Christina Broom was a pioneering woman in press photography. Working from 1903-1939 Christina observed seismic changes in society documenting topics including the suffrage movement and military life. Her photographs regularly appeared in publications including The Tatler, The Sphere, and The Illustrated London News.
Image from the Museum of London
Christina Livingston was born on December 28th, 1862 in Chelsea as one of eight children to Scottish parents. We don’t know much about her childhood but she married Albert Edward Broom in 1889 and the couple had their daughter Winifred in 1903 in Fulham.
Unfortunately due to a sporting injury to his shin bone (cricket related) Albert was unable to work and so Christina took it upon herself to convert her interest in photography into a viable business. She knew that there was great public interest in postcards and so Christina taught herself how to make her own, selling views of London under the name ‘Mrs Albert Broom’ at a stall in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace which Christina and her family ran from 1904 until 1930. The business soon became a family affair with Albert writing the picture captions and their daughter Winifred developing and printing the postcards.
Christina’s skill soon caught attention and in 1904 Christina was promoted as the official photographer to the Household Division with a darkroom in the Chelsea Barracks. She would hold this position until 1939.
While in this position she continued to photograph many local scenes, including some events at Fulham Palace including two major pageant productions in 1909 and 1910. The first, The English Church Pageant of 1909, retold the long history of the Church. It had 4,200 performers and an estimated 178,000 spectators who sat in purpose-built stands on the main lawn. The second performance, The Army Pageant of 1910 showcased the army’s history and the significance of historic sites, and played to an estimated audience of 100,000. For thirty years she also photographed the teams of the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race and was afforded the privilege to photograph the King and Queen and the Royal Family at close quarters.
While Christina was working the women’s movement in Britain had captured her passion and drive and she devoted her skills to documenting it. With the help of her daughter, Christina began photographing many of the processions, exhibitions and fairs of the militant Suffragette as well as the more law-abiding Suffragist movements. These images were converted into postcards and sold at various fairs and shops such as the Women’s Social and Political Union. Her images were popular and she had the talent of capturing typical day-to-day scenes in an almost unseen manner – her subjects typically lacked the typical formal stiffness that other official photographs seemed to be steeped in. In fact through Christina’s photographs we can today understand how broad the movement was across the classes, from pit brow women, pottery workers and nurses and midwives to actresses and journalists, and even photographing those who had been imprisoned for their beliefs in 1910.
One of the earliest of these images is housed in the Museum of London’s collection and shows members of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, at their ‘monster’ meeting in Hyde Park on ‘Women’s Sunday’, 21 June 1908.
(see image below)
At the ‘Women’s Sunday’ meeting in Hyde Park on the 23rd July, 1910 Christina, who was less than five feet tall, managed to manoeuvre a tripod and a heavy half-plate box camera through the packed Hyde Park into a good position and captured the earnest camaraderie of the speakers and their supporters. This was also the day the Suffragette colour scheme of purple, white and green, symbolising dignity, purity and hope, was launched.
Christina’s last suffrage photograph captures the arrival of the Cumberland suffragists, members of the moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, ‘Women’s Pilgrimage’ to the capital on 26 July 1913.
It is not clear why Broom stopped photographing the women’s suffrage movement in the summer of 1913. Several reasons have been suggested including that her other work became more popular and made more money, or that perhaps the escalating militancy of the WPSU was the reason for her to end this particular line of work. The end of her work with the suffragettes coincided with the summers of 1913 and 1914 when newspapers ran stories of broken windows, arson attacks on empty houses and churches, railways stations and sporting facilities.
Christina’s Husband died in 1912 and as she aged she found herself with crippling back pain at times, her daughter Winnie would push her to the barracks or the Royal Mews in her wheelchair, so that she was still able to use her camera. Christina passed away on June 5th, 1939 and Winnie who had served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the First World War was unable to pursue the photography business alone into the Second World War. But she remained committed to the work that had been achieved and set about ensuring that the existing negatives were preserved and that her mother received due credit housing her mother’s negatives in public institutions (some 40,000 images). Collections of these images have been scattered across the globe and are held in some prestigious institutions such as The Museum of London and The Imperial War Museum. In 1994 The National Portrait Gallery showcased some of the images in an exhibit on Edwardian Women Photographers.
Author: Emily Brown
Sources:
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/march-women-photographing-suffragettes-broom
https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/trails/women-photographers/christina-broom-1862-1939
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/meet-christina-broom
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