When did this wedding take place?

QThis wedding photograph features members of my family, but I don’t know who the bride or groom are. Narrowing down the year would really help me put names to faces. My grandfather (born 1888) is in the top row, and next to him are my grandmother (born 1893) and an aunt who was born in 1869.

Chris Beddoe

AThis is a tightly grouped professional wedding photograph, the spacious open-air location probably the bride’s family’s garden or the grounds of the reception venue. During the early 20th century, brides from all social backgrounds began to favour a formal ‘white wedding’ with special gown and veil, as here, and this was popular by the outbreak of the First World War. Bridal attire followed prevailing fashions, and the narrow line of both the bride’s dress and the fitted dress and neat hat of her adult bridesmaid indicate c1911–1915.

Otherwise, appearances are relatively informal, with little finery.

Most ladies are bare-headed and wear everyday white or pale-coloured blouses and tailored skirts of the era. The high-necked blouses are stylistically late Edwardian, and those that are front-fastening with shallow v-necklines and small collars more modern – typical of early wartime. The groom’s uniform style suggests a date of late 1914 or 1915, offering a precise timeframe for this scene.

This wedding party includes adults aged broadly in their twenties to fifties, and several schoolgirls (including three bridesmaids) wearing fashionable knee-length dresses and hair bows. Parents of the wedding couple would be in the middle row: for instance, the couple behind the bride and bridesmaid. Your grandparents, standing behind, seem rather peripheral figures.

Remember too that children often help with firmly identifying family photographs, because their ages and birth years are relatively easy to judge: the five youngest children here were all born between approximately 1900 and 1908.

Jayne Shrimpton

1 UNIFORM JACKET

The groom’s economy tunic/ jacket clearly shows the plain breast pockets (without vertical pleats) that were introduced for uniforms in late 1914/1915, when material was in short supply.

2 BRIDAL ATTIRE

Special white bridal wear with floral headdress and veil was not unusual at the start of the First World War; later on, brides were more likely to wear a daytime dress or tailored suit with smart hat.

3 DRESSY BLOUSE

The lady wearing a black blouse may not be in mourning, particularly considering the shiny satin fabric: this was popular in the 1910s as a ‘dressy’ alternative to the white blouse.

4 FASHIONABLE SUIT

The most stylish male here is the young man standing in the middle row wearing a fashionable pinstriped suit, his long, narrow jacket lapels the latest mode in the mid 1910s.

5 HAIR BOWS

Most schoolgirls during the 1910s wore huge white hair bows, like the ones that the two girls sitting on the grass are wearing. These striking accessories reputedly originally inspired the term ‘flapper’. Their generation then became the ‘flappers’ of the 1920s!