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Documentary, The Lost Photographs of Mary Alice Young, BBC
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00:00Unseen for over a century, an incredible photographic collection of a family and
00:11community is being seen for the very first time. Once believed lost, the images were
00:18taken by a pioneering Ulster Scots photographer and now her family is
00:23delving into her past to examine her extraordinary legacy. I had no idea that
00:30they were going to be so fascinating. They're about life but also about the
00:34genius of this woman who was one of Ireland's earliest lady photographers. I
00:40think what's important is just that window into the past that people get to
00:44see with these unique photographs. Photography is about developing an image.
00:50She reveals these images and now, from our perspective, we can see the Ulster
00:57Scots community in the making.
00:59Galgorm Castle in Ballymina was a much-loved home to Mary Alice Young. Born in 1867, she was a member of a well-known,
01:26wealthy, County Antrim family.
01:32She was my great-grandmother and she was originally McNaughton from Dunderav in Bushmills.
01:39And she was married to my great-grandfather, Willie Young. And the Youngs made their money through the linen trade in the early 1800s.
01:48They had an office in St. Petersburg, another office in New York, and an office in Chile.
01:56So as linen manufacturers, they were very forward-thinking. And then they bought Galgorm in 1850.
02:07Castle life in those days was very different in that it was a whole community that used to survive and operate and be employed around the castle.
02:15Castle music
02:22Jane, come on in and I'll show you the books.
02:27Christopher Brook is building a fuller picture of Mary Alice's life with the help of the local museum manager.
02:34She was a great diarist and she wrote in her diary every day.
02:41And just to read one of the quotes here, 1914 was a bleak year.
02:46Irish politics reached boiling point with the militant woman suffragettes on top doing all the destruction they could.
02:55And while she was a suffragette, she was very anti-violence.
02:59Yes.
03:00And just looking at some of the things that she's written down as quotes, experts know everything that is known and don't want to know anything that isn't.
03:08Yes, that's quite amusing.
03:10And all her diaries, apart from this one, when she became old, she then took them down to Port Russia and she threw them in the sea.
03:20She's very much a woman of her times.
03:22So she would have been brought up in a big house family.
03:25And in that social set, there would have been a range of attributes that ladies would have to have shown.
03:31So they'd have to have been able to draw and maybe speak a little bit of French and show their musical accomplishments.
03:39But photography seemed to be an acceptable pursuit and Mary Alice Young seemed to have a real passion and interest for photography.
03:47But how she chose to take her photographs and what she photographs makes her special.
03:53A lot of her photographs are taken in the late 19th century and pre the First World War.
03:57And so much we know changed with the First World War.
04:00So she's kind of recording a moment in time, a time that's going to slip away.
04:05So it's a very exciting journey of discovery for us as we learn more about Mary Alice Young through her photographs.
04:10Mary Alice's interest in photography started in her early twenties.
04:17She had the resources to fund what started as a fashionable hobby.
04:21But she quickly developed a flair for taking compelling images.
04:25Today, Christopher is visiting the public record office, where the lost photos were rediscovered.
04:41Prony is the official archive for Northern Ireland.
04:45We have over three million records here, which is a huge amount.
04:49And a third of them come from private depositors.
04:52Christopher was in touch with me over another matter.
04:56And I mentioned the photographic slides.
04:58The story in the family was that they had been destroyed or misplaced.
05:02So he was really, really excited to find out that they were here.
05:06So Christopher, here we have some of your family's papers, D3027.
05:12And here are the 48 boxes of glass plate negatives.
05:16So 1,100 glass plates.
05:19But of course, because they're glass plates, they're completely inaccessible to the public.
05:24So the first stage in the project is getting the glass plates cleaned and rehoused and then digitised.
05:30I just want to find out what they were, how good they were, what they were about, and whether it would be possible to get access to them so we could have a look at them.
05:42I think people will be surprised by the collection.
05:45It's not just a record of Mary Alice Young and her family and her social circle.
