Windows on York’s history (From York Press)

Windows on York’s history

9:15am Friday 3rd February 2012 in Features

Housed in an oak cabinet at the Minster Library is a unique assemblage of old photographs of York. STEPHEN LEWIS trawls through the Evelyn Collection – and remembers the man whose legacy it is.

THERE is a lovely description in a book by local historian Hugh Murray of the day a young doctor, William Evelyn, first came to York.

It was January 19, 1891. Dr Evelyn, then aged 30, had come to the city to take up a partnership in a Museum Street general practice.

According to Mr Murray’s book, Doctor Evelyn’s York, he had left a London shrouded in a “pea soup fog, characteristic of the capital city with its myriad of sulphurous and coal-burning fires”. At 2pm that afternoon, he arrived in York to be confronted by an entirely different scene.

“He walked out of York Station and stood facing the city walls, which were covered with two inches of snow. In the dim half light of a winter’s afternoon, the walls in their mantle of white looked magnificent and created a great impression on the young man.”

It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the city. The doctor was later to say: “I fell in love with York then and have been increasingly in love with it ever since.”

We should be grateful he did. Because not only did Dr Evelyn become a tireless campaigner against what he called the ‘spoliation’ of his adopted city – he also left a priceless collection of paintings, sketches, drawings and photographs of old York.

The early 1900s were a time of great change for the city. But progress brought its own dangers. York’s heritage was under threat from roads, trams and overdevelopment.

In the time he could spare from his medical work, Dr Evelyn threw himself into the fight to save the city he loved. He became the secretary of the Yorkshire Architectural and York Archaeological Society (YAYAS), and used this position to campaign against what he called ‘vandalism’ – including the widening of roads for electric trams, the demolition of ancient churches, and his pet hate, advertising posters.

His energy was inexhaustible. When the city council decided to build a memorial to those who died in the Great War, for example, Dr Evelyn joined in the debate about where it should be sited.

He arranged for photographs to be taken of all the possible locations, then superimposed a memorial design by Edwin Lutyens on each of the photographs to give people an idea of what a memorial at each of the sites would look like.

He also gave a series of public talks, using slides of photographs he had commissioned of York, to drive home his campaigning points.

One, entitled Nineteenth Century Fingerprints Of Vandalism In York, was intended to shake citizens out of their apathy.

“Curious to note,” he told his audience, “how apparently much more interest is taken in the preservation of what little has been handed down to posterity of old York by those who have for various reasons come to reside in the dear old city from afar than is evinced, with a very few notable exceptions, by those who have lived all their lives in the city.”

It is many years since Mr Murray wrote his biography of Dr Evelyn. But he makes no secret of his admiration for the man even today. “He was an individual who got down and did things,” he says.

Perhaps Dr Evelyn’s most lasting contribution, however, was the huge collection of pictures and prints of York that he amassed in his lifetime.

An inveterate collector, he hunted out sketches, drawings, paintings and maps of the old city, some dating back several centuries. Those that he couldn’t buy for himself, he had photographically copied. And, as his campaigns to preserve old York gathered pace, he commissioned a series of ‘new’ photographs of the city to illustrate what needed saving.

He died in 1935, and his collection of 1,200 or so original drawings, sketches and maps of old York was bought by the city art gallery for the bargain price of £3,000.

But his collection of more than 3,000 photographs – including photographs of all the original drawings and sketches he had gathered, but also a series of photographs showing the city in the first three decades of the 20th century – was passed to YAYAS, the organisation of which he had been secretary for so long, and on behalf of which he had campaigned so vigorously to save the best of York.

That collection is held by YAYAS to this very day. It takes the form of glass-plate negatives – and some larger ‘positive’ images – housed in an oak cabinet that Dr Evelyn had purpose-built.

The collection is kept in a temperature-controlled vault at York Minster Library’s Old Palace. Its keeper is Ian Drake, a volunteer city guide and retired Yorkshire Water finance manager who, like Dr Evelyn before him, believes in giving something back to the local community.

Every one of the photographs is indexed with its own reference number – and in a series of old exercise books a record is kept of what each image shows.

There are some fairly dull images among them, Ian admits: and others about which we know very little.

But overall the collection provides a wonderful window onto a vanished York. “It is a fairly unique collection. The city council has its own collection of old photographs, many of which can be seen on the Imagine York website. Bu this is an excellent addition to that.”

Because it takes the form mainly of glass-plate negatives, the collection isn’t, sadly, the kind of thing you can just turn up to browse through.

You can arrange to see it by appointment – but probably only researchers, historians and writers of local histories would want to, Ian admits.

Nevertheless, YAYAS is trying to make it more accessible. Ian is in the process of slowly scanning every one of the images. It is a big task, and one that will take some time. “We’re all volunteers!” But the hope is that eventually the images will be put up on the YAYAS website, where those interested will be able to browse to their hearts’ content.

In the meantime, we reproduce a few of them here…

Legacy of a lifetime

Many of the images in YAYAS’ Evelyn Collection are photographs of drawings and sketches of old York that Dr Evelyn gathered during his lifetime.

They include a sequence of sketches of the Ouse Bridge at various times during its life. One shows a gathering of people on the bridge – the Old Ouse Bridge, that is, with its surface sharply canted up to a peak in the centre.

The sketch of which this is a photographic copy was dated August 13, 1807.

“It must have been drawn shortly before the demolition of this bridge, which started in about 1810,” says Ian Drake, the keeper of the collection. “The bridge was part demolished but kept in use while the new bridge was completed.”

Another image shows the Old Ouse Bridge superimposed directly above a drawing of the ‘new’ one that replaced it in 1810: a perfect opportunity to compare the two. Another fascinating sketch shows Thursday Market (now St Sampson’s Square). “At a guess I would date the sketch to the early part of the 19th century,” Ian says.

Dr Evelyn also kept a photographic record of old posters and billboards that tickled his fancy – such as one for a ‘baby show’ at Clifton on Monday, October 8, 1855. And he commissioned photographs showing the intrusion of ugly advertising hoardings against the skyline of York – such as this one of the Minster in 1912, with an Oxo advert prominent in the foreground.

• If you are researching the history of York and would like to make an appointment to view the Evelyn Collection, contact Ian Drake at YAYAS at ridrake@hotmail.com

A drawing of the Thursday Market, with part of Silver Street

An engraving of Ouse Bridge, with the old crossing shown above the ‘new’ one which was started in 1810

An advertisement for a baby show in 1855