Dartmouth Museum has recently received a major donation: the entire photographic archive of Vernon MacAndrew (1880–1940), a Dartmouth-connected businessman, yachtsman and philanthropist who pursued photography as a sustained private practice over several decades.The donation has opened a new chapter in the town’s cultural history - and in the life of a man already familiar to many in Dartmouth.
Vernon MacAndrew (1880–1940) is remembered locally as a businessman, yachtsman, and philanthropist, associated with Dartmouth’s maritime and social life in the early decades of the twentieth century. Alongside this public profile, MacAndrew pursued photography as a sustained private practice. He showed work privately to friends, family, and local groups, and he exhibited flower studies at the Royal Photographic Society. In 1936 he was admitted as an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society.
The archive was donated to the Museum by Dartmouth resident Alec Smith, who intervened when the archive was placed on the market at auction. Alec was impressed by the scale and completeness of the archive: “I’m delighted to have been able to transfer the complete archive to the Museum, so it can be kept together — and so its significance for Dartmouth and for the wider history of photography can be uncovered in the coming years.”
The archive had been in private hands since MacAndrew’s death and has only recently resurfaced at auction. It has not yet been fully catalogued or studied in a museum or academic context. As a result, the figures below are estimates, though they give a clear picture of what has been deposited and the overall character of the collection, which represents the overwhelming majority of his life’s work with his camera.
On current assessment, the archive totals approximately 5,000 glass originals, comprising around 4,500 glass positives and 500 glass negatives. Within this, at least 1,750 items are colour, forming a major component rather than an occasional experiment. On current information, that places it among the largest documented of pre-WW2 colour collections currently in the public domain. The collection spans approximately 1900 to 1939 and includes monochrome work, hand-tinting, and multiple colour processes, with evidence across the archive of Autochrome and other colour systems including Agfa and Finlay (glass and cut film)—a broad technical range within a single private body of work. There is also evidence of Paget material, but this has not been quantified at this stage.
For photographic historians, this breadth matters because colour appears as a sustained practice rather than a small side-line. A particular highlight is a long sequence (115 slides) of early Autochromes associated with MacAndrew’s time in Valencia (1906–1914), above, left, forming a multi-year run rather than isolated examples. The archive also includes later still life studies, indicating continued technical work with lighting, colour, and composition beyond travel and maritime subjects. In total around 300 Autochrome slides are identified and need to be catalogued.
The archive subjects include Dartmouth and Kingswear—harbour and river scenes, working boats, waterfront life, and yachting—to extensive travel and expedition photography made overseas. The overseas material includes sequences associated with travel in Europe and the Mediterranean as well as work made further afield, including in North Africa and the Red Sea region, Sudan, the West Indies/Caribbean, and the Philippines. This breadth places the archive within wider maritime and travel networks of the period, rather than limiting it to local topography.
A further strand, unusual in its scale within a personal archive, is MacAndrew’s systematic documentation of natural history, including an extensive photographic record of his shell collection alongside studies in botany, insects, and microscopy. After his death, his nationally significant shell collection was donated to the Natural History Museum, and the shell photographs in the archive form a separate visual record of that scientific interest. These sequences suggest a photographic practice used for recording, comparison, and close observation as well as for travel and social documentation.
MacAndrew’s position within yacht racing also provided access that is rarely available to photographers working from outside the sport. As owner and helm of the 12-metre Trivia, he achieved notable success at Cowes Week in 1938, winning 21 prizes including the King’s Cup. This brought him into the international big-boat racing world—yachts, tenders, and the shore-side and social routines around major regattas—and the archive shows that he documented this environment in colour[Image of West Solent One Design racing].
The archive also contains hand-tinted monochrome photographs associated with expedition contexts, showing that colour work here includes both native colour processes and post-production hand colouring. In later maritime work, there is evidence of MacAndrew using Finlay glass plates, and later moving into Finlay cut film, indicating changes in materials and practice within a single working life.
Dartmouth Museum has stressed that this donation marks the beginning of a long-term project rather than a finished story. The immediate priorities are collections-led: stabilisation of fragile glass materials, condition assessment, careful handling protocols, and creation of a structured inventory. Only once these foundations are in place will it be possible to make evidence-based statements about the archive’s wider significance within British photographic history and the history of early colour practice.
“This is an important addition to the town’s historical record,” a museum spokesperson said. “It offers a rich visual account of Dartmouth’s maritime world, but it also raises wider questions about early colour photography and private photographic practice in the first half of the twentieth century.”
The donation also strengthens an existing local photographic resource. Dartmouth Museum already holds a substantial group of black-and-white glass lantern slides by five local photographers, documenting Dartmouth between 1890 and 1945, totalling approximately 2,400 slides. The addition of the MacAndrew glass material increases the scale and range of Dartmouth’s public photographic holdings and supports future work comparing local documentation across formats, decades, and photographic approaches. A project page on the Museum website will host updates as work progresses.
Taken as a whole, the MacAndrew donation brings into public care a large, technically varied archive made over several decades, and represents his complete oeuvre, so far as we are currently aware. The presence of multiple early colour processes, the sustained Valencia Autochrome sequence, the hand-tinted expedition photographs, the use of Finlay materials in later maritime work, and the extensive scientific documentation of shells and related subjects combine scale with a high level of photographic intent. Once conserved and catalogued, the archive has the potential to stand both as a major visual record of Dartmouth and its maritime life and as a significant body of primary material for the study of early colour practice and private photographic production in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.
With thanks to Jonathan Turner, Dartmouth Museum. If any BPH reader has further information about Vernon MacAndrew and his photography, please get in touch with Jonathan at Dartmouth Museum: vicechair@dartmouthmuseum.org.
See: https://www.dartmouthmuseum.org/
Images: (top to bottom): Dartmouth harbour entrance from Bayards Cove, 1930s; Vernon MacAndrew, around 1939; Traditional houses beside a rice field in the Huerta de València, c1912. Autochrome; Hyacinths in flower, Autochrome; MacAndrew’s expedition motor yacht, Harpado, undergoing repairs in Jeddah c1923; Philippines, over-water stilt village (possibly Moro), hand-tinted photograph, 1929;Shells from the Cyclophorus genus of land snails, found in the Philippines, 1929; West Solent One Design yachts racing in Torbay, early 1930. All courtesy of Dartmouth Museum.
