Johnston images provide a unique pictorial social history of Caithness
HERITAGE MATTERS: The Wick Society's regular column about local heritage
The Johnston Photographic Collection provides us in Caithness with a unique pictorial social history. We can see how people dressed, what they worked at, the shops that existed along our streets, what people did for entertainment and, they provide many mementos for families.
Beyond our own community, however, these photographs are also recognised as a major contribution to photographic history, as a source for the tellers of history and as a huge resource for family historians.
Three recent events help to illustrate these.
The Royal Photographic Society invited the Johnston Photographic Collection to present an online talk. Along with a range of Johnston images the presentation included a history detailing the origins of the Johnston story, beginning with Alexander Johnston, the son of an Edinburgh plumber, as he began to work with the relatively new art form of photography.
He originally set up his photographic business at the rear of his father’s plumbing business in Wick during the 1860s. Through three generations the Johnston family amassed somewhere in the region of 100,000 photographs – around 40,000 which are now available online at www.johnstoncollection.net. The Johnston’s basic business was portrait photography, but they were obviously astute enough to go beyond their studio and capture all walks of life.
The presentation also provided an opportunity to explain the establishment of the Johnston collection within the Wick Society. Third-generation Alec Johnston, on his retirement, gifted the collection to the Wick Society and when the then chairman, Iain Sutherland, went to Johnston’s studio he found himself literally "knee deep in glass plates”.
Many were damaged but through the funding and technical support of people such as Donald MacBeath and Marc Farr, from North Highland College UHI, the collection began to be digitised by a group of Wick Society volunteers – a group that continue to work to make this important collection accessible and available.
The Johnston photographs are regularly in demand by film companies, seeking to enhance their history programmes. Most recently, Channel 5 while making a programme entitled The World’s Most Scenic Railway Journeys, sent a film crew to Caithness where, along with other points on the Inverness to Wick line, the herring fishing industry story was told. The Johnston photographs were readily recognised as a key visual aid and scenes of the harbour, boats and the Whaligoe Steps will feature in the programme due for broadcast in the autumn.
The Johnston photographs are regularly consulted and added to by people exploring their family histories. On a recent occasion we received a telephone call offering to donate a batch of printed Johnston photographs pertaining to a family with Caithness connections. To our surprise and delight the collection consists of approximately 200 Johnston photographs depicting a number of prominent Caithness families – Flemington, Morris, Geddes, Coghill and Dunnett. We are greatly indebted to James Flemington for this amazing collection of photographs, in many of which he has identified the people. Currently they are being compared to our existing online images, although many of them will form a new family history resource.
Apparently when Alec Johnston donated the collection to the Wick Society he didn’t think they would be of any interest to anyone beyond Caithness. How wrong you were, Alec, and our heritage will forever be the richer.
- Wick Heritage Museum in Bank Row reopened at the start of June with Covid-19 safety measures in place, including a new one-way system. It is currently open two days per week – Fridays and Saturdays, from 10am to 5pm.