Oxford college team photographs 1893 present a particular challenge for genealogy researchers: group portraits of rowing crews, football teams, and college societies survive in family albums, college archives, and occasionally in dealers’ catalogues, but the men in them are rarely identified by name. The standard convention was to list crew members by their position in the boat, not their position in the photograph, which means that even when a list of names survives, matching names to faces requires detective work. This guide explains how to use Joseph Foster’s extraordinary 1893 matriculation register to identify the individuals in Victorian Oxford college photographs, and how to trace what became of them.
The method works because Foster published the biographical details of every man who matriculated at Oxford between 1880 and 1892, and because two photographic firms, Hills and Saunders and Gillman and Co, photographed almost every team and society in the university during this period. If you have a college team photograph from the 1880s or 1890s and you know which college it came from, Foster’s register can tell you who is in it.
The hairdresser who photographed a prince
The firm responsible for the majority of Victorian Oxford college photographs had origins that no amount of advertising could have invented. Robert Hills was a hairdresser and wigmaker with a shop at 16 Cornmarket Street, Oxford. In 1856 he began offering photographic portraits from the same premises, quickly renaming it “The Oxford Photographic Gallery.” His assistant, John Henry Saunders, born in 1836, became his partner in June 1860, and Saunders went on to marry Hills’s daughter. The hairdressing operation was relocated across the street to number 49.
What transformed Hills and Saunders from a provincial studio into a national firm was a single client. When Edward, Prince of Wales, arrived at Christ Church as an undergraduate, Hills and Saunders were appointed as his photographers. Those portraits survive in the National Portrait Gallery collection, which holds over 200 images by the firm. By 1863 they had opened a branch in Eton. In 1867, Queen Victoria granted them a Royal Warrant. Branches followed in Cambridge, Harrow, Rugby, Aldershot, Sandhurst, and London, each positioned near a school, university, or military centre whose young men needed photographing. The firm was, in effect, the first national chain of social photographers.
Hills understood that students would pay for portraits to send home, and that teams and societies would commission group photographs as keepsakes. By the 1890s, Hills and Saunders had been photographing Oxford students for nearly forty years. Their group photographs of college rowing eights, football elevens, and torpid crews were printed on order sheets so that students could select which images they wanted in their personal albums. The Royal Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the Science Museum Group all hold Hills and Saunders photographs.
The firm that followed
Hills and Saunders were not the only photographic studio working the Oxford colleges. Their rival, Gillman and Co, operated from the Victoria Studio at 9 Magdalen Street, with a copying and enlarging department at 18 Market Street. Charles Gillman had started at 107 St Aldate’s before expanding. The firm traded as Gillman and Masslin before becoming Gillman and Co. In 1930, James Soame Jr. merged his business with Gillman’s to form Gillman and Soame, the company that still photographs Oxford graduates today.
Several photographers who later established their own Oxford studios trained at Hills and Saunders. William Forshaw, who opened a studio in Alfred Street, advertised on the back of his cartes-de-visite that he had worked “for many years with Hills and Saunders.” G. Coles of St Aldate’s made the same claim. When Forshaw and Coles later joined forces in Alfred Street, they retained the endorsement. If you have an Oxford photograph from this period and you can read the studio name on the mount or the reverse of the card, a comprehensive directory of Victorian Oxford photographers, with addresses and dates, is maintained by the Culham local history project and linked in the further reading section below.
John Henry Saunders died in 1890 and the partnership was formally dissolved in 1889, though both families continued to operate branches under the same name. The Oxford studio survived until 1935, when it was absorbed by Gillman and Soame. In 2019, Gillman and Soame acquired the Hills and Saunders brand entirely, uniting two photographic archives that between them span from 1852 to the present day.
Foster’s register: the key to identifying the faces
Joseph Foster, born in 1844, was a genealogist and antiquarian who had already produced his monumental “Alumni Oxonienses,” a biographical register of every member of the University of Oxford from the earliest records to 1886. In 1893 he published two companion volumes: “Oxford Men and their Colleges,” which covered the colleges themselves with portraits and views, and “Oxford Men, 1880-1892,” which extended the biographical register to cover everyone who had matriculated in that period. Both are public domain and fully digitised on archive.org.
Foster understood the value of group photographs. In his preface to “Oxford Men and their Colleges,” he explained that the “eight,” the “eleven,” and the football teams were “an integral part of College and University life,” and he commissioned team photographs from Hills and Saunders and Gillman and Co to illustrate the book. He hoped these would form “an illustrated record which should possess a permanent and ever increasing value.” He was right, though not quite in the way he expected. Over a century later, the register he compiled alongside those photographs has become the single most useful tool for identifying individuals in any Victorian Oxford group photograph, whether or not it appeared in his book.
