Edward Ashton, photographer of St Ives and Hayle, Cornwall

ASHTON, Edward
Professional: St Ives (Figs. 6—9)

  Both Mr Ashton and his early work deserve to be
better-known.   He is believed to have been a native of
St Ives; the surname certainly occurs in Cornwall (there

is a hamlet called Ashton, near Breage).   Less genteel
than Penzance, less affluent than either Truro or
Falmouth and lacking the learned societies that these
other towns possessed,  St Ives could not find the
photographic custom that elsewhere supported men like
J.C. Stephens and Robert Preston.   Yet its picturesque
warren of the fishermen’s quarter, ‘Downalong’, cried
out for cameramen, and a quarter-century later was
very fully covered by the staff photographers of Frith’s
and Valentine’s.

  Edward Ashton is first recorded in 1873¹ with his
main business as both greengrocer and photographer at
West End, Hayle and a studio at Tregenna Hill in St
Ives.   The gap in time between the 1856 and 1873
Kelly’s Directories for Cornwall is misleading here, as
in other cases;  what may be Ashton’s earliest dated
view shows the wooden pier at St Ives under construc-
tion in July 1866.²   His harbour and marine studies,
and family scenes, imply someone intimately familiar
with that town.   Later mentions show Ashton only in St
Ives, with no Hayle address, and the greengrocery
presumably abandoned.³     There must be some connec-
tion with the activities of Mr Burton, and it is suggested
below⁴ that Ashton began — after some private
endeavours — as Burton’s assistant, acquiring the St
Ives studio between 1870 and 1873.   Mr Ashton’s
career remains to be discovered in detail, but he
appears to have ceased working around 1890 or so.⁵