Corporal Benjamin. L. Spackman scrapbook of photographs, 1860s

Corporal Benjamin. L. Spackman (born Cheltenham, England, 5 October 1824 – died Dublin, Ireland 5 September 1879) was trained in photography at the South Kensington Museum. He accompanied Charles Thomas Newton to record the archaeological excavations Mausoleum of Halicarnassus (Bodrum, now in present-day Turkey) in the 1850s.

Spackman, a sergeant in the Royal Engineers, benefited from a peculiar arrangement between the military and the museum world. Charles Thurston Thompson had been hired as the official photographer for the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His appointment grew out of the 1851 Great Exhibition, where the sappers of the Royal Engineers had been involved in the construction and documentation of the Crystal Palace. A detachment was posted to act as firemen for the new museum, where courses of instruction were set up in 1856 to keep them from idleness. One of the courses was in photography, and Spackman excelled. As a corporal he began producing waxed-paper negatives of the construction site. In 1856 and 1857 Spackman was posted to accompany Charles Newton in his excavations at Halicarnassus on the coast of what is now Turkey. In 1862 at the London International Exhibition, Spackman displayed his photographs of the progress of the building and also of the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society. For nearly two decades Spackman remained a royal engineer, while acting primarily as a photographer for the museum. The sappers’ quarters were behind the north cloister of the museum.

This scrapbook contains Spackman’s bookplate, and the assembly and sequence of the contents can presumably therefore be attributed to him, as can some of the photographs. It contains images of designs, models, drawings and buildings connected to the South Kensington Museum, the 1862 Exhibition and the surrounding area during the 1850s and 1860s, as well as other ephemera, such a grid of carte-de-visite portraits.