A view from the top of Magdalen Tower (but is it? See [**] below) taken by WGRA in about 1902 with his new box camera. This is scanned from a very home-made print. Did he take any views in other directions while he was up there, I wonder? There were no other prints available to me. So, this is WGRA, an Oxfordshire-lad, born and bred at Shillingford, near Wallingford, who then came with his family to live in Oxford in the mid-1880s, and lived in Tackley Place, just north of Jericho, for his latter schooldays, before seeking his fortune for 6 years in Holland at his Uncle Albert Reed’s paper factory at Raamsdonksveer. But, by 1902 WGRA had decided against the paper industry, and had returned to England, and here he is, very much a ‘town boy’, looking down on the ‘gown part’ of Oxford at age 24, and about to marry a local girl, soon after the turn of the century. The year of Edward VII’s coronation, wasn’t it? The end of the Victorian era and the very apogee of the British Empire before it started to crumble in the First World War. A time of career-change for Willie Archer, from the technicalities of paper-production in Holland, to clerk and later manager at his father-in-law’s house-furnisher’s shop in Little Clarendon Street, Oxford. Well, well. Life beckoned to him no doubt he felt in 1902. And for 19 years he nailed his colours to his father-in-law (George Blake)’s mast, even naming his second son (my father) Frederick George Blake Archer as a tribute to him, and echoing his own (WGRA’s) names: William George Reed Archer, of which, Reed was his mother’s maiden name. [**] But was it Magdalen Tower, as his handwriting on the print indicated? (I need to re-check my recollection with the original!). I never could quite get my head round the relative positions of The Radcliffe Camera, All Souls Church spire, and St Mary’s church spire, and where was the High Street exactly? The answer is: "Christ Church". The view is from not from Magdalen Tower (a long way east of Carfax) at all, but from Christ Church’s Tom Tower (a few hundred yards south of Carfax) or thereabouts. It’s the only way to get those named landmarks in the necessary relative positions - and Magdalen Tower itself is almost visible (!) off to the right of St Mary’s.
(Added 2.2.15): have inspected the original: it DOES say (in pencil apparently in Grandpa’s hand): “View from Mag College Tower of Oxford”. So, make of that what you can. He should have known, I suppose (!).