The Suffragette Barbara Ayrton dressed as a fisher girl to promote the Women’s Exhibition, May 1909
Christina Broom was forty years old when she taught herself how to use a camera. Not an everyday occurrence in 1903. She got help from her teenage daughter Winifred to help in the darkroom based in the coal cellar in their Fulham home and she started making postcards – a growing industry at the time. Her husband Albert, who had badly injured himself in a cricket match so severely he had to give up his Ironmongery business, wrote the captions. She set up a stall in Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace from which she sold her postcards from 1904 until 1930. At her most popular she was printing 1000 pictures a night. This was a time when there were seven reliable postal deliveries a day.
What was different about Christina Broom, born Christina Livingston at the end of 1862 near Sloane Square, is she lugged her camera equipment around with her. Women photographers were not common but the few around became studio based. But jostling for space with men Christina Broom, at less than five feet tall, became the first female press photographer. “Historically she has been seen as an eccentric amateur, which has meant her work hasn’t seen the light of day in quite the way it should have done,” said Anna Sparham who curated an exhibition of Broom’s work at the Museum of London.
Lucy Davies in the Telegraph wrote of Broom:
Because newspapers were for the most part still unable to reproduce photographs, postcards were also used as a means of disseminating news, and Broom’s enterprise happened to coincide with a period of great upheaval in British history – she captured both the Suffragette movement and the First World War with an unusual, almost maternal intimacy. She also turned her lens on the more humdrum details of city life, producing many streetscapes and informal portraits in which her sitters appear wonderfully unguarded.
Young suffragettes advertising the Women’s Exhibition, May 1909.
Women’s Social and Political Union Exhibition stand, probably at Claxton Hall during the Women’s Parliament, February 1908.
Suffragette Charlotte (Charlie) Marsh at Hyde Park rally, 1908.
The Sweets Stall at the Women’s Exhibition, Prince’s Skating Rink, May 1909.
Christabel Pankhurst, co-founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), photographed inside the Women’s Exhibition, held at the Princes’ Skating Rink, Knightsbridge, May 1909
The Catalogue and Enquiries stall at the Women’s Exhibition, Prince’s Skating Rink, Knightsbridge, May 1909.
The reconstructed prison-cell exhibit at the Women’s Exhibition, Prince’s Skating Rink, Knightsbridge, May 1909.
Suffragettes in Hyde Park on Women’s Sunday, June 1908.
Charlotte Despard, president of the Women’s Freedom League, at the Green, White, & Gold Fair organized by the Women’s Freedom League, 1909
Nurses and midwives marching in their uniforms to the Albert Hall
Mounted suffragettes taking part in a procession to promote the Women’s Exhibition, May 1909.
The Putney and Fulham Women’s Social and Political Union branch shop and office, 1910.
Women’s Social and Political Union Exhibition stand, probably at Claxton Hall during the Women’s Parliament, February 1908.
The Drum & Fife Band performing in a procession to promote the Women’s Exhibition, May 1909.
A suffragette in historic costume at the Green, White, & Gold Fair organized by the Women’s Freedom League, 1909.
Portrait of Christina Broom taken by her daughter Winifred Broom
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