Deck chairs on the Queen Mary

The photographs in the Stewart Bale archive show what British life and work was like in the 20th century. They were taken of many different subjects including industry and construction, transport, social history and World War II. There are about 200,000 negatives and 2,000 prints.

Stewart Bale Ltd was founded as an advertising agency by Herbert Stewart Bale (1859 - 1929), a printer who came to England from Australia in the early 1900s. The need soon arose for high quality illustrative photography for the business. A difficulty in finding photographers to meet these high standards eventually led them to fulfil this role themselves when Herbert’s son Edward Stewart Bale (1889 - 1944) came into the firm as a photographer.