YOU’RE CLICKED! The world’s first ever mugshots
Police in Birmingham made history in the 1800s when they began photographing criminals. Here’s their rogues’ gallery
IT IS not the magnitude of his crimes that has given petty offender Isaac Ellery a place in the history books. After all, his rap sheet involved the theft of just four cushions from a horsedrawn carriage. But he was arrested in Birmingham in 1853, a year when the goahead local police force was believed to be among the first in the world to make a photographic record of all its suspects.
Less than 20 years after the first ever photograph was taken by a Frenchman called Nicéphore Niépce, Ellery was frogmarched from the cells on the city’s Moor Street to a new photographic studio that had opened up down the road to have a mugshot taken.
By 1870 the force produced its own photos and the custom of getting suspects to hold a sign bearing their details was introduced in the form of a chalk board. (All our mugshots were taken before this became common practice, however.)
In 1891 a photographic studio, including a dark room, was set up and styles of photographs changed. There were periods where those arrested were asked to put their hands out in front of their body and then in front of a series of mirrors, thus providing views of the subject from a number of angles. West Midlands Police heritage lead Corinne Brazier spent hours painstakingly sorting out hundreds of mugshots from the period.
“It could well be that the West Midlands Police Museum holds the oldest surviving police custody photos in the world,” she says.
“In the 1870s it was legislated that all forces had to take photographs of people in custody and this is when the first ledger of the Birmingham Police collection starts.
“These images show some sad characters – all in black, many in bedraggled clothing.”