Twitter detectives help identify Edwardian family from photo negatives found in attic

Clothes, car registration plates and streetscapes gave clues to the time andlocation of many pictures

The photos are believed to range from 1895 to 1914, according to John Thomson’s Twitter following (John Thomson)

A photographer from Somerset is believed to have identified the source of more than 100 long-forgot Edwardian-era photographs with the help of social media.

John Thomson, from Bath, became fascinated by negatives he found in dusty old boxes from a second-hand bookshop and began to search for clues to who had taken the photographs.

“I brought them home, put them in the loft, and forgot about them for ten years.” he said to The Independent, uncovering them when he was doing some loft work “and just started digitising them and seeing if we could work out who they were.”

He told The Independent he wanted to save them because he “felt sorry for them” and that he had a lifelong love of photography.

“I just felt sorry for them just being thrown away. I’m a keen photographer. I’ve always had a dark room in my bedroom. I’ve always liked negatives of photos.”

In 2018, Mr Thomson set up a Twitter account to share his findings and to seek help from other users in figuring out who had taken the pictures and the life they led.

Twitter detectives eventually helped identify the man behind the photos as Sidney Fletcher, a banker who travelled around Europe and whose family moved to Somerset in the 1930s.

“There’s about 100 [more] I’ve got to go through,” Mr Thomson said, “I’m just uploading them bit by bit.”

The photos document Fletcher’s life, from the 1890s to roughly 1914, as he went around UK and parts of Europe, such as the south of France. The photos time span was gleaned from clues such as clothing trends and other giveaways.

“There was one with an early car registration number plate, so some people managed to try and make it through that,” he said, adding that, over time, people “pieced it together.”