Page 7 - Bulletin 7 2003

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The volume from which this book has developed, however, was the first album in
which a large selection of Elliott studies were reproduced in a size that did any

justice to them. Of the nearly ten thousand negatives in the Elliott Collection, less
than two thousand are of architectural subjects, of these, 160 of the best and most

interesting were selected then. In the present volume, the number of photographs has

been increased to 289, now no longer almost exclusively of subjects that have since
vanished, as in the first book. For not every beautiful building that Elliott

photographed has disappeared; not every townscape has lost its charm entirely. If this
book helps to make its readers aware of the gravity of a century’s loss, as well as of

the value of what still exists, and of the need to prevent any further decay, its purpose
will have been fulfilled, as well as that which made Arthur Elliott embark upon the

task of a lifetime.

The Life of Arthur Elliott

Arthur Elliott was born in or just before 1870, in or near New York, of Scottish
immigrant parents. His father died shortly after Arthur’s birth and the family soon

returned to Scotland, where Arthur’s mother worked in bars and with travelling
theatrical companies. Poverty obliged the young Arthur to work in similar places

from a very early age. His mother died when he was twelve, after which he kept
himself by working in a chemist’s shop, as a canvasser and the like. He was still in

his early teens when he enrolled as a crew member on various ships, staying in India

for two years as a railway worker. He returned to the States for a while and then to
England, before coming to South Africa in the late 1880’s, not quite twenty years of

age. He lived a varied life in pioneer Johannesburg, trying his hand at occupations
like waiter, pedlar of small wares and phonograph agent – none with any apparent

success. A more notable spell was his time with the theatrical company of Luscombe
Searelle, as a scene painter and production manager.

It was during the South African War that Elliott started taking photographs, after his
arrival in Cape Town as a refugee in 1900. A friend had given him a present of a

quarter-plate camera, and the photographs he took of Boer prisoners were so popular