What Foster recorded for each man
Foster’s register is organised by college. University College begins on page 27, Balliol on page 55, Merton on page 97. Within each college section, every man who matriculated between 1880 and 1892 is listed alphabetically with the following information: full name, father’s name and status (clergyman, gentleman, esquire, or occupation), place of birth or residence, school attended, date of matriculation, age at matriculation, honours and prizes (listed in detail), degree class, and subsequent career where known.
The depth of this biographical detail is what makes the register so valuable for genealogy. In 2023, the archivist at University College Oxford published a detailed identification of an 1890s Univ football team photograph by matching each face to Foster’s biographical entries and supplementing the information with census returns and school records. Among the men he identified were Kenneth Alexander Woodward, born 1874 in Manchester, who had attended Harrow and later became a schoolmaster at Repton; Donald Currie, born 1874 in Ayr, son of a Scottish draper, who read Law and took a Third; George Rupert Lees Mellor, born 1875 in Lancashire, son of a cotton spinner employing over 120 workers; and Ronald Alister Greig, born 1873 in Hong Kong, son of a banker, educated at Highgate, who kept nine terms but never took a degree.
Each of these men can be traced further. Woodward appears in the 1950 edition of Wisden. Currie’s father appears in the 1881 census as a draper in Ayr. Mellor became a solicitor in Southport. Greig’s family had moved from Hong Kong to Chislehurst, Kent. The combination of Foster’s register with census data, school records, and professional directories can reconstruct a life from a single face in a team photograph.
The team photographs Foster commissioned
Foster’s table of illustrations in “Oxford Men and their Colleges” lists the following team photographs, all from the 1892-93 season: University College Football Team (Association), University College Torpid, Balliol College Torpid (photographed by Gillman and Co, the only team photograph in the book not credited to Hills and Saunders), Balliol College Football Teams (Rugby and Association), Merton College Football Teams (Rugby and Association), Merton College 1st Torpid, and the University Crew. Each photograph was reproduced using the collotype process by Waterlow and Sons.
Together, these seven photographs captured approximately seventy to eighty named individuals across three colleges and the University crew in a single season. Merton alone, founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton, contributed three team photographs containing approximately thirty to thirty-five identifiable men. The University Crew of 1893 is a cross-college finding aid, since it drew oarsmen from multiple colleges. A researcher looking for an ancestor at any of these colleges in the early 1890s has a strong chance of finding them through these photographs and the register that accompanies them.
How to match a face to a name
If you have a Victorian Oxford college team photograph and want to identify the individuals in it, here is the method the University College archivist demonstrated:
First, identify the college and the approximate date. The studio name on the mount or card back will help with dating: Hills and Saunders used different card designs at different periods, and the Victorian photographers in Oxford directory (linked below) can help you narrow the date from the address and format. The number of men in the photograph and the type of team (eight for rowing, eleven for football, fifteen for rugby) will tell you what sport you are looking at.
Second, go to Foster’s register on archive.org. Both volumes are fully digitised with text search, so you can search for a surname directly if you have a partial identification. If you only know the college, navigate to the relevant college section and work through the matriculation entries for the years that match your photograph’s date. The number of men who matriculated in any given year at a single college is typically small enough to produce a manageable shortlist.
Third, cross-reference with census returns. Foster gives each man’s father’s name and place of origin, which can be matched against Victorian census returns and parish registers indexed by TheGenealogist. For the 1891 census, most of these men would appear as students in Oxford, listed under their college.
Fourth, check school records. Foster records the school each man attended before Oxford. If you can identify a face through a school photograph (Harrow, Eton, Winchester, and Rugby all have photographic archives from this period), you can confirm the identification in the Oxford photograph.
The archives that survive
The Hills and Saunders photographic archive for Harrow, containing an estimated 80,000 glass plate negatives, survived the closure of the Harrow studio and is now held by Harrow School. The Eton archive remains with Hills and Saunders (now part of Gillman and Soame) and is searchable through their archive service. The Oxford negatives are believed to have been destroyed when the studio was absorbed in 1935, making published photographs in books like Foster’s, and prints in college archives and family collections, the primary surviving record of their Oxford work.
