Okay, this is the maple box, which contains the pictures of the bridge. And these are the stereo’s for which you use this viewer to see them in 3D. Uh, so these have all been carefully lettered and carefully laid out on cards. You have the construction pictures of Victoria Bridge.

Mr. Notman was, on this one anyhow, up on top of the tunnel with his 8 x 10 camera and his stereo camera taking photographs of the actual construction phases of the bridge.

These are the people that are laying the monumental stone, which is now at the entrance to the Victoria Bridge on the Montreal side.

These are the bigger plates he took with a bigger camera. These would, these would be about 11 x 14 plates allowing for cropping and show some of the workers on the bridge and the ice. He was up there with his camera in the winter as well. This must have been rather interesting, technically speaking.

And the finished bridge. This whole box was presented to the prince on the occasion of opening the bridge to take back to his mother, the queen. And shortly after the boxes arrived in London there’s an account of the arrival of the box in the Illustrated London News describing the contents of the box and the fact that the queen was very pleased with it. A few months after that, looking at Notman’s picture books we find built a portico over his front door saying, “Photographer to the Queen.”

And the Queen of course was an avid photographer herself, and she was very keen on all of this stuff. And it was she who gave him the permission to use this title, “Photographer to the Queen,” which is kind of an invented title but he lost no time in putting it up. And of course people flocked to be taken by the photographer to the Queen.

There is no known actual record of the queen, Queen Victoria, having bestowed this particular rubric on him. That does not necessarily mean that it didn’t happen.

But what is true, is that being able to call yourself photographer to the queen was a massive business advantage. And Notman exploited it throughout the rest of his entire career.

But shortly after this he had a whole studio and a staff of quite a few people working for him and had begun to win medals in, in some of the European exhibitions.