John Mead's Blog (8)

As the 100th anniversary of the Armistice is looming I am asking for help to contact any living relatives of former Daily Mirror photographers who served in WW1 or worked for the paper in the UK during the conflict. 

I am particular interested in Bernard, Thomas and Horace Grant  who had all covered conflicts around the world before the outbreak of the Great…

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Can anyone help in locating where the image below was taken? It was found in a suitcase stuffed full of 5x3 film negatives, which was transferred to the Reach Central Archive, Watford at the end of 2017 when we moved the Surrey Advertiser Archive. From other negatives found in the suitcase we believe it is somewhere on the English South Coast taken in the…

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Over the past six weeks we at  Trinity Mirror central archive have reviewed our holdings from the Birmingham Gazette. A number of images have come to light by a photographer by the name of H G Crabtree. He appears to have worked for the paper from the early 1930s to the mid 1940s.

Any information about his life and career at the Birmingham Gazette…

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Last week saw the Cambridge News photography archive move to its new home at Trinity Mirror's central archive at Watford. The move was triggered due to the impending move of the Cambridge News from their Milton offices.

The negative archive starts in 1959, if anyone knows the whereabouts of the pre 1959 collection please drop me an email, also names of any…

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With the Surrey Advertiser moving to smaller premises we have had to move their photographic archive up to the Trinity Mirror’s central archive in Watford. Like so many of the local titles I have repatriated to Watford the negatives prior to 1963 appear to have been lost. The journalists and present leadership team at the Advertiser have no knowledge of what happen and when. If anybody has any information what happened to the archives of the Surrey Advertiser, Surrey Times, The Guildford Time… Continue

Over the past five years as Trinity Mirror's archivist I have begun to bring together all its national and regional photographic archives into a central archive based at Watford.

What has become apparent that a number of the regional archives are incomplete and that no one person knows what happen to the them. There are Chinese whispers of…

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Its been a fantastic week in tracking down more information about the Daily Mirror's First World War photographers, especially George Mewes.

George went to Russia at the beginning of the war and became a Official Photographer with the Russian Imperial Army. As well as making a photographic record of the fortunes of the Russian army he wrote a series of articles which were syndicated around the world.

His description of the fall of Warsaw, the cost to the city and the…

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I took over the stewardship of the Trinity Mirror collection back in 2004. Since then I have when possible try to discover a little of the history and careers of our earliest photographers and where possible try to credit their work.

Back in 1904 when the Daily Mirror became the first UK daily newspaper to print photographs on a regular basis published images simply carried the credit Daily Mirror. Little credit was given to photographers like Ivor Castle, Tom, Bernard and…

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