Current Project 2007 - 2009

A small group of volunteers, with guidance from Clive Payne and Margaret Staham, are working to produce captions for every photograph. Quarterly meetings are held on the Record Office to check on progress and discuss any arising issues. Betty Milburn is acting as clerk to the group, entering all completed captions onto the Record Office database, and placing hard copies into the files in the Record Office. These can be viewed at any time, and will be transferred to this website later this year. We hope this added information will greatly enhance your enjoyment of the Jarman pshotographs.

To date, 360 captions have been completed, and we are hoping to reach 500 before the first transfer takes place.

We would welcome any offers to help with this work. If you feel you could spare some time to work in the Record Office for a few hours, checking facts from the available sources, we would be pleased to hear from you. Staff are on hand to offer any assistance you may require.

For further information please contact Betty on 01284 725 425 or

Spanton Jarman Project 2, July 2005 - March 2007

This report is in inverse chronological order so that readers who have seen it before need not scroll all the way to the bottom to find out the latest news.

It is published as our response to a requirement of the Local Heritage initiative that we keep a record of our activities related to the grant that we have received from them.

March 2007

The final report has been submitted to the Lottery Heritage Initiative, who are satisfied that we have achieved our objectives. Work continues with writing captions for all the images, and we have set a target date of 2009 to achieve this. We would welcome any offers of help with this work – please contact the chairman if you are interested in learning more.

February 2007

The exhibition of winning entries at Moyses hall Museum was viewed by more than 1700 people during the three weeks it was there. It has now been deposited in the Bury St. Edmunds Record Office.

January 2007

The website has been updated with the results of the photographic competition.

October 2006

The photographic competition has closed, and the judges have made their decisions which will be announced at the St. Edmund’s Day Civic Reception and Awards Ceremony hosted by Bury St. Edmunds Town Council, in the Athenaeum on Sunday 19th November 2006.

Apart from that, and the subsequent exhibition at Moyses Hall through to January 2007, the project is now complete.

August 2006

The website has been updated and there are now 908 pictures that can be viewed online.

May 2006

A photographic competition has been launched, open to all, with closing date at 10^th September 2006. Click here for further information. We continue to receive offers of sponsorship, and Bury St. Edmunds Town Council has generously offered to include a special ceremony for prize winners of the competition at the St. Edmund’s day event in the Athenaeum on 19th November.

27th May - Meeting for volunteers held at the Record Office. Volunteers were able to view the 8 files containing prints of all the images, and agree a format for the captions which are being prepared. This is very interesting work, but will take a great deal of time to complete. Local historian, Clive Paine has agreed to edit the work to ensure consistency, and he, and Margaret Statham will continue to offer support to the volunteers. If you have any specialist information about any of the images, or would like to help us in this task, please get in touch.

Photographs show the glass images stored in boxes in the strong room – and now freely available to view in the record office search room. Some of our volunteers browsing the files.

April 2006

The digitising project is now complete. Counting the last batch of 154 received on 10^th April, a total of 1062 pictures have been digitised. The website has been updated to show 754 of them: this excludes the latest batch and a number that are duplicates or nearly duplicates. All the photographs have been printed, and are available for view at the Suffolk Record Office.

The photographic competition is to be launched in the very near future, details of which can be found elsewhere on this site. We await the names of the last few sponsors and the printing of the flyer/entry form.

Captioning of the photographs is an ongoing process, and is taking much longer than we had anticipated. Nevertheless, we have achieved most of our targets on time and within budget.

The picture above shows boxes of negatives ready for transportation to Swaingrove in order to be digitised.

March 2006

Members received a report on the Project at the AGM on 6th March and three of our volunteers gave presentations on their work with researching captions..

Richard Norburn, with help from his son Andrew and wife Joyce have been looking at Churchgate Street, and gave an interesting presentation on their findings.

Jeff Paine highlighted a number of properties in Hatter Street, and gave some helpful comments on the resources he had used in his research, and

Peter Plumridge gave a detailed account of his research into the workhouse in College Street.

• Bury St Edmunds Town Council were our first supporters (even before we received our grant from the Local Heritage initiative)
• Abbey Blinds
• Charles Mansfield
• Chica Shoes
• Cllr Paul Hopfensperger (Suffolk County Council)
• D J Evans (Bury) Limited
• Denny Bros
• Gross & Co
• Milburn Leverington & Thurlow
• Jackson-Stops & Staff
• Robertson David & Co
• Thurlow Champness
• Trotter & Deane

February 2006

Work is progressing well with the project. A further 190 glass negatives have been selected from storage in the Record office for digitisation, and volunteers continue in their work to research captions for the pictures.

December 2005

On 29 December Chris had a meeting with Jayne Austin of the Suffolk Record Office to agree the best way to extract data from CALM for use in automatically generating the data for the website.

A further training session was held for volunteers on 17 December when volunteers studied a number of sources available in the RO and selected their particular areas of interest. We now have a group of 20 people who are beginning to work on captions for the first set of photographs.

On 15 December Margaret & Betty received training in the use of the Record Office software (CALM) which will be used to enter the captions and other information on to a database. Further volunteers will be required in due course to help with this work.

November 2005

Good progress is being made with the digitisation process, and Swaingrove has produced CDs of the images that have been supplied to them. We have decided to have prints taken from the negatives so that the collection can be made readily available to those who do not have easy access to a computer.

