Lost glass negatives of dramatic and moving pictures taken by the Manchester Guardian’s first staff photographer during the Irish Civil War have recently been discovered in Manchester. With the advent of modern digital photography, which does not require old-style developing and printing techniques, the darkroom shared by the Manchester Evening News and the Guardian was due to be closed. Current staff photographer Don McPhee was having a last nostalgic look round and found a box of glass negatives on the floor, still in their protective paper wrappping.
The pictures were taken by Walter Doughty, who joined the paper in about 1909 and retired more than forty years later. He continued to work relief shifts during the summer when he was in his eighties. According to Bob Corfield, who worked for the Manchester Evening News for fifty years:
He was a great photographer who taught me a lot. He had a knack of always being in the right place at the right time. He also photographed attempts to raise the Thetis, the submarine which was stranded on the seabed off the North Wales coast in 1939.
With the exception of the Cork picture, the selection shown here is from the outbreak of the Civil War in Dublin, June/July 1922. The soldiers in uniform are Irish National Army not British Army. Most depict fighting on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street). Since there are no precise dates or places indicated on the glass negatives themselves the captions that follow are necessarily speculative. Readers are invited and encouraged to add any additional information or comments. Further information on the collection is available from The Guardian Picture Desk, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER, tel: 00 44 20 7278 2332.
