How to find the Derby Registers on the new site….

The index to the Derby Registers, otherwise known as Derby Official photographs, which was formerly hosted on the old Midland Railway Society website, can now be found on the Midland Railway Study Centre website. Please update any bookmarks you may have to them – https://www.midlandrailwaystudycentre.org.uk/derby-registers/

Having got that announcement out of the way, this is a good opportunity to share a bit of background information about these Registers, their content and the people behind them.

Thomas Scotton held the position of the Midland Railway’s Official Photographer, being so appointed in 1882 having spent the previous 17 years of his employment as a painter. This was in the pioneering days of the art of photography and Scotton had evidently carved out a reputation as a talented amateur photographer among the vibrant club scene in Derby. Scotton had been rubbing shoulders with W.W.Winter and Richard Keene, to name just two prominent members of that community.

Scotton’s new appointment was under the Locomotive Department, but his work quickly encompassed the breadth of the Company’s activities. He was commissioned to record important new structures, as well as a lot of less important structures like bridges and often the dilapidated examples that were about to be replaced. He photographed the outcome of accidents & mishaps, he was sent out to record the picturesque scenery around the Midland Railway to brighten the interiors of passenger carriages, and much more mundanely, he recorded a ‘portrait shot’ of dozens and dozens of new locomotives, carriages and wagons as they emerged from the Derby Works.

Throughout all his endeavours (with the unavoidable exception of those wagon portraits), he was able to let his inner artist surface in his work. Always impeccably framed and composed, he would frequently find a few willing (?) volunteers to “casually loiter” within his views. Whether they be platelayers or even local farmers, Scotton clearly believed that even a run-of-the-mill photograph of a bridge that is about to be demolished should be artistic. In many such images, as illustrated above, close inspection will reveal that the “fisherman” casually perched on the river bank in the middle-distance is actually just holding a small stick.

There is no doubt that Thomas Scotton covered an inordinate milage in the course of his work, a lot of which was a long way from the railway itself. He would undoubtedly have had at least one assistant travel with him as the weight of this camera and tripod alone would be more than enough to carry, without the requisite case of glass negatives to go with it.

Thomas Scotton remained in post until his sudden death in 1894, and was succeeded by his son, Thomas Albert Scotton. T.A.Scotton presided over an ever-expanding Photographic Department for the remainder of the Midland Railway’s existence and well into the LMS period, before retiring in 1934. As cameras got smaller and cheaper (notably, as did film and developing costs), the wider use of photography, along with the newer process of “photocopying”, led to more photographers and much more work for them. By the time the Midland Railway was ‘grouped’ into the LMS in 1923, the Company’s “Official” photographers had produced in excess of 13,000 images, all on glass plate negatives.

The truth is that we do not fully understand the nature of the Midland Railway’s recording and referencing of its photographs. We do know it evolved over the years as many of the surviving glass plate negatives have up to three different reference numbers scratched into their surfaces. The commonality appears to be that the prefix ‘DY’ was universally employed. It is evident that at some point in the 1930s, the London Midland & Scottish Railway needed to have a clear out of their Derby Photographs and simply disposed of those they considered no longer “relevant”. At the same time, so the evidence suggests, the index was completely rewritten with a whole new set of DY numbers allocated.

Over the years, members of the Midland Railway Society have done an enormous amount of work to transcribe the surviving Derby Registers (the original pages of which are held by the National Railway Museum at York, along with the bulk of the surviving negatives). The late Ashley Sanders coordinated a project over 20 years ago to ‘crowd source’ our members to create the transcript that now forms the Derby Registers Index from DY1 to 13009 – the end of the Midland period entries.  It is estimated that the LMS period goes up to around the DY47000 figure, and with British Railways, continuing on into the region of DY60000.

Hand-in-hand with that work has been ongoing efforts to try and reconcile the three often incomplete, or even conflicting, elements of • Register entries, • surviving negatives, and  • known prints… the latter often surviving from long destroyed negatives. There remains a lot of work to do and a lot of those gaps will never be filled, unfortunately.