Individual Oxford college archives hold their own photographic collections, some of which have been partially digitised. The Bodleian Library’s University Archives hold the original matriculation registers and a card index covering admissions from 1891 to 1932, which fills the gap between Foster’s published volumes and the modern period. For the period before 1880, Foster’s earlier “Alumni Oxonienses” covers the entire span from the earliest records to 1886, and digitised copies are available on archive.org and through British History Online.
Genealogy research note
Foster’s two 1893 volumes together form the most comprehensive publicly accessible register of Oxford students from the 1880s and early 1890s. For researchers tracing ancestors at Oxford in this period, they should be the first resource consulted. Both are digitised on archive.org with full-text search capability.
For ancestors who attended Oxford colleges in the Victorian period, the college and university records often provide the father’s name, occupation, and place of residence, which can be cross-referenced with census data. The college servants and tradespeople guide on this site covers the records of non-academic staff who worked alongside these students, including the battels books and bursars’ accounts that can place a cook, a scout, or a stonemason inside a specific college in a specific year.
Researchers who find an ancestor in a Hills and Saunders photograph from Harrow or Eton may be able to locate the original negative through the surviving archives. The Harrow archive is held by the school; the Eton archive is searchable through the Gillman and Soame archive service at gillmanandsoame.co.uk. For Oxford, where the negatives are lost, the published photographs in Foster’s books, in the Bodleian’s collections, and in the National Portrait Gallery’s online catalogue are the best surviving sources.
Named individuals in this article on Oxford college team photographs 1893
| Name | Dates | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Joseph Foster | 1844-1905 | Genealogist and antiquarian; compiler of Alumni Oxonienses and Oxford Men and their Colleges (1893) |
| Robert Hills | fl. 1856-1890s | Hairdresser turned photographer; co-founder of Hills and Saunders at 16 Cornmarket Street, Oxford |
| John Henry Saunders | 1836-1890 | Photographer; partner in Hills and Saunders; married Robert Hills’s daughter |
| Charles Gillman | fl. 1870s-1900s | Photographer; proprietor of Gillman and Co, 107 St Aldate’s and 9 Magdalen Street, Oxford |
| James Soame Jr. | fl. 1900s-1930s | Photographer; merged with Gillman and Co in 1930 to form Gillman and Soame |
| William Forshaw | fl. 1870s-1890s | Oxford photographer, Alfred Street; formerly with Hills and Saunders |
| Kenneth Alexander Woodward | 1874-1950 | University College, matriculated 1893; Harrow School; later schoolmaster at Repton |
| Donald Currie | 1874-1923 | University College, matriculated 1892; Ayr Academy; read Law (Third); appears in football and torpid photographs |
| George Rupert Lees Mellor | b. 1875 | University College, matriculated 1893; Rossall School; read History (Fourth); later solicitor in Southport |
| Ronald Alister Greig | 1873-c. 1951 | University College, matriculated 1892; born Hong Kong; Highgate School; kept nine terms without degree |
| Walter de Merton | c. 1205-1277 | Founder of Merton College, Oxford, 1264 |
| Edward, Prince of Wales | 1841-1910 | Christ Church, Oxford; photographed by Hills and Saunders; later King Edward VII |
| William Stubbs | 1825-1901 | Bishop of Oxford; Regius Professor of Modern History; photographed by Hills and Saunders |
Further reading for Oxford college team photographs 1893
- Oxford Men and their Colleges (1893) on archive.org : Foster’s complete volume with college histories, the matriculation register 1880-1892, and his table of team photographs. Fully digitised and searchable.
- Oxford Men, 1880-1892 on archive.org : The companion biographical register with schools, honours, degrees, and portraits. Public domain.
- Hills and Saunders at the National Portrait Gallery : Over 200 portraits by the firm, including their photographs of Edward, Prince of Wales, at Oxford.
- Bodleian Library guide to past members of the University of Oxford : Explains how to use Foster’s Alumni Oxonienses and the post-1892 card index for tracing Oxford ancestors.
- University College Oxford: identifying an 1890s football team : The college archivist’s detailed identification of a team photograph using Foster’s register, census returns, and school records.
- Hills and Saunders archive : The surviving photographic archive, now managed by Gillman and Soame, with a searchable database of school and university photographs.
- Victorian photographers in Oxford : A comprehensive directory of every known photographic studio in Victorian Oxford, with addresses, dates, and card-back designs for dating photographs.
- FamilyRelatives.com Oxford Men register : A searchable digital version of Foster’s matriculation register for quick lookups.
