Eight decades of life through a lens
Stuart Tippleston and his father Peter Tippleston looking at photographs taken by Peter's father Edgar, who used to run the family photography business.
FLICKING through a huge, ageing binder full of 1930s photos it was easy to see how hard-working photographer Edgar Tippleston had been.
It was 1931 when he first set up his photography firm and, 80 years later, his grandson Stuart is still running Tippleston Photography.
But the family still have the physical reminder of the firm’s first pictures, taken by Edgar, which include everything from family snaps to Cobblers match images of players and the crowd, visits by dignitaries, local plays - including one at the Royal, featuring Errol Flynn - and even pictures of the frozen river Nene during a particularly cold winter.
Unfortunately many of the pictures are not captioned so the exact identities of some of the people in the old images are no longer known.
Stuart, aged 47, said: “There wasn’t anything like the number of people we have now with their own cameras. Back then the firm did anything social and all industrial work. That included photography from when Avon Cosmetics came to Northampton. We photographed the buildings and when they brought in the first Avon ladies. Avon bought all the negatives from us.”
Edgar’s son Peter, who joined the firm in 1955 and retired in 2005, said: “It was really started by my father and I’m pretty certain he worked for the Chronicle & Echo at the time when he started the business in 1931.”
But the photographic flair was in the family blood long before the original E.C. Tippleston business was founded, as Edgar’s own father Ernest had also been a keen photographer.
Peter said: “I have got some shots he took during World War One of the streets in Far Cotton as the soldiers were billeted to Far Cotton. The photos he took were of the soldiers with the families there. If you had a house you had to let people in at that time, you had no option.”
Edgar started out his career working for the famous Northampton model-maker Bassett-Lowke, before moving on to employment at Birdsall’s bookbinding company.
But, having always been a keen photographer, he finally took the plunge and set up his own company at Harborough Road, Kingsthorpe, where the Tippleston firm remained for more than 50 years before moving to its current location in Adnitt Road, Abington. At first the firm even shared its premises with the hairdresser’s business run by Edgar’s wife Phyllis.
The firm’s history has traced the development of photographic technology from glass plates used in the early days to the modern digital technology used today.
Peter recalled: “We started with plates and they were alright as long as you didn’t drop them...and that happened.”
Nowadays the bulk of the firm’s work, which is carried out entirely by Stuart, is wedding photography.
Stuart said that he left school at the earliest opportunity to join the family firm, although the discipline of wedding photographyhas changed over the years.
He explained that in the early days of the Tippleston firm, there were many more weddings taking place and photography was a formal process of specific family photos. Nowadays the ceremonies are fewer but the process is much more involved, with clients wanting the photographer present from the start of the day, to help them tell the story of their experience in photos.
Since 1931, the Tippleston firm has photographed more than 10,000 weddings.
Peter, who studied photography at the art college in St George’s Avenue, Northampton, remembers what life was life at the busiest wedding period of the 60s and 70s.
He said; “At best we were doing an average of eight a week, that was in the mid 60s to the 70s, I used to work seven days a week. The most I did in one day at that time was four weddings. I was going from one to the next.”
And, in a pre-digital age, the firm had to maintain a swift service of film processing.
Peter said: “First the films had to be processed, numbered and then printed and of course it was the old fashioned way of printing. Looking back, I don’t know how I managed to do it all.”
Despite the changes in photography practice, some aspects of the job have nothing to do with technology, according to Peter.
The 78-year-old said: “The main thing is knowing how to handle people and enjoying what you do. It comes across if you enjoy what you do and you never stop learning.”
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