Thomas Vernon Begbie 1841 - 1915

[shipsbroker]

hello

Thanks for your reply. I have seen some of TVB's work and early photographs of Edinburgh. They are impressive, interesting and great value to anyone with an interest in old Edinburgh.

[sonofthom]

I agree - they are excellent photographs.The problem however is that they are not by Begbie. I actually own original Victorian prints of several of the photographs and they date from the late 1850's, much earlier than the date ascribed to most of these photos by Edinburgh Council; Begbie would have been only about 16 years old then. The photographer's label on these early prints confirm that the photographer was Alexander McGlashon, an established photographer at that time.

[Joe Rock]

I thought I would respond to this discussion here as I have had no response to the discussion on the British Photographic History website on the same subject. I am the author of Thomas Begbie's Edinburgh: A Mid Victorian Portrait (Edinburgh 1992) and I carried out the research on the photographer as well as printing his glass negatives.

I was not able to discover his birth date on the OPR, even using a fuzzy search and decided that the Census was probably as close as it was possible to get until other evidence presented itself. His age in all later census records corresponds to the 1841 census. He is listed in the 1861 census, aged 20 as a "Photographer", living in lodgings at 121 Rose Street. This is a very confident statement and it could be that Begbie was working with a camera from age 15, supplying negatives for someone like Alexander McGlashon, who had the facilities to print them and the finance to publish them.

Those interested can see my contributions on the BPH site:
http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/thomas-begbie-views-of?xg_source=activity

Joe

[sonofthom]

Sorry I have been a bit slow in responding to this, but I do not think that one word, "photographer", can be described as a confident statement. It may well be a generic job description inserted by the enumerator in place of a more lengthy description given by the subject. Indeed this is borne out by the description used by Begbie when his first child was born in 1865; in the "profession" column he describes himself as "photographer's assistant". As this document is actually signed by Begbie I think that we can reasonably take this as an accurate statement.

Given that McGlashon was an active and experienced photographer I think it is very unlikely that he would have entrusted expensive equipment and indeed his own reputation (it is McGlashon's name that is on the photographs) to a youngster with no previous photographic experience.