Kenyon Archives – Nine Years On
In 2015, the South West Heritage Trust undertook to rescue the enormous collection of photographic negatives created by Stanley Kenyon during his career as a Somerset photographer. The negatives were suffering from vinegar syndrome and were slowly destroying themselves. The race against time to salvage the collection took 18 months and included professional digitisation, volunteer teams cleaning and cataloguing, and finally an exhibition of Kenyon’s life and work at the Museum of Somerset. The project was a steep learning curve for those involved, and ultimately saved a priceless record of 20th century life in the county. Now, 9 years on, we look back at what was achieved and what was very nearly lost.
The Life of Stanley Walter Kenyon
Stanley Walter Kenyon spent most of his life and career in the Wellington area of Somerset. His early work focused on local people, schools and businesses. Later he became interested in industrial architecture, which led him to win contracts to photograph industrial sites throughout Britain.
In 1944 he was awarded the Fellowship of the Institute of British Photographers and was made an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society. Kenyon was a photographer of excellent technical skills, and his images, mostly taken as large-and medium-format negatives are of correspondingly excellent quality.
Kenyon won contracts with a wide range of industries and businesses throughout Britain and Ireland including dairies, millers, power stations, engineering works, collieries, iron works, waterworks, and factories making everything from biscuits and paper to sewing machines and cloth. He captured aspects of the reconstruction and industrial development following the Second World War, and photographed many working practices and industrial machines that no longer exist.
The Kenyon Negatives
The collection comprised c. 60,000 negatives. Of these 50,000 acetate images were suffering from vinegar syndrome, causing emission of a noxious, acetic gas; the negatives become brittle; layers of the film begin to shrink and the acetate begins to bubble and pit. They couldn’t be housed with other photographic archival material without risking cross-contamination, and working with the collection for any length of time would cause headaches and irritation to the eyes, nose and mouth. We were fortunate that Somerset Libraries were able to allow us to store them off-site at one of their branch libraries, and Local Studies Librarian Kate Parr would visit periodically to change the micro-chamber paper which was packed around the negatives to absorb the acetic gas.
After securing funding through generous grants from Somerset County Council, the Somerset Archaeological & Natural History Society (SANHS) and the Somerset Industrial Archaeology Society (SIAS), we could finally think about digitisation. The negatives had to be shipped to our contractors who would scan each image and re-name them according to what Kenyon had written on its envelope. Sadly the original negatives had to be carefully disposed of, as keeping them would have been impossible, both in terms of cost and health and safety.
Thanks to Our Volunteer Team
Our crack team of volunteers worked on a variety of projects getting the collection into a fit state to be used. Using Kenyon’s business registers they catalogued the entire collection, including details of the person who commissioned the work and the subject of the photograph. Members of SIAS also reviewed some of the entries to make them more accessible to users: for example, in his work with industrial firms, Kenyon might only have described his photograph as ‘valve’, so it would help to have a bit more information to go on! They cleaned and repackaged the nearly 11,000 glass plate negatives ready for them to be digitised in-house.
Filming the Story
As we began to near the end of the practical part of the project, Kate Parr and our volunteer team very gamely took part in a video recording, capturing both the story of the photographer and their personal reminiscences of working on the collection. The film was part of a 6-month long exhibition held in the Hammett Room at the Museum of Somerset, show-casing the best of the collection. We were able to draw on the different themes of his work over his astonishing career, highlighting both the local significance of his work, and the contrasting national and international breadth of his experience.
The Kenyon Collection Today
Today, the Kenyon Collection is one, if not the, most heavily used photographic collections in the archive: it supports the research of our users; reminiscence therapy sessions with older residents of the county; learning packs for schools and colleges and fun ‘days gone by’ views for our outreach and social media channels. Our thanks for help in rescuing this remarkable collection go to our funders, our volunteers and to the family of Stanley Walter Kenyon for their interest and support for the project, without whom this priceless record of 20th century Somerset may have been lost for ever.
Access the Kenyon Collection
View the images of the Kenyon Collection by searching for A/DQN within the Archive Catalogue.
View the exhibition film documenting the project.
