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Introduction
Bruce Cummings was born in 1889 at Barnstaple in Devon. His father was a newspaper reporter and it was to this profession that he was apprenticed at the age of 17. He disliked newspaper work intensely and, pursuing his schoolboy passion for biology, he obtained a release to take a post with the Marine Laboratory, Plymouth. Family difficulties prevented him from taking up this post but subsequently, following spare time study, he gained entrance by competition to a job at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.
Never hale and hearty, he was told when in his mid-twenties that he had only a few years to live. Consequent upon this, and writing under the name of W.N.P. Barbellion, he edited and published his best known work—The Journal of a Disappointed Man— before he died of multiple sclerosis on October 22, 1919 at the age of 30.
I first encountered the Journal in 1956, and read it avidly. It had a great impact on me and, along with other published journals, was one of the influences that, at the age of 18, made me change my jottings diary into a formal daily journal.
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But I'd never seen a photograph of him or the people in his life and the places where he lived. For me, that was a sad thing, and I felt the lack deeply.
Then, in 1998, I made the acquaintance of a British writer—Eric Bond Hutton—who is writing a full biography on Barbellion, and mentioned my long term disappointment to him in passing. To my great delight the postman called not long after, bringing a large manilla envelope containing a number of photographs of Barbellion. That started me on this site, the first version of which appeared online in July 1998. Subsequently, thanks again to the help of Mr Hutton, I have added further photographs to the website, most recently here in July 2003, as a full revision.
To the best of my knowledge there is no other easily available collection of Barbellion photographs. I'm delighted to be able to bridge that gap here. I have grouped the photographs and arranged them as closely as I am able in chronological order; sadly, there's no reliable information presently available to me to provide more than a few captions.
John Bailey
July 2003
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