Cathedral’s £1.98 Internet eBay ‘find’

Put up for auction by a seller on the mainland who had no idea of the subject matter they featured, a member of the Cathedral’s staff, who wished to remain anonymous, began bidding for the two images - and won the bid obtaining them for 99p each.

Despite the apparent age of the images - believed to be late 1800s - a few verifications revealed the images to be original photographs of none other than Bishop Alexander and his wife Cecil Frances.

What alerted staff to the images was the photographer’s name - Alexander Ayton. It was under Ayton’s name that they had come up for auction on eBay with the subject simply referred to as ‘a lady and gentleman’.

Being history buffs, the staff realised that Ayton has maintained a photography studio in Kennedy Place, which some Sentinel readers may recall as the ‘Old Unionist HQ’- does anyone remember the building with the blue facade?

At some point towards the last decade of the 1800s Ayton moved premises to Shipquay Place (now erroneously referred to as Guildhall Square).

Once in possession of their sepia-tinted treasures, the staff set about authenticating the images, but unfortunately it transpired that the vast majority of the negatives that has be amassed by Ayton through his work had been destroyed by a subsequent tenant of the building where the studio had been.

It is a sad end to a life’s body of work particularly when you think that Ayton enjoyed the patronage of Queen Victoria, and had even taken the Monarch’s photo as well, and because he had been given the ‘Royal nod of approval’ Ayton also had a studio in Edinburgh in Scotland. Incidentally, in addition to his portrait work, Ayton was also very famous for his landscape studies particularly of Donegal and Londonderry, and some of his stunning scenes of Tory Island in the 1870s are still in existence, but I digress...

Fortunately for the Cathedral guides, there are large numbers of portraits and images of the late Bishop Alexander, so identifying him was rather easy. By comparison identifying Cecil Frances was a little more complex.

One of the guides, however, had a sketch of Mrs Alexander and the tiny eBay image had nudged at his brain when he first saw it, but he was unsure until he had the picture in his hand and could compare the images side by side. Sure enough, the drawing is based on that exact photograph - although there is no way of knowing exactly how many copies of that image were in circulation or, indeed, still are for that matter.

The important thing is that the Cathedral is now in possession of two small, original companion portraits of sound provenance of the Bishop and his famous hymn-writing wife, and all for the princely sum of just under £2.

Now that’s a bargain!