George Watkins
1904-1989
By profession, George Watkins was a heating engineer, but it was his spare time activities which contributed so much to industrial history.
He toured Britain taking photographs and making notes concerning industrial installations, principally stationary steam engines. Thanks to the determined efforts of a small number of individuals and organisations, much of his information has been made widely available, mainly in the form of the 'Stationary Steam Engines of Great Britain' series of books from Landmark Publishing Ltd.
These books were edited by A. P. Woolrich, and include a Foreword which gives an excellent account of George Watkins' activities, from which the following information is largely drawn.
Mr Watkins' recording activities spanned from the 1930s to the late 1970s, when illness restricted his abilities to travel. In 1965, in recognition of the importance of his work, he was appointed as a research assistant at the Centre for the Study of the History of Technology at Bath University, where he was enabled to devote all his time to augmenting and classifying his collection. He was also in demand as a lecturer and author.
Following his death in February 1989 his collection was gifted to the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, whose archive is in Swindon. Thousands of his photographs are reproduced in the 'Stationary Steam Engines of Great Britain' series. Some of the photographs provide the only record of products of the firms who made the engines and other machines. This machinery often displayed great ingenuity, superb workmanship, and was maintained in immaculate - or indeed deplorable - condition, and without G Watkins' records, the work of the designers and craftsmen would have disappeared into oblivion.
A P Woolrich describes some of the difficulties faced by Watkins in his efforts to obtain photographs. Initially he had to travel by train and bicycle, and most of his photographs were taken with a tripod-mounted wooden plate camera. The engine houses were frequently dark, confined spaces, posing great difficulties with lighting and with siting the camera. Long exposures were necessary, but in some cases he got round the problem of photographing a working engine by uncovering the lens a number of times whenever the piston was passing through dead centre. He was also adept at 'painting with light' - overcoming inadequate lighting by illuminating areas in turn by a hand-held lamp.
Examples of his photographs, at low resolution, can be seen on the English Heritage 'Viewfinder' website. Example here.