Three Winters in the Archive

The Brennan Collection is eleven thousand four hundred photographic negatives, mostly glass, taken between 1898 and 1951 by a commercial photographer in a mid-sized industrial city, and donated to the county archive in 1979 by a nephew who wanted the space.

It sat in nineteen boxes for forty-one years.

Rosalind was hired on a three-year grant to catalogue it, which is a job that sounds romantic to people who have not done it and which consists, in practice, of unwrapping a piece of glass, photographing it, measuring it, entering nine fields into a database, rewrapping it, and doing that four hundred times a month in a room kept at sixteen degrees.

Brennan photographed everything. That is the value of the collection and it is why it survived: he was not an artist, he was a business, and a business photographs weddings and factory floors and shop fronts and school groups and a man standing proudly beside a new van, and does it for fifty-three years without ever once thinking about posterity.

By the end of the first winter Rosalind had done about three thousand.

The woman

She first noticed her in a wedding group from 1923.

Not the bride. Third row, far left, partly behind a man's shoulder — a woman of perhaps thirty in a dark coat, looking slightly away from the camera.

Rosalind noticed her because she had seen the coat before.

This is the thing about doing four hundred a month: you develop a memory you did not ask for. You know the fabric of the period. You know which studio backdrop Brennan used in which decade, and that he re-used one in 1931 that he had retired in 1926, which is a nine-word note in the catalogue that took Rosalind four days to be sure about.

She went back through the database. The coat appeared in a factory group from 1921.

Same woman. Second row.

By the end of the second winter she had forty-one.

The pattern that was not a pattern

Forty-one photographs across twenty-eight years. 1919 to 1947.

Weddings, mostly. Some funerals. Two school groups. A shop opening. A christening.

Never the centre. Never the subject. Always in the second or third row, or at the edge, or partly obscured — and here was the thing that took Rosalind eight months to admit she believed: always looking very slightly away from the lens.

Everyone in a 1920s group photograph looks at the lens. That is what the photograph is for. The exposure is long enough that looking away is a decision.

Rosalind wrote it up cautiously, as a note in the catalogue, and mentioned it to her supervisor, who was interested in the way that supervisors are interested in something that is not going to affect the delivery date.

What she tried

Marriage records for every wedding she appeared at. No overlap in surnames.

The factory. The factory employed eleven hundred people and the records burned in 1968.

She tried facial recognition, which does not work on glass plate at that resolution and which she is embarrassed to have spent two weeks on.

She tried the obvious romantic explanation — that the woman was someone Brennan knew, a wife or a sister, brought along and quietly inserted — and it collapsed immediately, because Brennan's wife is in the collection eleven times, named, and is not her.

The third winter

In the third winter, at about photograph nine thousand two hundred, Rosalind unwrapped a plate from 1938 and found a shop interior.

A draper's. Two assistants behind a counter and a display of coats.

And on the left, at the end of the counter, in a dark coat, looking slightly away — her.

Working.

Rosalind sat in the cold room for a long time.

Then she went back through the forty-one, one by one, and looked not at the woman but at what was on her.

The 1919 photograph: a dark coat. The 1923 wedding: the same dark coat. The 1931 funeral: a different, better dark coat. The 1938 draper's: a display of coats behind her, one of which she is wearing.

The 1947, her last: an overcoat that Rosalind, by that point, could date to about 1944 from the buttons.

What it was

Her name was Eileen Farrelly and she was a draper's assistant and later a manageress, and she appears in forty-one photographs across twenty-eight years because in a mid-sized industrial city between the wars, the person who sold you the coat came to the wedding.

Not as a friend. As a supplier — the way the photographer came, and the caterer, and the man who did the cars. She was there because she had dressed half the room and because it was good business to be seen, and Brennan photographed her forty-one times because she was in the room forty-one times, and she looked slightly away from the lens every single time because she was not a guest and she knew it and she had been raised to know it.

She is not a mystery. She is a woman who was at work.

The catalogue entry

Rosalind found her through the shop, and the shop through the trade directory, and the trade directory gave a name and an address, and the 1939 register gave a date of birth, and the local paper in 1961 gave four lines of obituary that mention no family.

Eileen Farrelly, 1889–1961. Draper's assistant, later manageress, Corrigan & Sons, Ferry Street.

She is now named in forty-one catalogue records.

Rosalind's grant ended in September. The collection is at eleven thousand one hundred and something; someone else will finish it.

In her final report, under Notable findings, she wrote three paragraphs about Brennan's backdrop re-use in 1931, which is genuinely useful to other researchers and which she is proud of.

Under Other, she wrote one line.

E. Farrelly (1889–1961) now identified in 41 images. She was at all of them. Nobody had written her name down.