05:51It's very much a record of the people in County Antrim and the surrounding areas.
05:57The glass plate is removed.
06:02The emulsion side is always up because that's the most sensitive part and can get scratched.
06:08So what I do is gently brush the emulsion side and then look at the glass slide to see whether it needs further cleaning.
06:22I can use a little bit of solvent.
06:25And then it evaporates.
06:29And then we put it in our new four-flap enclosures.
06:37So that when they stand up vertically in the new enclosures, it's easy to find the one that you're looking for.
06:44They would have sat and they would have rotted away in the Prony warehouse and maybe they would have stayed there forever.
06:50And I think it's important that these things are made available to the public.
06:53And I'm fascinated in history and I'm fascinated in those people who recorded history and were equally interested in it.
07:05Inside the quality of her photographs, Mary Alice's work has also attracted the attention of historians interested in culture and identity in Ulster.
07:17One of the most important things from Ulster Scott's point of view would be the fact that she's a woman and that in itself is extremely important to have perhaps not a voice but at least an eye that is that of an Ulster Scott's woman.
07:37Because over that period, the people who were producing the material were male and that's why her contribution is of such interest.
07:48Because by necessity, she's looking at things in a different way because it's at that period that we're getting emerging a consciousness, an awareness of an Ulster Scott's identity that coincides exactly with Mary Alice's lifespan.
08:09One of the problems to do with Ulster Scott's is visibility and that's why the ability to show images is in itself important.
08:22And she's directly involved in the community and those are the ones which I would find most interesting.
08:30The ones of the turf cutters, the gardeners, the people working the fields around where she lived and the people are Ulster Scots.
08:40Now they're not walking around with tartans and badges saying I'm an Ulster Scot but basically that's what we're looking at.
08:55Time has taken its toll on much of Mary Alice's collection.
09:00Restoring and preserving her photographs is a meticulous process.
09:05These glass plates are being shot in our new super camera.
09:16Hopefully they're future proofed for the next generation to be able to see these things.
09:21And from those then we have an accurate representation of what exactly we have.
09:27But as you can see, some of them are overexposed, some of them are underexposed and some are broken.
09:32And this is what I like to call a jigsaw puzzle without a box.
09:37Individually, if you isolate each one of these fractures, put it together and any gaps you can use with adding extra pixels in that, we're able to go to here.
09:52And that is phenomenal.
09:53We say this was broken a hundred years ago.
09:57It hasn't been seen.
09:58What you're looking at is the first time since they were taken to be able to see the image itself.
10:04And I think you'll see that the results are splendid.
10:08You wouldn't have known that had been broken at all.
10:10And the next wee bit that I wanted to show you was what I can see is very early Photoshop.
10:15So this glass plate, Mary, is taking obviously from a nursery rhyme, Little Miss Moffat and her spider, which wants to create something around it.
10:29So this wasn't really standard.
10:30This was people experimenting with the various different ways of how you could achieve what you wanted to achieve.
10:35Very much, there was no YouTube back then.
10:40So she has used her techniques as such.
10:42What we don't have is her finished print.
10:46But I'm pretty sure she was using techniques to get this to finish to what I hope is what she was wanting to see.
10:56And then finally, I find this fascinating.
11:00A photograph taken of a man and a horse.
11:05Now, if I wanted to take a photograph of a horse or a car, I can take up to 30 shots and then I'll pick that one.
11:14Back then she had to get a glass plate, put it into a box, set it all up, set it up, take the exposure.
11:22She could only do it once and then the horse is away.
11:24It's lovely because when we first started this, I was worried that the pictures were going to be all of, you know, gateposts and churches and gravestones or whatever.
11:33And I didn't expect to have such great sort of action shots for that quality.
11:37Mary Alice's photographic collection is not just an intriguing record of everyday life.
11:50There are intimate family photographs and artistically inspired images as well.
11:55Her camera also caught a glimpse of a period of turmoil.
12:04This photograph, taken during the Home Rule crisis, shows members of her family training with the Ulster Volunteer Force.
