Why the fishwives of Portobello and Newhaven were the Instagram stars of their day

A card depicting women in the Highlands

Cartomania was a photographic craze that seized the imagination of the British public at the beginning of the 1860s. As the new decade dawned, studios the length and breadth of the country were eagerly introducing a new format of photograph that had just arrived from France. These small portraits were about the same dimensions as a standard business card and therefore, on account of their size and origin, were known by the French term cartes de visite.

Every sitting produced a number of different portraits in a variety of poses, each mounted on a stiff card, usually with the photographer’s details printed on the back. The sitter would typically order one or two dozen for distribution amongst his or her friends and extended family, who would in turn reciprocate with their own portraits. Specially designed albums were available to house one’s collection and these albums, some of them lavishly decorated, were prominently displayed in the home for visitors to peruse, assess and discuss their host’s social circle.

Enterprising photographers soon saw opportunities beyond simply photographing members of the public, and a market for celebrity portraits quickly developed. Lucky the photographer who could gain access to a popular luminary! A series of portraits of the royal family taken by photographer John Mayall in the summer of 1860 sold ‘by the 100,000,’ according to one contemporary commentator. Authors and artists, prelates and poets, politicians, playwrights and actors were all popular subjects.

General Garibaldi in 1864 and the Shah of Persia in 1873 were both bombarded with requests for a sitting when they visited London. A quarter of an hour’s work could provide a photographer with a handsome windfall and a steady stream of income for years to come. Celebrity portraits were so popular that several reports mention the crowds that formed to ogle the displays in stockists’ windows, often to the extent that pavements were blocked and traffic impeded.

However, even the best studios sometimes struggled to provide variety. Commercial portraiture conformed to a limited range of poses, and most studios’ painted backdrops repeated the same hackneyed clichés. Libraries were a perennial favourite, since they implied erudition, while many sitters were shown amidst leafy bowers or on terraces overlooking an ornamental lake. Plaster columns, velvet curtains and balustrades were ubiquitous, to the extent that some albums became a monotonous sea of bland sameness. Photographers looked around for ways to offer something a little more unusual. In Belgium, apple-cheeked dairymaids proved a popular subject, as did matadors in Spain and hand-coloured portraits of local girls wearing their regional costumes in Italy. Here in the British Isles traditional costumes had largely disappeared from everyday life but studios made the most of what was available. The pit brow girls of Wigan — trouser-clad young women who worked on the surface at coal mines — were unusual enough to garner the attention of local photographers, while Irish photographers sought out pretty, bare-footed colleens.

Welsh photographers provided an array of female subjects of all ages sporting traditional Welsh costume, invariably topped off with a tall, black hat and, for some reason, often posed drinking tea, as if the Welsh had a greater proclivity for the beverage than their English neighbours. However, to judge by the number of surviving examples, the most popular of these regional portraits were taken in Scotland. Here the most sought after subjects were the wives and daughters of the fishermen of two villages on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, Newhaven and Portobello. The women’s distinctive traditional costume of striped skirts layered one on top of another drew every photographer in the nearby city at one time or another. In addition to keeping their menfolk’s nets in working order and baiting their lines, these ‘fishwives’ also cleaned and sold all the fish that were caught, crying their wares on the streets of Edinburgh with their heavy baskets of fish on their backs.

Duncan Macara, a stationer and photographer with premises on Cockburn Street in Edinburgh, produced a series of ‘Scotch Photographs’ during the 1870s. The very first carte in the series was a portrait of a ‘Newhaven Fishwife,’ described in the notes on the back of the mount as ‘so picturesque, and her appearance so clean and tidy, that everyone is struck with the uniqueness of her costume — perhaps the most characteristic to be seen anywhere in Britain.’ The notes further explained that marriage outside their community was frowned upon, and concluded with a description of the colours of the women’s cotton jackets, their petticoats and stockings.

Edinburgh photographer William King Munro also provided a lengthy description with his portraits of various fishwives, emphasising ‘the laborious lives which they lead’ and also mentioning that ‘they generally marry in their own caste.’ The women were ‘very dexterous in bargain-making’ and possessed ‘a species of rude eloquence, an extreme facility in expressing their feelings by words and gestures.’

Elsewhere several Scottish photographers produced series of local women treading their laundry with their bare feet, sometimes two to a tub, and these too came with extensive captions on the backs of the mount, which invariably mentioned something about ‘the frosty weather when their legs are literally as red as blood with the cold.’ These portraits presented the women as if they were members of some ‘exotic’ tribe on the far side of the globe, for the edification and entertainment of a privileged, urban audience far removed from the harsh realities of life in the Highlands.

It has recently come to light that not all the portraits of Newhaven fishwives are what they seem at first glance. Though clearly staged by the photographer, the majority do certainly depict what they claim to portray and many are captioned ‘Newhaven Fishwife’ or a similar title in the lower margin. On the other hand, and somewhat surprisingly, other portraits may well show tourists wearing costumes provided by the studio. In 1882 the Portobello photographers William Kyles and William Smeaton Moir — the men operated two studios in the village, one ‘opposite the Old Town Hall’ and another ‘adjoining the Pier’ — ran newspaper advertisements under the header ‘Novelty for Tourists’ in which they informed the public that they kept ‘Costumes on the Premises for taking Ladies as Newhaven Fishwives, and Gentlemen as Highlanders.’ Three years later the partnership had broken up but Moir was still at the same addresses and still advertising the same service.

Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing just how many tourists to Portobello availed themselves of this opportunity, though it’s easy to imagine that those who did had a great deal of fun dressing up and assuming a new identity for the camera, and the resulting portraits would certainly have brought a smile to the faces of their friends back home who perused their albums. However, no carte portrait has yet come to light which can unequivocally be identified from its context as one of these costumed tourists, though it is hoped that an example will eventually surface.

Cartomania: Photography and Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century, by ​Paul Frecker, is published by September Publishing, £40