Beryl Pomeroy; fine-art print dealer
Hyfler/Rosner
29 March 2005
Frances Beryl Pomeroy, fine-art print dealer: born
Cranfield, Middlesex 13 September 1922; managing director,
Thomas Ross & Sons 1963-89; died London 31 January 2005.
Beryl Pomeroy succeeded her father, grandfather and
great-grandfather in running the fine-art plate-printers
Thomas Ross & Sons, an enterprise that had been established
as Dixon & Ross in 1833.
The firm's first workshop was in a former stable in
Hampstead Road, London, and it was on her visits there as a
child that Beryl became entranced by the smell of the
printers' ink and the atmosphere of silent concentration as
the printers inked huge engraved copper plates and turned
the fly-wheels of the old iron rolling-presses to transfer
the images to paper.
In 1990, interviewed for the British Library's National Life
Story Collection, she described these formative experiences
with affection and great vividness; it was almost as if her
future life's work was predestined by them. There was a
phase when her talent and enthusiasm for needlework seemed
to point to a career in embroidery; but the Second World War
intervened and in 1940 she entered the Civil Service as a
clerk in the Ministry of Food. An aspiration to serve in the
WRNS was unsatisfied due to stringent entry conditions and
she remained in the Civil Service until 1945.
During the war her father, fearful of the Hampstead Road
building's vulnerability to bombing, rented a coach-house in
Hounslow West and transferred there a couple of presses and
much of the valuable stock of old plates, prints and paper.
Beryl helped with the office work in the evenings and this
(as well as her brother's departure from the firm to take up
farming) must have been a factor in her decision to join her
father full-time in 1945 when he reoccupied the Hampstead
Road workshop. The old excitement was strong as ever; she
had a powerful sense of her guardianship of the firm's long
tradition of collaboration with the skilled engravers who
translated into the language of bitten and engraved line the
original work of eminent artists.
By this time, Ross's had acquired a huge collection of
19th-century and earlier plates (many of them left in their
care by such celebrated publishers as Henry Graves, long
since gone out of business) and archives in the form of day
books, ledgers and correspondence recording links with
J.M.W. Turner, Edwin Landseer, John Linnell and many other
prominent artists and with engravers like Samuel Cousins,
C.G. Lewis and Landseer's brother, Thomas.
The firm had since its early days enjoyed an international
reputation, supplying prints to dealers in North and South
America and many parts of Europe and very soon after the end
of the war overseas buyers began to return. Beryl Pomeroy
was instrumental in expanding the trade in response to their
demand. It was her wise policy, however, to keep enthusiasm
at a high level by refusing to flood the market; each
customer had a strictly limited allocation and, ever
forthright, she would rebuff unreasonable pleas with "Not
bloody likely!" in tart emulation of Shaw's heroine Eliza.
A print-colouring studio was set up, thus reviving the
earlier practice of tinting engravings with watercolour, and
this aspect of the work was developed and supervised by
Marion Dadds, who joined the firm in 1956 and was to work in
close collaboration with Beryl Pomeroy until they both
retired. There were new publications: a magnificent
mezzotint reproduction by Lawrence Josset of Pietro
Annigoni's portrait of Queen Elizabeth II; and flower pieces
from Thornton's majestic Temple of Flora, the pastorals of
Fragonard and Constable's landscapes, all engraved in
mezzotint by Arthur Hogg, a resident engraver, and printed
meticulously in colour by George Hardcastle.
The latter had been with Ross's since 1937 and, when in 1956
the master-printer Philip McQueen, descendant of another
prominent print-publishing family, brought to the firm his
stock of old plates and prints, Ross's embodied a remarkable
amalgamation of the resources, skills and traditions handed
down from three London plate-printing houses singled out for
special commendation by the jury of the Paris exhibition of
1855.
With her father's death in 1963, Beryl Pomeroy became
managing director; also at about this time redevelopment was
planned for the Hampstead Road area and Ross's was given
notice to find new premises. After a three-year search a
suitable building was found in Manfred Road, Putney. As the
Hampstead Road workshop was emptied for the move, Pomeroy
suffered an emotional wrench at what she saw as an
interruption of the historical continuum she had grown to
love.
Since exit was by a narrow passage, the huge Victorian
presses had to be dismantled, as had the plan-chests,
shelves, desks and plate-racks, all undisturbed since 1833.
Kegs of ink, much of it bought in the 19th century from
Bouju, the Paris ink merchant, were hauled up from the
basement and the old ledgers, happily, went with everything
else to Putney in March 1966.
The reorganisation took six months, during which no printing
could be done, although trading continued on the basis of
existing stock. This consisted mainly of Victorian
engravings and in promoting these to her American clients,
in the first instance, Pomeroy played a substantial part in
a resurgence of interest in 19th-century imagery.
She was to work with undiminished energy and enthusiasm
until her retirement in 1989. "By the time I left," she
mused in her Life Story interview, "I knew practically all
there was to know [about marketing reproductive
engravings]." This was certainly no idle claim. There was
hardly any important republication of historic plates in
which Ross's was not in some way involved during the Putney
years. Pomeroy also collaborated with new generations of
print publishers and artist-printmakers and was enormously
generous in the help she gave to scholars who were beginning
to discover the rich resources of primary material of which
she was custodian.
It must have been in 1972 that I first met Beryl Pomeroy. I
should have remembered the date precisely because it marked
a turning-point in my professional life. Interested in
19th-century English book illustration, I had recently
embarked on research in that field when a colleague
mentioned by chance Thomas Ross & Son's, a firm for which he
had once worked. Intrigued by his account of what was
clearly no ordinary printers, I arranged to visit the firm's
premises in Putney.
There I was greeted by Pomeroy. She showed me the firm's
earliest Day Book which she extracted from a mountain of
dusty leather-bound volumes. The book was full of detail
illuminating the procedures of the 19th-century printers of
reproductive engravings; this I found so engrossing that I
at once switched the focus of my research to the history of
the engraving trade in London.
My own debt to her is incalculable: she introduced to me
legions of virtually forgotten engravers and printers who,
before photo-mechanical methods rendered their work largely
redundant, did so much to bring, in hand-reproduced form,
the works of major artists to an eager 19th-century public
and to whose virtuosity Ross's provided a remarkable
epilogue.
Anthony Dyson