Our Fred’s focus was photography not rude postcards
Regular readers will know BT welcomes any excuse to talk about its favourite Bristol photographer. And it’s 150 years since Fred Little was born, so …
FIRST off, we owe the late Mr Frederick George Little a profuse apology for suggesting that he ever sold dirty postcards.
If you’ve been a regular reader of BT over the last few years you will know how fond we are of Fred Little, photographer, photographic supplies dealer and purveyor of picture postcards to two generations of Bristolians.
Not only did he take thousands of pictures himself which have proved invaluable to historians, he also took pictures of old pictures – photographs, paintings and drawings. Many of the original images are still available today, but many others would have been lost had Fred and his camera not recorded them for posterity.
Not that he would have seen it that way. He had a business to run and a living to make, and selling old photos of Bristol printed on postcards would have been a modestly lucrative sideline.
So was selling humorous postcards. Long before the days of sophisticated digital software for creating and manipulating images, Fred was making fake photos using nothing more than scissors (or maybe a surgical scalpel), glue and pots of coloured inks. So during a long spell of rain he faked an image of the city centre under water.
Another time he doctored a picture of Wine Street so that grass was growing on it and sheep were grazing; this was what it would look like if the Council put the rates up, said the caption. If he had a picture, either taken by himself or some earlier photographer, of some local building on fire, he would touch it up to make the flames look more vivid.
Frederick George Little was born in 1874 in, we think, Easton, and he seems to have gone into business as a newsagent and stationer before branching out into photographic supplies.
His brother Arthur dealt in
antiques, and it’s likely that many of the old pictures – paintings, drawings, photos and book illustrations – that Arthur acquired were turned into postcards by Fred. The pair also published a book about the history of St Peter’s church.
For some years he had a shop in Castle Mill Street, close to St Peter’s church, and close to his brother’s shop on Narrow Wine Street. He appears in trade directories as a photographer in the first two decades of the 20th century.
The business was later bought by H. Salanson & Co, who also ran a photographic business as well as being opticians. He married Florence Sims in 1903 and they had two sons and a daughter, though as far as we know none of them had any children, so it appears he has no direct descendants living.
Florence died in 1933 and in later life Fred lived in Failand. He died in
Bishopston in February 1953 and is buried with his wife and one of his sons in the churchyard of St Bartholomews, Failand.
BT has speculated for some years over the dirty postcards case. A Fred Little “who keeps a postcard shop at 10 Old Market Street” was charged in September 1913 with “exposing to view certain obscene and indecent postcards and offering them for sale.”
Our Fred, however, does not appear to ever have had premises on Old Market Street. Besides, an item in the local press the day after the case was reported states that “Mr Fred Little, photographer, of Castle Mill Street, wishes us to state that he is not the Fred Little mentioned in a police-court case yesterday.”
So that’s resolved, then. Fred’s memory lives on, completely untainted.