Seeing double

But as a penniless student, Brian May could only look longingly at the stereoscopic images which had fascinated him since childhood.

“I was at college in London near Christie’s auction house. I used to visit the viewing rooms, which had boxes of stereoscopic (three-dimensional) cards, glass slides and daguerreotypes,” recalls the Queen guitarist. “I couldn’t afford any of these treasures but it was exciting to touch them and view the pictures. Many were grubby and faded – until they were viewed in stereo. Then they sprang to life.”

It was while browsing at auctions that Brian spotted the initials TRW on some poorly-preserved images. When he later came across a “stunning image” by TRW – Victorian photographer Thomas Richard Williams – called The Village Schoolmistress, he was hooked.

Now Brian has produced a delightful book comprising a collection of TR Williams’ 3-D images depicting life in a small village in the 1850s. Called A Village Lost and Found, the book is the result of 30 years of research and provides a fascinating insight into the daily working lives of ordinary people. Images include a family picking potatoes, a farm boy loading a dung cart, two villagers chatting over a gate, a farmer eating bread and cheese in his barn and a courting couple sharing a moment together at a water pump.

Brian and his co-writer, photographic conservator and historian Elena Vidal, gave a presentation about the book at the National Media Museum in Bradford, where some of their research for the book was carried out. The rock legend told me about his life-long fascination with stereoscopic photography. Over 6ft tall, with his trademark mop of black curls, he has the charisma of a guitar hero combined with a softly-spoken charm.

Brian postponed a career in astronomy when Queen’s popularity first exploded. He returned to astrophysics in 2006, completing his PhD and co-writing his first book, Bang! The Complete History of the Universe, with Patrick Moore. Photographic history is another of his passions.

“As a boy, I collected 3-D picture cards given away in Weetabix packets,” he says. “I became fascinated with the idea that two flat pictures could be merged into a stereo image so real it looked like you could touch what was in it. When I was about ten, I made pairs of small sketches that became 3-D scenes when free-viewed. I took pictures of my mum, dad and the cat with my Woolworth’s 2/6d camera, sliding it sideways on a table top between exposures.”

Little did the young Brian know he was re-treading TR Williams’ footsteps from nearly 150 years earlier.

Brian says TR’s series of 59 photographs of the village, Hinton Waldrist, capture a way of life under threat from industrialisation. “We believe he spent boyhood summers there and wanted to preserve the way of life he fondly recalled,” says Brian. “It was a time of great change and no doubt he was aware that rural life wouldn’t be this way for much longer.”

At first glance, the images create an idyllic sense of village life, but Brian says TR didn’t set out to romanticise it. “To the people living there, it was just normal working life,” he says. “There’s a lovely picture of women in bonnets turning barley, but in his accompanying verse TR calls it ‘wearing and tedious’.”

The identity of the village was lost for 150 years, until Brian discovered it in 2003. “I drove around Berkshire looking for it. It turned out the boundaries had changed and it was now in Oxfordshire,” he says. “Eventually the internet was invented and we put a picture of the village church on it. Several people got in touch, saying they knew it. When we visited Hinton Waldrist it was largely unchanged; we met people living in thatched cottages from the original images, and people whose ancestors were in the pictures.

“We stood where TR Williams had stood and saw the views he’d seen – the church, river, bridge. There’s a pig farmer called John Sims who appears in several of TR’s photographs. In a corner of the churchyard we found John’s gravestone; it was very moving. We felt like we’d made a connection with the real people from these images, which go back to the birth of photography.”

Looking at the images, you can almost imagine being there with the woman at her spinning wheel, the blacksmith outside his smithy and the villagers bringing in the harvest, or enjoying a gossip with ‘Old Giles’ the knifegrinder. The photos spring to life in glorious 3D when seen through a stereoscopic viewer Brian has designed, which can be folded into the slip-case of the book. “It’s a 21st century viewer creating the true Victorian experience,” says Brian.

In the book, some original images appear alongside photos of the village as it is today. In exploring the history of the village, its people and links with the present, Brian and Elena have given each image an added layer of meaning.

TR Williams specialised in stereoscopic portraits, hugely popular in the mid-19th century. He photographed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and their daughter Princess Victoria’s wedding. But by the time Brian discovered Williams’ work, little was known about him.

“The stereoscopic craze peaked at the end of the 1850s and stereo cards were produced at an alarming rate, sometimes at the cost of quality,” says Brian. “TR became disenchanted and stopped producing them, claiming they’d become vulgarised. He continued photographing stereoscopic portraits for a select clientele, and produced ‘cartes de visite’.

“When I came across his Scenes from a Village images, they were regarded as just a bunch of rural pictures, but I had a feeling about them. I saw a story of village life unfolding, featuring various characters.”

A Village Lost and Found provides an extraordinary insight into English society in the mid-Victorian era. It also explains historic photographic techniques and explores the life of the enigmatic TR Williams, who appears, Hitchcock-like, wearing a top hat, in some of his own photographs.

Colin Harding is curator of photographic technology at the National Media Museum, which has some of TR Williams’ work in its collection. “TR Williams was a pioneer of Victorian photography about whom comparatively little was known,” says Colin. “It’s fantastic to hear Brian and Elena talk about their exhaustive research, resulting in a book which is not only a significant contribution to photographic history but also a fascinating glimpse of Victorian rural life.”

Brian reveals that a future project could be a book of 3D Queen images. “I always took a stereoscopic camera on tour with Queen and would ask someone to snap away at us while we were on stage. Sadly, there’s no 3D footage of Queen but there are stills, so you never know,” he says.