Kresen Kernow

In 2021, Kresen Kernow was awarded a grant from the National Archives Archives Revealed programme, a partnership between the National Archives, The Pilgrim Trust and the Wolfson Foundation, to catalogue the George Ellis Photographic Collection.

Consisting of over 95,000 glass plate negatives and accompanying 30 hand-written ledgers detailing each image (1939-1982), the collection was sold by the photographer, George Ellis, to the Cornwall Library Service in 1983.

Born in Middlesex in 1900, George William Francis Ellis became a freelance photographer, working in London and overseas, before joining the Cornish Guardian newspaper in 1939 and moving to Bodmin. He worked there until the summer of 1940, when wartime economies led to his redundancy.  He stayed in Bodmin with his family and began his own photographic business.  Working from his studio at 4, Nicholas Street, he still supplied the Cornish Guardian, and other newspapers such as the Western Morning News, with photographs of local and national events.

Alongside images for the press, the George Ellis collection includes portraits, weddings, schools and commercial work showing shops, businesses and houses.

Coverage is centred around Bodmin, from where Ellis ran his business, but he supplied images to various newspapers and therefore his work covered central and east Cornwall. There is, however, coverage of other parts of Cornwall, for example, Falmouth Second World War bomb damage and underground shots at South Crofty Tin Mine, Illogan.

He captured public and private lives, the everyday alongside the unexpected and surprising, from championship women’s darts to the Royal Indian Army Service.

Remaining frustratingly inaccessible for over 40 years, the grant has enabled Kresen Kernow to open up this unique collection to all.

This project has truly transformed discoverability, access and use. For the first time, a searchable online catalogue has been created, enabling people and organisations to discover images of interest, make connections across the archive and other collections at Kresen Kernow and order copies, generating income for the service.

The quality of the images means they are excellent for merchandise and film, as well as exhibitions and tourist information at partner organisations.

Staff and volunteers working on the collection have been enriched and inspired, gaining new skills and knowledge.

A new Ellis volunteer team was set up to enhance the core catalogue information by adding terms and tags to records, bringing diverse perspectives to the creation of additional discovery data. We are keen to use this project to explore this functionality which we hope will particularly contribute to the collection’s discovery by new users and audiences.  The terms and tags also enable google-based searching, opening up the collection to a global audience.

Staff have contributed to a touchscreen exhibition of Ellis images and a pop-up in-house exhibition.

Care of collection has been a prominent theme with boxes being created by our volunteers to protect the ledgers from further damage as they will no longer be required in order to search through the collection. Volunteers and staff have been digitising and repackaging the glass plate negatives making them available for customers and social media use whilst keeping them protected for the future, learning about the workflow for archiving the collection.

The project has developed further partnerships and projects with other organisations, both locally and nationally, including Historic England, IntoBodmin, a community and arts organisation, Falmouth University and a professional photographer.

The nature of the George Ellis collection, portraying everyday people and places, has revealed untold stories of a poignant nature. They show people who might not be represented in the written record helping to make archives more inclusive. Our volunteer Fran’s most memorable images are of ‘Operation Happiness’ between Ex-Navy man Evelyn Coad and former Falmouth beauty queen Miss Hilda Tripp, following their secret elopement by special license at Lanhydrock Church, Bodmin in January 1959. Their love story was reported in national and local newspapers and these articles have been transcribed and are available to view on our online catalogue, alongside the images from the George Ellis Collection.

Highlighting the global impact, we recently digitised a 1948 wedding after a request from a family member in Australia, who recognised the Egloshayle wedding of his Uncle and Aunt with his mother as a bridesmaid online. His mother then emigrated to New Zealand in the 1950s. The family had purchased one of the images but the remaining images had not been seen. A similar enquiry occurred recently with a researcher contacting us by phone having heard we were cataloguing the George Ellis Collection, knowing her family had a couple of photographs by Ellis. She was overjoyed to discover we held many more previously unseen images of the same wedding and portrait sitting, which was already discoverable on the online catalogue. The researcher is now visiting Kresen Kernow to carry out further family research and will likely order copies, generating income for the service.

We have recently published a blog on our website where you can find out more about George Ellis and his photographs – https://kresenkernow.org/blog/.

Thank you to the National Archives Archives Revealed programme, for enabling Kresen Kernow to provide access to an unparalleled visual record of the people and communities of central and east Cornwall.