Christina Broom was probably Britain’s first woman press photographer. Her photojournalism captured London, the military, the suffrage movement and royalty from the early 1900s. In addition to the popularity of her postcards during her lifetime, Broom’s work has been recognised in books and exhibitions in the present day. She is commemorated with a blue plaque at 92 Munster Road, Fulham, where she lived and worked from 1913.

Chistina Broom was born Christina Livingston on 28 December 1862 to parents who were bootmakers. She studied in Margate, Kent, where she gained a lifelong passion for swimming, shooting and fishing. After her parents’ deaths, Christina ran the family business in the King’s Road, Chelsea. In 1889, she married Albert Broom, the son of a local ironmonger. Their daughter, Winifred, was born in 1890 and they sold the bootmaking business the same year.

Experiments in photography

The Brooms set up a stationer’s shop in Streatham in 1901, after Albert became permanently disabled following a cricket accident. They printed and sold photographs and satirical drawings as postcards.

Christina Broom began experimenting with a borrowed camera and registered nine photographs for copyright in May 1903. They included the opening of the new South London Electric Tramway between Westminster and Tooting by the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge returning in his carriage from the opening of Kew Bridge, and Derby Day at Epsom. She had captured the 1903 Derby winner, ‘Rock Sand’, and sold many postcards of the image.

Profitable postcards

The shop was not a success, but Broom’s photographs were and her work supported her family. Broom – known professionally as Mrs Albert Broom – invested in a second-hand half-plate camera and taught herself how to take photographs and about the chemistry of printing. Her shots included scenes of the changing Edwardian metropolis, from ‘quiet’ views of monuments and church interiors to bustling street scenes and moments of national celebration and ceremony.

Broom sold images to newspapers and continued to produce and sell her own postcards, which were hugely popular during the postcard ‘craze’ of 1902–18, at the peak of which some 880 million cards were sent annually.

Following the funeral of Edward VII in May 1910, the Brooms printed nearly 4,500 postcards of Christina’s photographs of the late king’s casket in Westminster Hall. At this time, Broom was likely the most prolific female publisher of picture postcards in the world.

Official press photography

Unlike most other women working as photographers at this time, Broom took her camera, tripod and heavy bag of glass-plate negatives outside the studio and set them up within the crowd at public events. Winifred was her mother’s dedicated assistant at home and on location.

While taking photographs in Chelsea in 1904, Broom tested the speed of her camera on some army subjects. She sent prints to the commanding officer of the Scots Guards, who invited her to photograph the mounting of the guard. She received a pass to the barracks and sold prints to the men along with an envelope so that they could send the prints home.

Broom’s photographs encouraged recruitment, which had dwindled in the years following the South African Wars, so Earl Roberts, the commander-in-chief of British troops, gave her access to Wellington, Knightsbridge and Chelsea Barracks. Thus Broom began her long role as official photographer to the Household Cavalry, the Brigade of Guards and Buckingham Palace Mews.

Royals, crews and suffrage

In 1908, Broom was permitted to work in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and to photograph the king and queen – resulting in the first of many exclusive group portraits of the royal family. Her commissions to photograph the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race crews also began around this time and she continued to photograph them for the next 35 years.

By 1906, Broom was photographing the women’s suffrage movement, showing activists at work in offices and at mass public demonstrations, pageants and fairs. These included a Women’s Freedom League bazaar, the 250,000-strong WSPU (Suffragette) Trafalgar Square demonstration and procession to Hyde Park in July 1910, and the NUWSS Land’s End Pilgrimage in June 1918. Her work encompassed all branches of the suffrage movement, including the militants.

Though there is no evidence that Broom was a suffrage supporter herself, her work created an important visual record. The suffrage campaign photographs were arguably as remarkable for being taken by a woman among women as were her photographs as a woman in the male regimental world.

Munster Road and wartime photography

Broom was widowed in 1912 after several years of managing the business with Winifred while Albert had been in hospital. In 1913, she and Winifred moved to 92 Munster Road, Fulham – a terraced house of 1896 – which was her home and base for her photographic business for the rest of her life.

Broom was well known locally, taking photographs in the streets, for instance of the Putney and Fulham WSPU shop and office at 905 Fulham Road and at popular events such as the English Church Pageant and the Bishop of London’s garden parties at Fulham Palace.

While Broom was living at 92 Munster Road, her work included many photographs of the armed forces. Some of her first shots in 1914 were of departing soldiers with their families on the platform at London Waterloo Station and a machine gun team of the 1st Irish Guards, shortly before they left for the front line. These images now appear more tragic than stirring: not one of the 14 Irish Guards soldiers in her photograph returned.

Broom also photographed women’s war work, including the Women’s Police Service and the Women’s Volunteer Reserve Signallers. At their busiest, mother and daughter produced 1,000 postcards per day of wartime images.

Post-war work and later life

After the war, Broom continued to photograph national events such as the crowds at the Victoria Memorial on Armistice Day 1918 and the state funeral of Edith Cavell in 1919. Her shots of the armed forces and royalty were published regularly, with the credit ‘Mrs Albert Broom’, in The Tatler, The Bystander, The Field and other society papers.

In 1937, Broom was interviewed in her drawing room by a reporter from the Westminster and Chelsea News, who was ‘confronted with hundreds of prints from a selection of some of the thousands of negatives – many of them irreplaceable – that are stored elsewhere in the house’.

Broom died after an illness on 5 June 1939.

Further reading

• Soldiers and Suffragettes: The Photography of Christina Broom (Bloomsbury, 2015), with essays by Anna Sparham, Margaret Denny, Hilary Roberts and Diane Atkinson
• Shirley Neale, ‘Broom [née Livingston], Christina [known as Mrs Albert Broom](1862–1939)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (public library subscription required)