Pioneer Early Photographers of Shaftesbury

At 6.30p.m. on Thursday 06 August there is an opportunity to see an evening presentation at Gold Hill Museum by Ann Symons and Claire Ryley of their researches into Early and Lesser Known Shaftesbury Photographers. The headline image of Shaftesbury High Street was taken by George Lydford in March 1877. Born in Gillingham in 1835, George trained as a joiner and carpenter; married Elizabeth Mary Scannell in 1857, with whom he had three children; and by 1871 the family had moved to Shaftesbury, where George established a business as a landscape and portrait photographer. He may have been one of Shaftesbury’s first professional photographers, as the Rev. Thomas Perkins,  headmaster of Shaftesbury’s new (boys’) Grammar School from 1878, was a dedicated amateur, and both E.F. Upfield and Albert Tyler were active later, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The High Street, with its distant triumphal arch, had been decorated to celebrate the March 1877 wedding at Motcombe of Lady Theodora Grosvenor (1840-1924) to Thomas Merthyr Guest. This was during the period of dominant Grosvenor influence over the town, where the family owned hundreds of properties until Theodora’s nephew, the second Lord Stalbridge, decided that everything must go in the Sale of Shaftesbury in 1918.

Theodora was the thirteenth and last child of Richard, second Marquess of Westminster, and Elizabeth, to whom (for her lifetime) the Grosvenor estates in Dorset and Wiltshire passed on the Marquess’s death in 1869. At that point Theodora saw her role as devoted companion and support to her seventy-two year old mother who, as Lady of the Manor, had many public duties and engagements to perform, some of which her daughter undertook on her behalf. One was to lay the foundation stone of the Westminster Memorial Cottage Hospital at Shaftesbury on 25 May 1871 in memory of the late Marquess. (Laurence Clark: ‘A Motcombe Miscellany’ p.22)

From 1879 the Guests lived at Inwood House near Henstridge during the winter, where they were joined by Theodora’s mother, and spent summers with the dowager Marchioness at Motcombe. After her death in 1891, aged 94, the Dorset properties reverted to Theodora’s brother, who decided to rebuild Motcombe House on a much more palatial scale. Theodora retained a strong interest in the development of the Westminster Hospital, donating a new operating theatre in 1907, and after her husband’s death in 1904, financing the building and running of an 8 bed cottage hospital in his memory at Templecombe. The Merthyr Guest Hospital later grew to 100 beds and was part of the NHS until its closure in 1974. In the autumn of 1923, aged 84, she was President of the Westminster Hospital committee and in the matter of a dispute involving criticism of the Matron “sick & tired of it all.” (See Dave Hardiman’s article in the 2021/22 Byzant ‘The Unfortunate Matron of the Westminster Memorial Hospital.’)  Other parts of Theodora’s legacy, still in existence a century after her death, include the Hunt Servants Benefit Society, founded in 1872 (she was a keen and able horsewoman); two of a ring of six bells installed at Motcombe Church to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887; and the original Merthyr Guest Cup, a trophy for clubs in the Blackmore Vale Sunday Football League, contested at least until 2023. According to Laurence Clark, She always attended the annual final in Inwood grounds to present the cups and medals. 

This lively, popular and illustrated talk, first given in the afternoon last December, is free to members of the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, while non-members may pay £5 at the door. Membership helps to support the work of Gold Hill Museum, and gives free admission to the rest of the forthcoming lecture programme. Please click on highlighted names or phrases to find further information archived in our website.