Photo 884/1

Black cloth-covered post-bound album, 314 x 435mm, containing prints mounted 5 or 6 to a page with captions handwritten in white ink. The album has modern typed labels on the front fixed endpaper listing the locations depicted in the photographs, with the addition of a colour coded finding aid in which coloured circles stuck on album pages correspond to the following locations:

1. Trip to Kashmir, 1929 [Green].

2. Murree under winter snow, 1929 [Blue].

3. Peshawar: Cantonment & Old City [Yellow].

4. Khyber Pass [Red].

A feature of several of the photographs from the Kashmir tour is the removal from the negative of a member of the Holmes' party. From correspondence with the donor it transpires that the man scratched off the negative was R. B. Holmes' brother-in-law, who left his wife (Gwen Holmes) about two years after the photographs were taken, thus falling out of favour with the Holmes' family.

Randolph Bezzant Holmes was born in Peshawar in 1888 and joined the photographic firm of his father William Dacia Holmes, taking over its management on the retirement of the latter in 1912. Several other family members were also involved in the running of the firm, which produced a comprehensive visual record of the North-West Frontier Province. The studio was closed after partition and Holmes retired to New Zealand, where he died in 1973.