The architect George Gilbert Scott, RA (1811–78) (known as Sir Gilbert Scott after his knighthood in 1872), had five sons. The elder two – George Gilbert Scott junior (1839–97) and John Oldrid Scott (1841–1913) – followed their father into his profession. The third son, Albert Henry Scott (1844–65), showed great promise in different directions and, for a short time, took up photography, but he died young while an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford. He is buried in Petersham churchyard, Surrey, under a fine granite monument designed by his father (Fig 1). Scott's posthumously published Personal and Professional Recollections (1879) contains a great deal about the short life and the circumstances of the death of this son. The boy was educated by private tutors and, briefly, at St Andrew's College at Bradfield, Berkshire, before going up to Oxford in 1864, and there was, his father recorded, ‘abundant evidence of the high order of his mind, both as to power and tone, especially evinced by his facility of composition, which from an early age was remarkable’.Footnote ¹

Fig 1

Albert Henry Scott's tomb in Petersham churchyard, Surrey, designed by his father, George Gilbert Scott. Photograph: Gavin Stamp (2011)

In a section of the original manuscript of Recollections concerning the illness and death of his son – omitted from the publication by the editor, George Gilbert Scott junior – Scott noted that:

Happily, proof of this last interest survives in an album of photographs now in the possession of Albert's great-nephew Richard Gilbert Scott. This album,Footnote ³ begun in 1861, originally contained thirty-three photographic prints. Nine of them are now missing, but their subjects are recorded on the pages. Most of the pages in the album are blank, suggesting that Albert had indeed abandoned photography after a period of experiment.

The photographic prints are on albumen paper, taken from glass negatives developed by the collodion process, both wet and dry. Albert was evidently trying different techniques, as some prints have the characteristic sepia colour of gold-toned prints while others are considerably faded. The wet collodion process, invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851, used gun cotton dissolved in ether to allow the light-sensitive chemicals to adhere to sheets of glass, and it soon superseded both the fragile daguerreotype on silvered copper and the calotype developed by Henry Fox Talbot, which used paper negatives. As Gernsheim records, ‘The relaxation of Talbot's patent in July 1852 and the almost simultaneous perfection of the collodion process made photography at last a really popular pursuit, and with mistaken ideas as to the ease of the new method large numbers of amateurs purchased the necessary apparatus’.Footnote ⁴ The wet collodion process required transporting all the necessary chemicals and a portable darkroom to pursue outdoor subjects, but the invention of a dry collodion process in 1855 allowed photographers to prepare sensitised plates in advance and to process the exposed plates later, obviating the need for carrying so much cumbersome equipment. This made photography less physically demanding and more attractive, particularly to amateurs. One such amateur was the seventeen-year-old Albert Henry Scott.

In his album, Albert labelled his prints with details about the process used, rather confirming his father's claim that he did all the chemical work himself. Several – all of outdoor subjects, taken far from home – are annotated ‘Tannin’, a reference to the new tannin process introduced by Major Charles Russell in 1861 to improve the dry collodion process, which allowed photographers to prepare sensitised glass plates in advance, although the exposure times were longer than with wet collodion.Footnote ⁵ Other prints are labelled ‘Ross’, which may refer to the type of lens and camera supplied by Ross & Co, an important manufacturer of photographic equipment established by Andrew Ross. Most of the prints are small, measuring 2¼in. (56mm) wide by 3in. (80mm) tall; a few are larger, one being 5in. (125mm) wide by 7in. (180mm) tall. Many of the smaller prints are labelled ‘¼ Ross’ or ‘¼ Fr.’, indicating that they come from a quarter-plate negative. A print of an experimental photograph of vine leaves in a conservatory (see Fig 3) is labelled ‘Wet. 3½ Ross’.

Albert began his album in 1861, which has been described as ‘a decisive year for the development of ideas about photography in Britain’ – something that he would have been aware of if he looked at contemporary photographic journals.Footnote ⁶ The ideas being discussed there concerned the status of photography, and whether it was an art or the product of a mechanical contrivance. For Lady Eastlake, writing in 1857, ‘A photographer must be an artist and a gentleman first before his photographic works can be considered art’.Footnote ⁷ But in 1861 photographers learned to their dismay that, in the International Exhibition to be held in South Kensington the following year, photography was to be excluded from the Fine Art section, being relegated to the section devoted to Machinery, under the heading of ‘Photography and Photographic Apparatus’.Footnote ⁸ The choice of subjects represented in Albert's album, ranging as it did from rural scenes to studies of railway stations, may possibly reflect contemporary ambivalence about the purposes of photography.