12:11Her husband, Willie, was involved in the dramatic smuggling of arms and ammunition into Larne to equip a unionist force determined to resist Home Rule.
12:27So Christopher, I thought we'd have a look at some of your family papers that are held here at the Public Record Office.
12:33As we know, Mary Alice married William Young, the eldest son of John Young in 1893.
12:42So we had a look at the Count books for Gal Gorm.
12:45So here there's an entry for February 1914 and it mentions Young for photos, seven and six.
12:52Do you see that there?
12:53I noticed, sorry, just to drop one other interesting one.
12:57Yeah.
12:58Rose Young, who was a Gaelic speaker and she together with Margaret Dobbs and Ada McNeil were known as the Ladies of the Glens.
13:08And they did a huge amount towards saving the Irish language culture verse song around that time.
13:14So it's interesting that while the Youngs and Willie Young, Mary Alice's husband, was bringing the guns in from Larne,
13:23Rose Young, his sister, was doing the Gaelic side.
13:27Was there tension, Christopher, with the family?
13:29Well, everybody always said there was, but the fact that she gets a monthly allowance here.
13:33Yeah.
13:34And also that she's in the Gal Gorm visitors book is coming at least once every two weeks to stay at Gal Gorm.
13:43Yeah.
13:44Seems to, seems to throw that out.
13:46Absolutely. Relations must have been, must have continued to be warm.
13:50So here we have a letter from the Secretary of the Admiralty to Sir Francis McNaughton.
13:55And it relates to a naming ceremony for the HMS Antrim.
14:00And Sir Francis has nominated his daughter, Mrs. William Young of Gal Gorm Castle.
14:06Now, even though these engagement diaries are later in date, they just show what a busy woman she was with either the school or the church or girl guides or whatever.
14:18She was a counsellor and she was an extraordinary lady because she believed that women should have their say
14:23and women should do and have their place in the world.
14:27And women's job was not to sit and do crochet and keep quiet and agree with everything their husband said.
14:35No, she was a strong lady. She was very involved in music in the local area.
14:39She was very involved in the scouts, in choirs.
14:42And she was actually one of the first women to get a convertible Vauxhall car, which she used to drive around Palomino.
14:48A selection of Mary Alice's photographs are being carefully chosen by Christopher's family and members of the public records team.
15:00That's interesting.
15:02Yeah, number 71.
15:05Yeah, we've got a drama boy.
15:07OK.
15:09You can decide.
15:11Or here's maybe a better one with the lady playing tennis.
15:14Where is it?
15:15Ballycastle.
15:17Today is the first time really anybody's been through them in this sort of detail.
15:22It's revealed the most fantastic photographs from an incredible photographer.
15:27So from that point of view, I think it's dynamic.
15:30We're in C20. This is number one. I know we have some other ploughing shots.
15:34The images will soon be revealed to the public for the first time in over a hundred years.
15:39This is number six, Gareth. Yeah. Yeah.
15:42That's crazy.
15:44Well, I've been excited about them ever since I heard they turned up because my mother thought she'd completely lost them.
15:51And that'll be, definitely keep that, because that'll be Belfast or Larn.
15:55And seeing them, I mean, they're just extraordinary. Like Christopher. I thought they might be quite boring, but they're wonderful family groups and best of all, the social history and all the things that went on and to see it photographed like that.
16:11I know you can go to a museum and see it. It's not quite the same seeing what your relatives took.
16:16I think definitely keep that.
16:19Yep. That's number nine. We'll keep that.
16:21I think Mary Alice had a very special eye. Some of her photographs are very unique.
16:25There is a real artist's understanding of use of light.
16:28When she photographs working people, you feel that she's not distant from them, that she's there in the moment with them and she has an empathy and sympathy for their lives.
16:36It's almost like a flash photography, but it's using natural light.
16:40Quite a few of Mary Alice Young's photographs are humorous. They're witty. They're intriguing. There's a slight mystery to some of them. And they also are good social documentary for the times.
