Hugh Cecil

Hugh Cecil Saunders (14 December 1889 – March 1974, Brighton) was an English photographer of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, who practised under the name of Hugh Cecil.

Biography

Hugh Cecil Saunders was born in Kingston upon Thames to Frederick Atkinson Saunders and his wife, Mary Ann Roberta Walton. He was educated at Tonbridge School and Queens' College, Cambridge.

At the Cambridge Photographic Society, he exhibited a number of landscapes, some of which won medals.

After graduation, Saunders became an apprentice to the Sevenoaks photographer H. Essenhigh Corke.

Hugh Cecil's work appeared in the weekly The Sketch, Tatler and Bystander magazines,

He exhibited regularly at the London Salon of Photography, and works appear in the annual Photograms of the Year between 1914 and 1928. Cecil had at least two pupil/assistants who established successful careers, Paul Tanqueray, who had also attended Tonbridge School, and Angus McBean, whose work Cecil noticed when exhibited near his gallery at a tea-room named the Pirate's Den. McBean later claimed that he took many of his sittings in the mid-1930s. The studio continued until the Second World War, and the official photographs of King George VI were taken there.

Cecil later experimented with the photographic machine that became the basis of the photo booths that can be used to obtain instant identity photographs for passports and other official documents. He died in Brighton in 1974; a number of his negatives were acquired by the National Portrait Gallery after a house clearance.