The other context in which Albert's efforts need to be placed is that of the status of the photographer. ‘I am inclined to believe that, at present, it is only people with long purses who can afford to take up Calotyping as an amusement,’ observed one writer on photography in 1855, adding: ‘more than this, it is only people with plenty of spare time on their hands who can afford to pay attention to it’.Footnote ⁹ As the privately educated son of a socially ambitious and increasingly successful architect, Albert was clearly a young gentleman amateur. But by the early 1860s, what with the establishment of so many studios producing carte-de-visite portraits, photography was becoming a profession or a trade. The result was, in the words of one historian, that ‘The pioneering amateurs, whose images form the early canon of nineteenth-century British photographers, largely abandoned photography by the mid-sixties’.Footnote ¹⁰ It may possibly be significant, therefore, that Albert pursued photography for only, at most, two years before giving it up.

The photographs he made in 1861–2 are not notably accomplished or sophisticated by contemporary standards,Footnote ¹¹ but they are of interest because of the subjects chosen by this intelligent and enterprising young man. Some are copies of engravings or paintings (see Fig 4; two missing ones are, tantalisingly, of portraits by his elder brother, George Gilbert Scott junior). Several are topographical. Two (alas, missing) are of streets in Hampstead – Frognal and North End – no doubt because the Scott family was living at Admiral's House in Admiral's Walk at the time (see Fig 2), before moving to the Manor House at Ham, Surrey, in 1864. Several photographs were taken in Sussex, either near Hastings or in or near Robertsbridge (see Figs 11 and 5; the view of the beach at Bulverhythe is of historical interest as the Martello tower in the background was subsequently lost to coastal erosion). It is not known why Albert took his camera to this part of Sussex, but his uncle, Samuel King Scott, practised as a doctor in Brighton and, in his Recollections, Scott recorded that on several occasions in the early 1860s he and some of his sons went to stay with his younger brother either at ‘a place on the South Downs’ or ‘at his little retiring place near Ashdown forest’.Footnote ¹² On the other hand, both Hastings and Robertsbridge were easily accessible by railway from both London and Brighton after 1852. At this date, however, it was still difficult to transport the equipment required to record such subjects, even when using dry collodion glass plates with the tannin process (it was not until the late 1880s that smaller, portable cameras using gelatin dry plates became available).

Fig 2

‘Afternoon’, dated August 1862; possibly taken in the garden of Admiral's House in Hampstead

Fig 3

A study of vine leaves using the wet collodion process; possibly taken in a conservatory at the back of Admiral's House in Hampstead

Fig 4

Copy of a portrait drawing of Mrs R Wright by George Gilbert Scott junior, dated November 1861

Fig 5

The Sussex shore at Bulverhythe to the west of St Leonards, near Hastings, Sussex, where William the Conqueror is supposed to have landed. The Martello tower in the distance on Galley Hill was one of two here that disappeared later in the century owing to the erosion of the cliffs by the sea

There are a few photographs in the album of medieval buildings. They are of the little church at Kingsbury, Middlesex (since swallowed up by London suburbia) (see Fig 6), the church at Ore, in Sussex (today a ruin) (see Fig 7), and the ruined end wall of the hall of the old Manor House at Crowhurst, in Sussex (see Fig 8). Even if the photographer had not been the son of a Gothic Revival architect, such antiquarian subjects would have been unremarkable at the time. What is remarkable, however, is that Albert took more photographs of the simple vernacular buildings characteristic of Sussex – cottages and farmhouses – than he did of old churches. There are views of an oast house and of a farm as well as the tile-hung and weather-boarded old Seven Stars Inn at Robertsbridge (see Fig 12)Footnote ¹³ and farmhouses at St Leonards and at Bulverhythe along the coast from Hastings (see Figs 10 and 9). This was not the sort of architecture that interested his father, but they were the types of building that were beginning to inspire the nascent ‘Old English’ style of Norman Shaw and Eden Nesfield. These photographs might therefore reflect the enthusiasms of Albert's older architect brother, George Gilbert Scott junior, who became involved with the William Morris circle in the 1860s and who would later design in that vernacular manner.Footnote ¹⁴

Fig 6

St Andrew's Old Church, Kingsbury, Middlesex, which survives today but was replaced by the New Church re-erected at Kingsbury in 1934

Fig 7

St Helen's Old Church, Ore, Sussex, which was in poor condition and is a ruin today, having been replaced by a new church in 1869

Fig 8

The ruin of the late thirteenth-century hall of the Manor House at Crowhurst, Sussex

Fig 9

Old farmhouse at Bulverhythe, the ancient village and former port now on the edge of St Leonards, Sussex