16:52This is a very interesting time for photography and the development of photography and the whole style and the function of photography.
17:04Originally photography would have been seen as one of the fine arts and they would have been trying to emulate what painters of the time would have been doing.
17:11Portrait photography would have taken over from the old portrait paintings.
17:14But at that point during the 1880s up until about the 1910s, you can see a shift from photography being purely a creative artistic function to becoming much more to do with photojournalism.
17:29I can see a lot of influences of different artistic movements in her photography.
17:33You can see how she would have been influenced by the pre-Raphaelite painter movement. You can see the influence of artists such as Rossetti and Miele and Holman Hunt.
17:44They would have painted women with lovely long flowing locks of hair in quite naturalistic surroundings.
17:51And she's tried to emulate that type of style in a lot of her photographs.
17:54You can see the influence of the Impressionist painters as well. There's one image that Mary Alice Young took of a young girl with a watering can in the garden at Galgorm Castle.
18:08And there's a very similar painting by Auguste Renoir. But then there's other artistic movements she would have been influenced by such as some of the Flemish painters like Vermeer.
18:17Some of the interior shots that Mary Alice Young took of people doing domestic chores, such as there's one of a girl baking in a kitchen setting, the light flooding in through the window from the left hand side. She's really trying to capture that master of light.
18:37There's so many lovely photographs in the collection, but it's great to know who's who, like to find out that a lot of the children in the images, you know, one of them is Mary Alice's daughter.
18:47And she captured children in her family and in her friendship group. And some of those are really beautiful. The portraits are just so personal and intimate.
19:01The interior shots, you get to see what life would have been like and what people's drawing rooms and just a different way that they would have done the interior design in those days as well.
19:12And it's just how they would have left it and very lived in looking.
19:15And then we saw some monograms on some of the photographs where obviously she'd put her own ones that she particularly liked, like the image of her bedroom and all the shoes lined up underneath her dressing table.
19:33It's just so insightful. It was really special to find that.
19:38We're just going to head up now to Dunderav, which is where Mary Alice lived before she moved to Galgham Castle.
19:56And on the way you'll see a number of the locations where Mary Alice took her photographs.
20:03And it's interesting to see how the countryside has changed from then until where it is now.
20:08Keith, wonderful to have you here because you know the history in more detail than I do.
20:26I have the family history, which is really very colourful and wonderful.
20:31Some of the facts actually might not be quite correct.
20:34Sure. Well, I mean, I've done some research, so we've managed to put together a direct line from you right back to the first McNaughton to arrive here in 1580.
20:43Shane Dew, a.k.a. John McNaughton. Now, he's reported to have married the sister of Sorley Bowie McDonnell, and that helped him establish the family here.
20:53But they came from Western Scotland, so that's the big Scottish link.
20:56The first baronet would have been your great-great-great-great-grandfather, Francis Workman McNaughton.
21:03Now, he would have been responsible for building Dunderav House.
21:07Yeah. And we can trace your family here. Right back, there's your parents.
21:12So, you've got a strong heritage, and it grounds you right here.
21:17I mean, they were a fascinating family, the McNaughtons.
21:20Yes, one of your particular interests is Mary Alice McNaughton, and possibly even her mother, Alice Mary Russell, because her father was quite well-known in his own right, I believe you know.
21:32Yeah, that was William Hard Russell. He's highly recognised as being, as I say, one of the great war correspondents ever in history.
21:41Yeah. I mean, he changed the whole attitude towards war correspondents and reporting, and influenced people like Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole, and they went out and started to do their good work.
21:51And Mary Alice's father, Francis Edmund, Workman McNaughton, would have known his future wife through Willie Russell, because indeed he married Willie Russell's daughter.
22:01And he would have been 20 years older than his young wife. It doesn't appear to have been a very happy marriage.
22:08No, it wasn't. He was 20 years older, as you say, and she took a fancy to the land agent. So, she left. Her picture was turned to the wall, and she was never spoken about again.
