Photographers in Barracks

[centurion]

I've been taking another look at the photo of my grandfather (served with the RDF) taken after he had returned from the Somme in 1916. Its a conventional studio photo. He's wearing a nice clean (new) uniform. The one he had at the Somme by his own account got quite a bit of blood (not his) on it when at one point he was in a trench full of corpses. Checking with my mother who has the original the inscription on the back states that it was taken in the RDF barracks. Was it usual for photographers to have studio facilities in barracks?

[Moonraker]

Perhaps not in barracks as such - and in the Wiltshire context I think of the brick barracks of Devizes, Trowbridge and Tidworth - but there were civilians living locally who frequently took photographs of the buildings and men. Likewise with the wartime hutted camps; in the Warminster area, the local photographers divided up the local camps between them. There was a Camp Studio at Fovant, though I think that this was more of a trading name and did not indicate premises within the camp. However prewar Marcus Bennett had a studio at Bulford Camp, and a postcard photograph of his hut suggests it was an official "encroachment" - a building let out to a civilian organisation such as a welfare institute.

One of Bennett's rivals was a German called Rosener, of Durrington, who continued photographing soldiers until late 1915; in applying for a trading pass to the Lark Hill camps he had claimed to be a Dane. The cards of his that I have seen show soldiers posed outside huts, and I suspect that such photographs were all that were permitted there from 1915 onwards, when rules relating to photography were tightened up, but observed differently even within Wiltshire. Photographs of the buildings themselves seems to have been tolerated at the Warminster and Wylye valley camps (notably Codford), but not elsewhere. Surprisingly there is even a series of at least 16 cards showing RFC Yatesbury in detail c1917-18.

Moonraker