[Photo Album, Model Village].

The Village of Crawley [Hampshire, England].

1818. circa 1950s-1960s.

Thick 4to album with 100 photographs mounted on cardstock leaves protected by tissue guards. Photos captioned by hand in ink. Additional type-written text on ordinary paper, tipped to the tissue guards. Handsomely bound in half red morocco, backstrip pannelled in gilt and lettered "Crawley Village". Occasional annotations and various other ephemera related to Crawley laid or pasted in. Fine condition with trivial rubbing to the binding and no apparent losses to the contents.

§ A beautifully curated album of photographs of the village of Crawley in Hampshire showing the changes made by Prussian immigrant Otto Ernst Philippi in his attempt to create a "model village." The history of the village has been told in the 2017 book Philippi's Crawley: An Immigrant's Dream of an English Village by Ian T. Henderson.

The album appears to be the work of P.C. Carter(?), one-time policeman of the village, whose name appears on the endpaper and who is credited with the typewritten notes by a later annotator. A typed note affixed to the front pastedown explains that the photographs show the village before and after renovations directed by Philippi, who purchased Crawley Court and much of the village in 1900. Philippi, a naturalized British citizen, set out to use the wealth he had acquired in the cotton industry to build a model English village over which he could be the benevolent lord of the manor. For many years it seems he was successful: houses were renovated, the pub extended, a village hall was built, and every child at the village school was given three new pairs of shoes a year, but in 1929 the Phillipi fortunes were ruined by the Hatry Crash and the estate was henceforth sold off piecemeal.

Internal evidence suggests that this album was created in the early 1960s and that most of the photographs were taken about 1954. The images of the village "before" appear to be photographs of older photographs, done very well. Each pair of photographs has a handwritten caption and a typed sheet giving information about the history of the building and the people who lived there. Further notes have been added by hand and additional pieces of ephemera have been bound, laid, or pasted in, including the three page typescript of an article about the village, noted as originally appearing in ‘Hampshire’ magazine in 1963. One extraordinary photograph, older than the others, shows "Mrs Eliza Philippi, March 1910" flying a very primitive airplane barely six feet above the ground, with "Mr Otto Ernst Philippi" frantically ducking out the way. The design of the airplane is so improbable we wonder if the photograph was somehow staged.

The photographs, captions, and annotations together provide a wealth of historical, social and architectural detail. It is clear that an enormous amount of time and local knowledge went into the making of it. The result is a lovely book and an important record of Crawley and its unwitting spell as a model English village. Item #125826

Price: $795.00