22:19And, of course, Mary Alice grew up here. Her childhood was here until she married and then went to live at Galgum Castle.
22:27So, yes, I would say she had a relatively privileged upbringing, obviously, coming from such a family. But at the same time, we can't overlook the difficulties in her parents' marriage.
22:37A very public, scandalous Victorian divorce. And then later in life, she lost two brothers in India, in the forces, miles and miles away.
22:46And in the First World War, of course, her two cousins, her two young cousins, were killed in 1916. So, I think those hardships would have shaped her life, shaped the woman that she became.
22:58And she certainly would have had a lifestyle that many people would have liked, but it came with difficulties.
23:16Mary Alice's innovative photography style has prompted Christopher to discover what another aspect of restoration might bring to her pictures.
23:28It's breathtaking the quality. I mean, there's so much information, there's so much detail, but you have to go through the entire image and remove all dirt and scratches, because you need a clean image when you're colourising.
23:40So, what's extraordinary is when you zoom in on the watch, you can see that it's 25 past 10.
23:45You can even see, yeah, you can see the time. You would not be able to do that with a standard digital camera or phone. You just do not get that level of detail.
23:53So, let's just take a couple of these images and see what we get here. Right.
24:08This is a good example of, in the original scan, what colour would that car be? I have no idea.
24:15So, I made the creative choice here of keeping the car black so that the image goes straight to the woman and the passenger in the back of the car.
24:24Now, every image you do creates its own problems. In the original black-white image, there was a lot of damage.
24:31And there was exposure problems. The woman or the girl in the photograph, very difficult job getting her flesh tones right.
24:40So, I had to do a lot of work to tone her down so that it looked like a natural beauty, sitting on the bridge, enjoying a lovely day.
24:49After many months of research, planning and painstaking restoration, the collection of Mary Alice Young's original black-and-white images is almost ready to open to the public.
25:14Christopher is getting the first viewing of the exhibition.
25:18These are all great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and grandmothers and aunts and great-great-aunts.
25:25So, it's a little bit emotional coming in here and seeing all these people, relations come to life.
25:32But it's the clarity that is fantastic.
25:34When you think 120 years ago or maybe 130 years ago and to be able to produce photographs like this by any standard, even today's standard is amazing.
25:45So, it's important for us to look at important milestones in its past.
25:48And Mary Young's photographs have helped us in the future.
25:52part of Ballymina and the Ballymina story.
25:55And this is another part of Galgorm that we're able to give back to Ballymina.
25:59We're looking into the future and how will Northern Ireland be shaped.
26:10So, it's important for us to look at important milestones in its past.
26:13And Mary Young's photographs help us to do that.
26:16But also, I think she's a good role model.
26:18She's a strong, independent woman.
26:20And she's committed to what she wanted to achieve through her photography.
26:23When you look at this body of work, we have got to have that kind of recognition for aspects of Ulster Scots culture.
26:38But more importantly, I would say, what I would hope is that young people, young women, in particular from the Ulster Scots community here in Ballymina,
26:49might themselves be inspired to work on the material that she has produced in some way.
26:55Well, I mean, what a wonderful journey it's been from really two years ago when we first discovered that these glass plates were in storage
27:18and were actually never going to be seen because that was the issue.
27:21And I mean, one has to say, she was an extraordinary photographer.
27:24She was a very early one.
27:25And she experimented with lots of things, with light and movement, and really advanced in those days.
27:40I never met Mary Alice.
27:41I'd always heard about her.
27:42I'd had stories about her.
27:44And just to sort of finish this journey, I'd like to read you a passage from her last diary.
27:49She said, I've been very ill and can't recover my courage and vitality, which I feel is gradually ebbing away.
27:59I've enjoyed writing this journal sometimes, and now it's all ending.
28:04I've had a full and happy life, fooled too often of my own mistakes, but I have enjoyed it all.
28:11And now I must say goodbye.
28:13And with that it ends.
28:15people singing...
28:16He thenonsieur singing happy.
28:17...
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