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05 August 2025

Margaret George: a Fenland Village through her lens

Margaret George was born in 1899, the second daughter of the Revd. Maurice Barnard George. Little is known about her early life, but when she was eight years old, she was given a Kodak Brownie box camera, and that gift triggered off a passion for photography which was to remain with her for the next seventy-five years.

Revd. George was Curate at Wiggenhall St. Peter from 1910 until 1918 when he was appointed Vicar of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Guyhirn. The family moved into the Vicarage and for the next thirty years Margaret George assiduously recorded village life in great detail. Hardly anyone escaped her camera; baptisms, weddings, fetes, seaside outings, farm activities, funerals – all found their way into her collection. As well as human interest the collection records the development of fen farming, agricultural machinery, and motor vehicles, including a month-by-month account of the building of the first road bridge carrying the A47 over the River Nene in the mid-1920s.

The collection contains over ten thousand images; in addition to the negatives, which she mostly processed herself, there are thirty albums of contact prints. The earliest albums have little accompanying details but later on virtually all the prints in the albums are meticulously labelled with date, place, names of the people, cats, dogs, goats, cows, horses and sometimes cars!

Some pictures from the Guyhirn period are of the Fens outside of the village, and some are away from Guyhirn altogether. A considerable number of the negatives (3.5 inches by 2.5 inches roll film format) survive in their original envelopes in batches covering six-month periods.

Her enthusiasm for photography continued even after she left Guyhirn, including during a spell in hospital in London, and her last known photograph was taken in 1979 when she was over eighty years old.

After Margaret George’s death in 1983 her family passed the collection into the care of local historian Brian Payne, who was himself born in Guyhirn, and he brought the images to the attention to the public through talks to local history groups, schools, WI groups, and societies.

Whilst Margaret George was not of the same technical ability of a professional photographer such as Lilian Ream, her images give a fascinating, relaxed and casual record of life in a Fenland village over three decades and we are extremely fortunate that she has left us such a wonderful collection.

Photo top - Evacuees arrive

Photo middle - Margaret with 'Penelope' the car

Photo bottom - Catherine Wilson arriving at Guyhirn Church with Frank Wilson who was one of the wiltnesses to Catherine's marriage to John Barnes, 29 July 1931