Henry Cyril Casserley (12 June 1903 â 16 December 1991) was a British railway photographer. In the 1920s and 1930s, he photographed remote corners of the railway network in the United Kingdom and Ireland. His work provided a source of illustrations for books and magazines.
Henry Cyril Casserley was born in Clapham, County of London, to Edward Casserley, a minor Post Office official, and his wife, Sarah (). Edward had a strong interest in mechanical objects and built a model railway in his loft, which could have led to Henry's enthusiasm for trains. Henry spent his working life in the head offices of the Prudential Assurance Company in London until he was evacuated to Derby in World War II. He married Kathleen Goose on 16 July 1931. Their son Richard (31 December 1936 â 18 October 2017) also took up photography and later acted as custodian of his father's collection.
The family lived beside the railway line just east of the Bromley South railway station from 1931 to 1939, but they moved to a house on a new estate in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, as the electrification of the Southern Railway greatly reduced the number of steam trains passing through Bromley. Casserley acquired his first motor car in 1934, which aided his reaching of obscure small railway lines and investigation of windmills, in which he had also developed an interest.
He was in military service from 1942 to 1944, mostly based in the Army stores section at Bicester, but was invalided out and returned to his job at the Prudential. He retired in 1964 and devoted himself to his 'second career' as a photographer and writer. His wife died in 1986 and his interest and memory then declined until his death, aged 88, in Berkhamsted.
Casserley's first camera was a Kodak No. 2 folding Brownie with f/8 Rapid rectilinear lens acquired in 1919, but this was soon replaced by a professional standard Butcher's 'Popular Pressman' quarter-plate reflex camera (using 4ü" x 3ü" glass plates). In 1937, he replaced it with a Leica 35 mm camera, which served him until the end of his career, being replaced with an identical model when the original was stolen in 1963.
Despite a few experiments with early commercial colour film, he continued using black-and-white photography. His record-keeping of negatives used a numbering system he later shared with his son, and it is estimated that he had personally taken 60,000 railway subjects by 1972, in some fifty-two years of work.
He began by recording locomotives, usually "on shed", i.e. at a locomotive depot rather than in service. He photographed in this manner because of the bulk of his camera and the slow film speeds. Later, he expanded his range to cover scenes in and around stations as his desire to travel over all railway lines in the British Isles took him to obscure corners of the railway system. There are many characteristic broadside shots of Southern Railway locomotives passing the family home in Bromley in the 1930s, but he generally strayed from railway photography, being strictly a "photographer of record". He largely stopped photographing railways with the end of steam traction on British Railways and Córas Iompair ÃÂireann.
Casserley began contributing articles on railway and travel subjects from 1919 but was soon better known for supplying photographs to The Railway Magazine and enthusiast society journals. An early success was to obtain the first photograph of Midland Railway 0-10-0 banker locomotive 2290 in steam, at Derby in January 1920.
Before retirement, he wrote or compiled a few books, including the self-published Locomotive cavalcade (1952), and editions of The Observer's Book of Railway Locomotives of Britain for Frederick Warne & Co. From 1964 to 1979 he put together more than 20 titles, mostly collections of photographs â usually his own â for specialist transport publishers David & Charles, Ian Allan and D. Bradford Barton.