Marriage: England Marriage Index (3Q1902 vol 2b p242)
George Corpe
Whitfield
Birth: 1832/3, in Paddington, London,
Middlesex,
England
Married: Laura Caroline Bishop in 1857 in Basingstoke district, Hampshire, England. Laura was born in 1834,
in
Maidenhead,
Berkshire, the daughter of a surgeon, and died in 1904 in Eastbourne, Sussex.
George initially established a photographic portrait studio of
his
own on Regent Street,
London, and then, in 1856, joined
forces with Samuel Lock to form Lock & Whitfield, a fairly
prominent firm in
early photography, with studios in London (178 Regent Street) and
Brighton (109 King's Road). In an advertisement placed in a Brighton
newspaper, dated 20
September 1864, Lock & Whitfield offered to take "carte de
visite
and every description of photograph, colored or uncolored, on
paper, ivory or porcelain." By 1867, Lock & Whitfield had fixed
the
price of twenty carte de visite portraits at £1.1s.6d. Lock
&
Whitfield probably employed a manager to run their Brighton
studio in the 1860s, but by the time of the 1871 census, George C.
Whitfield was living at Upper Rock Gardens, Brighton with his wife and
five children. Samuel Lock took up residence in Brighton in 1877, but
died 4 years later on 9th May 1881. Lock & Whitfield's Brighton
studio was taken over by another chain of
photographers, Debenham & Co in 1886. The studio in Regent
Street
carried the name of Lock & Whitfield until around 1895. Perhaps
the
most important work of this company is found in
the book Men of Mark; A
Gallery of
Contemporary Portraits (buy
used - if you can afford it!) which contains photo portraits
of
many of
the prominent men of late 19th century Britain. Other works can be
found at the National
Portrait Gallery and the British
Library.
In the 1860's, Walter Woodbury invented a means of mass producing
identical photographs known as the Woodburytype,
or Woodbury Process, a photo-mechanical printing process which has true
continuous half-tones and to the untrained eye is indistinguishable
from an actual photograph. George Whitfield became a
partner in the Woodbury Permanent Photographic Printing Company.
William Crawford's book on photographic processes The Keepers
of Light
quotes a
visitor to the Woodbury Company in the 1880s noting that eight men in
the printing
shop each worked seven presses containing four printing moulds each to
produce a total of 30,000 portraits in a single day. The presses were
mounted on rotating tables so that the worker could turn round the
table and attend to each press in turn.
Occupation: In 1881, an assistant at his
father's
photographic printing company; in 1901 a manufacturer of photographic
plates and paper.
Census & Addresses: 1881: 14
Sandringham Gardens
Uxbridge Road, Middlesex
1888: Cleveland Lodge, The Greenway, Uxbridge, Middlesex (from a letter
to Annie Plumbe forwarded to the Whitfields while she was visting there
in July 1888)
1901: living in Watford, Hertfordshire; Age 40; Born in Kensington,
Surrey; Occupation: Photographic Plate & Paper Manufacturer
Sources:
Birth: 1881 census
Marriage: England Marriage
Index (2Q1886
vol 2c p691);
exact date from Claire Freestone
If you have any comments, additions or modifications to the
information
on this page, please feel free to email me.
Created and maintained by: chris@ocotilloroad.com
