Aerial house photos used to be in all rural homes, but my search for one was no easy task
A friend recently became an official Irish citizen and, as I pride myself on being a considerate gift giver, I set about coming up with the perfect token to mark the occasion. This friend bought a home in the past few years and did a beautiful job on renovations, so I wanted to get something for the house. I weighed up several options, from homewares – maybe a Foxford throw or a piece of Brookwood pottery – to contemporary Irish art. Who wouldn’t want a Jen O’Dwyer original or a beautiful Domino Whisker piece? Then, on a visit to Kildare to my childhood home, it hit me as soon as I walked in the door. The one quintessential object my friend must have: a vintage aerial photograph of her house to hang in the hallway of said house. Perfect. The aerial house photograph is a rural staple, as common a sight as a copy of David Gray ’s White Ladder, an expired packet of iodine tablets, or A Woman’s Heart on cassette. The photographs were big business for decades in the last century, particularly in the 1980s and 90s, as enterprising photographers took pre-emptive shots from small aircraft and then hawked them door to door, no doubt bigging up the glamour associated with such a unique piece of art. In the days before Google Earth, it was fascinating to see a structure you knew so well from ground level from a brand-new, bird’s-eye view. Ireland’s fondness for one-off dispersed rural settlements meant that singling out individual dwellings for photography was simple. These photos often take pride of place in the home, in the hallway or sitting room – ours is the first thing you lay eyes on when you enter the front door. They capture not only the building, but a snapshot of whatever was occurring that day. Maybe the grass is being cut in a garden, or a Datsun Sunny is being washed, or Cuddles, the cat you had in 1989, is taking a poo in the flower bed or trying to get in one of the upstairs windows. Sometimes the glamour extended beyond the walls. I’m aware of households where the aerial photograph made it onto the base of a glass ashtray or even decorated a set of placemats. What a Christmas dinner conversation starter! My friend, the newly minted Irish citizen, doesn’t live rurally. She’s based in one of Dublin city’s inner suburbs and her home is part of a public housing scheme built between the 1920s and 1940s. So, an individual aerial shot of the house wasn’t going to be likely, but surely someone had photographed the area from the sky during the golden age of aerial photographs? Enter: Alexander ‘Monkey’ Campbell Morgan, a London man and second World War army pilot. My search for vintage aerial photos sent me down a rabbit hole of information about this man, who in peacetime turned his talents to aerial photography. In the 1950s he came to Ireland, flying all around the country and snapping towns and villages from the air. He established a business called Aerophotos and began operating charter flights for private customers. Morgan was killed in 1958 when his plane crashed near Waller’s Island in the Shannon estuary in Co Limerick after taking off from Shannon Airport. He was on an assignment for the Daily Express newspaper in Britain, sent to photograph the site of Carmody’s Hotel in Ennis, Co Clare, where eight people had died following the collapse of a wooden floor in the second storey of the building. Morgan’s legacy is an archive of aerial photographs taken between 1951 and 1958 donated to the National Library by Independent Newspapers. I scoured the archive, hoping for a snap that included my friend’s housing development, comparing identifiable reference points on more recent maps. And by God, I found one! And even better, I found somebody on eBay, in Australia of all places, selling an old print of that exact photo for a tenner. Morgan’s archive is fascinating. I found an aerial photo from 1954 of the village I grew up near, identifiable by the two churches and not much else. I was able to look at a 70-year-old photo of the area of Dublin 8 I live in now, complete with fields and brand-new housing developments. His photos show up on the Facebook pages of countless Irish local heritage and history clubs, and capture events such as extensive flooding across Ireland in the winter of 1954 and snow in Co Wicklow in January 1955. His collection even features some standalone rural houses – early versions of the ubiquitous aerial photo that started my search. I’m thrilled with the gift I found, even if postage from Australia is going to be very slow. If you’re reading this, C, sorry for spoiling the surprise.