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The Beaford Archive contains a wealth of photographs documenting rural life in North Devon from 1880 to the late 1900s. The key instigator of the Archive was the photographer James Ravilious. He contributed nearly 80,000 photographs of life in the villages and on the farms - documenting a vanishing way of life as mechanization gradually redrew the outlines of rural life. Roger Deakins, later an Oscar winning cinematographer, contributed another 5,000 pictures.
James Ravilious
Untitled documentary photograph by James Ravilious for the Beaford Archive © Beaford Arts www.beafordarchive.org. RAV/01/2108/39A. the image shows harvest time on Spittle Farm, home of the Down Family, just outside Kings Nympton
Ravilious also scoured the archives of families across the region to create the Old Archive - documenting the years between 1880 and 1940. There are some examples from Kings Nympton below. The full set can be found at https://beaford.org/tld-kingsnympton
The Project
Kings Nympton is one of five communities across North Devon that has been invited to take part in the Lost Decades project - the others being Dolton, Bideford, Hatherleigh and Atherington. This reflects the fact that James Ravilious spent a lot of time in and around Kings Nympton, documenting the farming community. You can hear John Down and Carol Sampson recount their memories of James photographing at their family's farms in the videos below.
Part 1 - The Lost Decades
The years between the Old Archive (1880-1940) and the Ravilious/Deakins archive (1970s/80s) are termed by Beaford `The Lost Decades' - years for which little photographic evidence exists in the archive. Their aim is to fill this gap by inviting families who were living here at the time to open their own albums and scrapbooks to source family photographs that can sit alongside those already collected. If yours is a family that was living in Kings Nympton during those decades, we would love to have access to your records to look for potential additions to the archive.
Beaford's Caroline Preston explains what the organisation hopes to gain from the Lost Decades project.
Part 2 - The Old Archive
As well as taking around 80,000 photographs of his own - in the 1970s and 80s - James Ravilious also scoured people's own archives to build up a picture of rural life from the 1880s to the 1940s. This priceless collection of around 5,000 photographs documents a lost way of life by showing a pre-mechanisation farming community at work and at play. There is much that can still be learned from these pictures, which are being painstakingly redigitised to bring out new levels of detail.
How can we help
The Beaford Old Archive includes 137 photographs of Kings Nympton that have been digitally remastered to bring out the best possible detail. Our task is to go through the archive, and see what in formation we can add to what is already on record.
the full set of 137 pictures can be found here.
Ella Ravilious - daughter of the photographer James, Beaford Arts trustee and curator of photography at the V&A, talks about the Beaford Old Archive - set up by her father - and how communities like Kings Nympton can help to fill in some gaps in the archive.
For an example of how remastering brings out new detail, see below.
Click on the yellow arrows to toggle between the old and new versions.
Old
Old
Our first priority is to identify those families that were living in the village during the Lost Decades - and to invite them to share their old photograph albums with us. If you think you can help, do contact us at kingsnymptononline@gmail.com. We hope to complete this part of the project by early summer, so we can then move on to selecting possible inclusions in the archive and submitting them by the end of the year. Once the images have been selected, Beaford will send a professional digitizer to the village to capture the images at best possible quality.
TIMESCALE
