IT was the ugly duckling! There is a mystique about old documents: the older, the more faded and the more yellow they are the better as many successful forgers will already have realised. Occasionally a document arrives which is the exception to the rule and this was one, writes Alan Roberts of the Barnoldswick History Society.

THE document was bound in cushioned leather with gilt lettering, and styled the British Army Photograph Album. Produced in 1890, it had been designed and printed in England, and bound in in Germany. There were spaces on each page to slot in photographs of your nearest and dearest, but the pages had become damaged by decades of use.

Two sizes of photograph were popular at the time. There were the smaller 'cartes de visite' or visiting cards which were 9cm by 6cm and pasted onto slightly larger card mounts which normally gave details of the photographer: the vast majority of these photographs were taken in the studio. Then there were the cabinet portraits mounted on larger cards (11.5 x 6.5cm). No other sizes would do: they had to fit into the slots in the album and collecting family portraits was so popular.

The album was illustrated with 12 fine plates of famous historical battle scenes by a Captain Bunnett. You could have a photograph of your grandmother staring into the camera while in the background British cavalry stormed the Russian guns at Balaclava and lower down the page three Lancers of the Duke of Cambridge’s Own Regiment sedately trotted past an inspecting officer in lush green parkland.

Further plates showed the British army both at home and abroad at a time when the British Empire stretched around the world. The coloured plates proudly show our army defending the empire against poorly-armed but determined tribesmen.

Incredibly the album also contained a musical box. Some suggested it would play ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. That would be written over ten years later when the British Army’s resources had been stretched suppressing an army of largely Dutch settlers during the Boer War.

Many young men from Craven served in South Africa including Walter Horsfield from Barnoldswick who was a sick-bay attendant there. Tragically he would die in the Rohilla shipwreck off the coast of Whitby during the First World War.

The musical box played ‘Home Sweet Home’ and The British Grenadiers’.

To modern eyes the album represented a hangover from Britain’s imperial past. The ideas once so proudly vaunted now seemed to be hopelessly out of date. The pages were badly damaged. The volume had now split in two, and there comes a realisation that not all old things are necessarily valuable. In pristine condition the album would be worth almost four figures, but this one had seen better days. The pull of a passing skip seemed unavoidable.

But then there was an epiphany. Sometimes family photographs are kept in shoe boxes: the corners become damaged, the surfaces become scratched and frequent handling would have wreaked its toll.

But where had the album come from? It was presented to a member of Barnoldswick History Society who was told it had come from a house clearance. There was little further information. The street name was said to be Welby Drive. It does exist but in either County Durham or Lincolnshire.

Was there a connection to Barnoldswick? Fortunately the answer was ‘Yes’. All the photographs are portraits except one and that was the photograph of a gravestone.

Christopher Waite had lived in Church Street in Barnoldswick and had died in 1889 at the age of 52. His son James Edward had died eleven years earlier aged just eight months. Could that photograph of a baby clothed in white with a tartan sash have been him?

A visit to Barnoldswick Library to access ancestry.co.uk revealed quite a story. Christopher’s father farmed 60 acres at Calf Hall about half a mile to the west of the town centre. He had at least nine children.

By 1851 just three sons and one daughter were still living at the farm. The boys had deserted the farming life in favour of working in the cotton mills as power loom weavers. This was the industrial revolution in action. Young men were leaving the land for the better pay in the towns.

Christopher was just 14 years old. He would marry Grace a policeman’s daughter who lived in Cross Keys Cottages. When baby James was baptised they were living and working on the farm, but four months later they were running a grocer and draper’s shop in Church Street.

And then the ‘ugly duckling’ suddenly became more valuable. The thirty-nine photographs had been well preserved within the pages of the photograph album. There is an art, almost a science, to dating old photographs even if the names of the sitters are unknown.

Then as now there were fashions in clothing and hairstyles. The cards reveal much about who took the photographs – they were all professionals: a high-quality photograph suitably presented was essential. There must have been fierce competition and as we will later see the family was prepared to travel outside Barnoldswick for that perfect photograph.

To be continued