Speaight Ltd

Artist associated with 101 portraits
Richard Neville Speaight took up photography at the age of 12 while still at school. He subsequently worked for two years with the camera-makers Sands and Hunter, and at the age of 17 became apprenticed to the theatrical photographers Martin and Sailnow, who were based in the Strand, London, where they took photographs on the stage of the old Gaiety Theatre. In 1896, with his brother, Speaight started the firm of F. & R. Speaight in Regent Street. In 1902 he moved to palatial galleries in Bond Street to become Speaight Ltd. As President of the Professional Photographers Association, Member of the Council and Treasurer, he devoted a huge amount of effort to raise standards and promote portrait photography. A regular exhibitor at the London Salon and RPS, Speaight published his autobiography, Memoirs of a Court Photographer, in 1926, the year in which he took the first official photographs of the future Queen Elizabeth II. In the Edwardian era he was dubbed the 'Photographic Laureate of Children's Photographers'. In 1911 he purchased Alice Hughes's collection of 50,000 original negatives of aristocratic portraits of children and their mothers to add to his similar collection of work numbering more than 100,000. This archive, which weighed more than 17 tons, was destroyed during World War II.