghton Chapels and modelled himself as ‘Lord of the Manor’.
Joseph died in 1840 leaving an estate worth eight million pounds.
After his death, the estate was passed through the family line with Roger’s father becoming the MP
for Rochdale and Roger’s brother, William, building Dutton Manor in 1872. Eventually, the estate
floundered during the ‘Cotton Famine’ and after the Great War the entire estate, including 50 farms
and the mansion, was sold off. The Fenton family lived in the area for around 100 years from 1829 to
1919. Indeed, the Punch Bowl Inn, now sadly demolished, was called The Fenton Arms Inn. There
are two stained glass windows in Hurst Green church - one for Joseph Fenton and one for William.
Roger Fenton was born in Bamford, outside Rochdale and several photographs, sometimes self-
portraits, hint at him being a rather exuberant character, dressing in flamboyant clothing and military
uniforms from different countries. Being a non-conformist, he couldn’t attend Oxbridge but went to
LSE. After which he studied art in Paris with Paul de la Roche who introduced him to photography.
Little is known about his family life but he married Miss Grace Maynard, they had five children and
lived for some time in Primrose Hill in North London.

In 1847 he became a founder member of the Amateur Photographic Society of London which
eventually became the Royal Society of Photography and in 1853 took on his first professional
engagement which sent him to Russia.
His landscape photos made him famous initially, he believed photography was an art form and
thought of himself as an artist becoming known in some quarters as the ‘Turner” of photography.
Prince Albert was very interested in photography, indeed when Albert and Victoria visited the Royal
Society, Roger acted as their guide. He took many photographs for the royal family’s private albums,
most of which have not been published. A further accomplishment was building a studio on the top
of the British Museum where his man/gorilla photos were perhaps a precursor to the ideas in
Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’.

In 1855, his photography skills took him to the Crimean War, visiting many places which are now
familiar to us such as Kherson and Sevastopol. Fenton was commissioned by the Manchester
publisher, Thomas Agnew & Sons, to travel to the Crimea and document the war, which he did in a
large, horse drawn van. Indeed, this van was fired at by the Russians. His mission was encouraged
by the government, which hoped that his photographs would reassure a worried public. Fenton’s
extensive documentation of the war—the first such use of photography—included pictures of the
port of Balaklava, the camps, the terrain of battle, and portraits of officers, soldiers, and support staff
of the various allied armies. The Collodian process was used to take and develop photos; this entailed
the shutter being open for a few seconds, therefore ‘action’ shots were impossible and many scenes
where somewhat staged and became controversial. He left Crimea in 1855 suffering from cholera
from which he never really recovered. However, he did sufficiently recover enough to continue taking photographs and is thought to have
taken the first picture of a cricket match in 1857.

In the summer of 1859, he came to Lancashire taking photographs in and around Stonyhurst College
and many photos shown were courtesy of the college. A particularly interesting slide showed ‘The
Dark Walk’ which it is thought Arthur Conan Doyle alluded to in The Hound of the Baskervilles
when he mentions the ‘yew avenue’. There were also several fishing/game related photographs. The
River Hodder was used by the Fentons as a recreational ground and the Stonyhurst Fisheries provided
fish for the ‘meat free’ days of the college, netting approximately 13,000 salmon per year in the early
1900s. Many of these photographs of Lancashire featured in the 1988 exhibition of Fenton’s work in
the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank. Photographs of the Bobbin mills in Hurst Green, which
were important for supplying bobbins to the Fenton Mills, were also shown.
Fenton continued to enjoy royal patronage into the late 1800s. He also took on many commissions to
photograph stately homes throughout the country, including Harewood House.
Later, he took hundreds of still life and posed portraits that weren’t looked on as very artistic. His
‘art’ was cheapened when photographic studios opened in every town and people were able to have
photographs of their family taken, relatively inexpensively, on the local high street. He also lost the
patronage of Prince Albert. Considering that it had now become a trade and not an art, he turned his
back on photography and returned to the bar in London.

He died in 1869, aged 50, from nervous exhaustion and heart failure. For the next 100 years he was
entirely overlooked, even his grave at Potter’s Bar was demolished.
However, in the late 20th century, he had a renaissance. A biography, Roger Fenton of Crimble Hall
was published in 1976 and in 1988 a major exhibition was staged at the Hayward Gallery in London.
A blue plaque was erected, in 1991, on the house in Primrose Hill where he lived. In 2004 major
exhibitions of his work were presented in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, the Paul Getty
Museum and the Tate Gallery in London. Buckingham Palace hosted a show of his work entitled
‘Shadows of War’ in the Queen’s Gallery during 2017.