Chair of the Friends of Coventry Cathedral and CovSoc member, Martin Williams, tells us about the earliest photo of St. Michael’s Church. Martin writes….
This is the earliest known photograph of St Michael’s Church, Coventry. There are earlier paintings and engravings but no earlier photographs. The photo was taken in the 1860s by Joseph Wingrave, who ran a chemist’s shop in High Street, Coventry. At the foot of this article in the photo on the left you can see his shop on the High Street corner. From the weatherworn stonework of the tower and spire you can see that the photo of St Michael’s was taken before the great restoration of the church that took place at the end of the 19th century.
Wingrave was quite an entrepreneur. He hauled his bulky camera equipment around Coventry city centre and the locality. Photographic film was not invented until many years later, so his pictures had to be recorded one by one on glass plates. From the glass images he produced sepia photographs on thin paper that he mounted on card and advertised for sale in the local newspaper as Views of Coventry and District. The illustration shown above is a good example of that initiative. It is a photograph sized 6.1/2ins x 4.1/4ins, often referred to as a cabinet card because it displayed well in a cabinet.
Joseph Wingrave was born in Luton in 1821 and moved to Coventry in the 1840s. He developed an interest in the history of his adopted city grew, and he played an active part in many local organisations. He died in 1897.
The Wingrave photos were reproduced in some old books, but not with any great quality. A search was mounted for the original glass slides that the book reproductions had acknowledged to the Coventry Museum service. Finally, last year the glass slides were traced in the Local History Section of The Herbert Museum. Using the latest computerised scanning equipment the Wingrave slides were scanned by Coventry Digital, and a selection of them were shown to members of the Friends of the Cathedral during the presentation by Dr Ben Kyneswood that follows the AGM. The historic Wingrave pictures are the earliest photographs of Coventry and they are an important part of Coventry’s heritage record.
This article appeared in the October 2024 edition of the Friends of Coventry Cathedral Chairman’s e-news.