COVIC and Alfred Hugh Fisher

COVIC has been mentioned before on the blog.

It is the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee, and GA Presidents were involved in its work at the time.

This article in the Cambridge University Special Collections blog describes some work carried out at the start of the 20th century.

It was written by Sabrina Meneghini.

It describes a journey made around the British Empire by an artist called Alfred Hugh Fisher.

He was hired to take photographs and make paintings in order to create a visual record of the people, landscapes and geography of the vast empire. From these images COVIC produced a series of illustrated lectures and textbooks which were to be presented as geography lessons to schoolchildren.

The 6 books that resulted are held in the library.
The Indian volume was written by Halford MacKinder... who was not a native of India...

Image source: https://specialcollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=16032

MacKinder was appointed for the supervision of the whole project, including the preparation of the textbooks. In 1910 he entered Parliament and consequently had less time to commit to COVIC, therefore the succeeding textbooks were authored by the economist Arthur John Sargent.

The texts inside each of the books are rich in historical and geographical descriptions. The front covers, with the illustrations and the titles showing either the natural products, the animals or the distinctive landscapes of the countries, provide information of the inside arousing readers’ curiosity.

The textbooks were accompanied by sets of lantern slides (no less than 350 per book) and the complete lists can be found at the end of each book.

A selection of the images are available on another blog post by the same author.

In 1902 the Colonial Office was charged with creating a visual record of the British Empire. The COVIC produced sets of lantern slides which were to be presented as a series of geography lessons to school children. The project’s cultural exchange aims were twofold: British schools would receive images of the colonies, while colonial school children would receive and see slides from the Mother Country. In 1907 the Committee hired Alfred Hugh Fisher, an artist and newspaper illustrator, for a duration of three years. He was given the responsibility of creating a visual description of Britain’s overseas territories.

This was quite a commission.

The first two posts were from 2018, but there is a follow up from April 2023 by Sabrina, updating on her PhD research.

Sabrina recently completed her PhD at DeMontfort University, entitled Classroom Photographic Journeys: Alfred Hugh Fisher and the British Empire’s Development of Colonial-era Visual Education, which made heavy use of the Library’s Royal Commonwealth Society photographic collections.

Congratulations!

The new post describes the journey in more detail and includes some of Fisher's photographs and paintings.

There are also diary and letter images.

His journey started in October 1907 in South Asia where he visited India (at the time of Fisher’s journey the term India included the areas in the Indian subcontinent administrated by the United Kingdom and ruled by the British Raj. It extended over present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka), Burma [present Myanmar], Aden, Somaliland, and Cyprus. From July 1908 to May 1909, he travelled to Canada, Newfoundland, Weihaiwei, Hong Kong, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula and Singapore. In his last journey, from October 1909 to August 1910, he sailed from Gibraltar and Malta to Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and Fiji. COVIC purchased images from places he was not able to visit such as the West Indies [Caribbean], and South Africa. Some were acquired from official bodies, others from amateur photographers.

Fisher was the first and only photographer employed by COVIC.

Sabrina says that:
British geographer Halford John Mackinder, attempted to influence how Fisher’s work would shape COVIC’s with instructions on how and what to photograph. Fisher did not always follow these instructions and his own vision of the Empire can be seen through his artistic works.

In the section on India.

The type of images requested by Mackinder to Fisher in India had to show the stability and order of the colonial society. It was important to illustrate to British pupils the Empire’s most valuable possessions and the achievements accomplished by British in the Indian subcontinent. Fisher documented the various forms of cults in India, ancient buildings, princes and rulers from different Indian states, railways, engineering infrastructures, and scenes depicting the development of the colonial economy to demonstrate the good functioning of the Empire and the subservience of its subjects.

The letters in this Yale archive would make interesting reading for sure.

Fisher sent his documents in the hope that his biography would be written.

Some of the material can be accessed in digital form by following links from the main page above. Fascinating stuff.

Source of text:

https://specialcollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=24905

This is a fascinating story and I'll try and track down the PhD in full as it sounds like it will be well worth finding out more...