Various news outlets reported recently that Brian Edwards, a visiting research fellow with the regional history centre at the University of the West of England had identified the image of a Wiltshire thatcher, as seen on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV.
Edwards said he came across the image in a photograph album during continuing research extending from an exhibition he curated with Wiltshire Museum in 2021. It is understood that the Led Zeppelin lead singer, Robert Plant, discovered a framed, coloured photograph of the original image of the Wiltshire thatcher in an antique shop near guitarist Jimmy Page’s house in Pangbourne, Berkshire.
The original image was discovered in a Victorian photograph album titled: “Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury. Whitsuntide 1892. A present to Auntie from Ernest.” It contained more than 100 architectural views and street scenes together with a few portraits of rural workers from Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset.
Beneath the stooped man’s image, the photographer wrote: “A Wiltshire thatcher.” Further research suggests the thatcher is Lot Long (sometimes Longyear), who was born in Mere in 1823 and died in 1893. At the time the photograph was taken, Long was a widower living in a small cottage in Shaftesbury Road, Mere. A part-signature matching the writing in the album suggests the photographer is Ernest Howard Farmer (1856-1944), the first head of the school of photography at the then newly renamed Regent Street Polytechnic, now part of the University of Westminster.
Farmer’s photograph is now in Wiltshire Museum in Devizes, and an exhibition featuring the image, along with others taken in the west of England during the Victorian era, is scheduled to be held at the museum in spring 2024.
https://www.uwe.ac.uk/news/unidentified-figure-on-cover-of-iconic-album-revealed
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