Almost 500 images have now been filed in ring binders and placed in the Record Office. They have been very well received, and offer an opportunity for all to view the images for the first time since the glass negatives were deposited in 1975.

October 2005

Chris and Betty attended a meeting at Rattlesden village hall on 22 October, where they spoke about the Spanton Jarman project and showed a selection of images from the collection, including 10 pictures of Rattlesden. This was part of the ‘Old Rattlesden evening’ arranged by local resident Peter Sweet, and included a short talk on the history of the village.

The event generated a great deal of interest in our project. Members of the local community were able to offer a great deal of information about the Rattlesden pictures, and have subsequently decided to set up a local history group to do further research on the 22 images of Rattlesden within the collection.

We hope that this may inspire other community groups to look at the pictures of their village with a view to engaging in similar activity.


The first training session for volunteers was held at the Record Office on 15 October

Clive and Margaret led a discussion on what makes a good caption. They explained the many sources of useful information available in the Record Office, including Directories, Rate Books, Listed Buildings information etc. The use of footnotes was also highlighted, and volunteers engaged in a practical exercise involving some images from the town centre.


An open meeting was held in the Cathedral Lecture Room on 3 October when Clive Paine delivered a lecture on the historical context of the Spanton Jarman collection of photographic negatives.

Clive gave examples of useful sources for research, such as Directories, old maps and census returns giving information about areas of development during the period covered. These included a number of areas of new housing, e.g Kings Road, Queens Road and Albert Crescent. He drew attention to the number of public buildings established at this time, e.g.
 -    The Suffolk General Hospital in Hospital Road
 -    Corn Exchange – replaced by a larger one in 1861
 -    Thingoe Union Workhouse – closed in 1884
 -    The Commercial School 1852

He spoke of the coming of the railway in 1846, the Railway Station and adjacent housing; of the railway Mission, the Salvation Army Citadel and other Victorian institutions.

We looked at various views of the Market Place and were encouraged to note a number of changes which would help to date a particular image, for example the Boer War memorial which dates from 1904.

Clive explained how local newspapers could be very helpful, providing a wealth of detail about such events as the visit of Edward VII in 1904 or the Pageant of 1907.

The meeting was attended by approximately 80 people, and generated a great deal of interest and enthusiasm for learning more about the Jarman photographs, and what they tell us about life in Bury St. Edmunds at that particular time.

September 2005

Stephen arranged for 270 glass negatives to be delivered to Swaingrove at Rougham on 14 September, who have been contracted to prepare digital images from the negatives. The negatives vary considerably in size, and these are mostly the smaller ones, measuring approximately 4inches x 6 inches and 6 inches x 8 inches.

When completed these will be added to the 379 images that were digitised by Suffolk County Council for the EESOP ( East of England Sense of Place) project.

On 5 September a meeting was held for all who are interested in helping to research and write captions for the pictures. Local historian Clive Paine and our President Margaret Statham explained the nature of the task ahead and gave some general advice on writing captions. Much work has already been done in preparation for this task, and Clive has agreed to be overall editor of the captions.

Over thirty people attended, and many have indicated that they would like to be part of the team of volunteers.

August 2005

On 5 August the committee met to receive the news of the grant and to agree an action plan.. A press release was prepared and a letter sent to members of the Society to announce the award.

We continue to submit pictures, with captions, to the Bury Free Press for weekly publication. Thirty pictures have appeared so far, drawing good response from the local community.

Chris reported increased interest in the website, with over 22,000 hits so far in 2005, and a growing number of enquiries from readers.

July 2005

The long awaited news arrived on 26 July with a letter from the Countryside Agency informing us that our application to the LHI had been successful and we had been offered a grant of £9845 from the National Heritage Lottery Fund.

The approved purpose of the project is “to raise awareness of the heritage of Bury St. Edmunds using a unique photographic collection, by various means, including; digitising the collection and making it available on line with informative captions written and input by volunteers; organising a lecture on the period of history covered by the photographs; organising a photographic competition for local people and groups; publicising some of the images in the local paper and inviting participation by encouraging local people to come forward to share their memories, etc.”

The Local Heritage initiative is a national grant scheme that helps local groups to investigate, explain and care for their local landscape, landmarks, traditions and culture. The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) provides the grant, but the scheme is a partnership, administered by the Countryside Agency with additional funding from Nationwide Building Society.

The grant will allow us to fund work to digitise a further 672 images of Bury St. Edmunds and make them available online.

Spanton Jarman Project 1

On taking ownership of the collection, the Society agreed to ensure that the negatives were kept in the best possible conditions for the future, and to make the images available to a wider community.

Our first task was to address the packaging, which had become worn over the years. With the help of a grant from the "Awards for All Lottery Fund", we were able to purchase the necessary materials for this task. A group of volunteers received training from Dominic Wall, conservation officer for Suffolk County Council, and set to work dusting and repackaging the fragile glass negatives in archival quality envelopes and boxes. The task was completed in 2003.

This website was set up by Past & Present Society member, Chris Austin, in September 2004 to show the images in a way that is accessible to all.

We have been able to show 379 images that were digitised by Suffolk County Council for a project called EESOP (East of England Sense of Place). The pictures are part of a larger collection of images that can be viewed on www.senseofplacesuffolk.co.uk.

The accessibility of the pictures on this website strongly contrasts with their original accessibility when they were stored in boxes at the Suffolk Record Office, shown below.

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