The work of a Wisbech photographer was celebrated in an exhibition of her military pictures at the town library.
The display, run by the Lilian Ream Exhibition Gallery Trust and the Cambridgeshire Regiment, saw visitors enjoying her photography which has been called the most extensive of its kind for its time.
Researchers from the Fenland Family History Society were on hand to help with soldiers’ military detail and their family history.
In addition a team of leading experts on the Cambridgeshire Regiment, Huntingdonshire Cyclist Battalion and Northamptonshire Regiment in WW1 were there to help identify general military pictures, medals or items and to help visitors with research into their relatives’ wartime service.
A spokesman for the Trust said: “As a woman photographer Lilian was a pioneer and for 62 years her photographic studio in Wisbech captured local people, places and events. Its surviving legacy now forms a social history of the Wisbech area.”
Lilian was born in 1877 and after she married, she bucked the trend of the time by handing her domestic duties to others.
She set up her own photography studio in 1909 at No. 4 The Crescent, with a dark room in the garden.
“The opening of such a business run by a woman in the genteel Crescent caused some disquiet, but from the beginning her business thrived, and soon a stream of local families and dignitaries were sitting for their portraits.
“Lilian gradually took on more staff, many of them also women, and trained them in various skills - hand colouring, framing and the taking and developing of photographs.”
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