Fig 10

Farmhouse near St Leonards, Sussex

Fig 11

Oast house at Robertsbridge, Sussex

Fig 12

The Seven Stars Inn at Robertsbridge, Sussex, as photographed by W Galsworthy Davie and published in Dawber's Old Cottages and Farmhouses in Kent and Sussex (1900). Albert Henry Scott's photograph of the inn is missing from his album, but this shows the building, subsequently altered, as he would have seen and recorded it

Painters had long been charmed by such humble rural buildings, particularly those associated with the ‘Penshurst set’ in Kent; a few architects, notably George Devey, began to follow them in the 1850s. The next generation, in reaction against the ponderous and churchy character of many Gothic Revival houses, began to take an interest in them in their search for a more sympathetic domestic style rooted in the vernacular. As Andrew Saint, Norman Shaw's biographer, has recorded, Nesfield and Shaw, at the beginning of their careers in 1862, ‘were off together for a week's sketching in Sussex, intent upon Wealden vernacular subjects. It is a sudden shift of interest.’Footnote ¹⁵ These two young architects were drawing vernacular buildings with prominent exposed chimney-breasts, tile hanging, all-embracing tile roofs and timber construction at the very time when George Gilbert Scott's son was photographing the same sort of architecture in the same county.Footnote ¹⁶

Albert was perhaps responding to a new artistic movement, but what is surprising is that he seems to have combined a feeling for the rustic picturesque with an enthusiasm for the new technology that would do much to undermine rural life, namely the steam railway. There are three photographs of railway subjects in the album, and all now seem remarkable, especially as railway photographs of this date are comparatively rare (although photographs of locomotives and industrial machinery were shown at the 1862 Exhibition).Footnote ¹⁷ The view of Hastings station – at the end of the South Eastern Railway's line from Ashford, which opened in 1851 – is the earliest known photograph of that building (see Fig 13). The locomotive photographed at St Leonards West Marina station shows a newly built London, Brighton & South Coast Railway engine (see Fig 14), while the photograph of a crane and a London, Brighton & South Coast Railway goods wagon at the same station is one of the earliest surviving of such vehicles anywhere (see Fig 15).Footnote ¹⁸ It is appropriate that these photographs were taken by the son of a compulsively busy architect who spent so much of his working life travelling on railway trains.

Fig 13

The original station and engine shed at Hastings, Sussex, opened in 1851 by the South Eastern Railway. The engine and train in the foreground belonged to the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway

Fig 14

London, Brighton & South Coast Railway locomotive no. 141, built at the company's Brighton works in 1860, at the St Leonards West Marina station engine shed

Fig 15

A crane and goods wagon of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway at St Leonards West Marina station; photograph dated August 1861

Hastings station is the only new building represented in the album, and none of Scott's own many architectural creations seem to have attracted the attention of his photographer son. This may seem surprising: Scott's professional career cannot have been entirely separate from his family life as his two elder sons became his pupils. Albert might surely have found one of his many buildings, either under construction or newly completed, a suitable subject for photography. But few architects at this date seem to have used the new medium of photography to document their work. One who did was George Devey (although most of the photographs that survive of his buildings were taken after 1865), but for contemporary images of mid-Victorian architecture, whether designed by Scott or by other well-established architects, the architectural historian has had usually to rely on perspective drawings commissioned by the architect or the woodcut plates published in the Builder or Building News.

Finally in Albert's album are the photographs of members of Scott's family although, alas, none are of George Gilbert Scott himself or of his eldest son. These seem to have been taken in the garden outside the family home in Hampstead where, presumably, the young photographer had his darkroom. Three are of Albert's younger brother, Alwyne Gilbert Scott (1849–78) (see Fig 16), a frail child who would go up to Christ Church, Oxford, and become a barrister but who died only eight months after his father. There is one of the fifth and youngest son, Dukinfield Henry Scott (1854–1934) (see Fig 17), who would become a distinguished palaeobotanist and director of the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew. And there is one of John Oldrid Scott standing next to his mother, Caroline Oldrid (1811–72) (see Fig 18). This is the only photograph of Scott's immensely supportive and long-suffering wife known to the author (another one that had once been pasted in to the album is unfortunately missing). After her sudden death, Scott wrote how ‘I deeply regret that I never had any portrate [sic] beyond photographs made of her – we always talked of getting Richmond to do this but her constant absence from London interfered. I now want him to do one from the many photographs we possess.’Footnote ¹⁹ But George Richmond never made such a portrait and those photographs seem to have disappeared, making the results of her son Albert's brief foray into photography all the more valuable.

Fig 16

Alwyne Gilbert Scott, George Gilbert Scott's fourth son, probably photographed at Admiral's House, Hampstead

Fig 17

Dukinfield Henry Scott, Scott's fifth and youngest son

Fig 18

John Oldrid Scott, Scott's second son, standing next to his mother, Caroline Oldrid