Shepherds and Sheep in Snowdonia (1951)

 

In 1951, Grace Robertson (born England, 1930) was despatched to record life among the sheep farmers of Snowdonia, Wales. Robertson was on her first assignment for The Picture Post magazine (1938 – 1957). She’d been hired by the periodical in 1950, a time when only a few women were working as photojournalists. “In those days”, Robertson said, “if you were a middle-class girl there were [only] three jobs – teaching, secretarial work or nursing, just to fill in until you got your man.” Before getting the job, Robertson had pretended to be a man. “I was Dick Muir,” she recalled in 2010, ‘explaining that she married the first name of a young man she had once fancied to her Glaswegian mother’s maiden name’ – “I was rather pleased to put unrequited love to good use.” True love did arrive. She met her husband, Thurston Hopkins, a hymned photojournalist when they both worked at the Post.