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IT WAS fortunate that Jean-Marc de Broglio, walking in Brixton one day in 1997, was a collector of random photographs, such as the one he saw sticking out of the rubbish skip he was at that moment passing.
When he looked more closely, he found three or four cardboard boxes containing more than 3000 pictures. Each bore on the reverse the name and address of the photographer, Jan Markiewicz, of Gayville Road, Wandsworth, in south London. The name was Polish, and the pictures were recognisably of Polish occasions and people — such as the dance troupe, and the congregation leaving church, in London (above).
Knowing that his friend Nicole Tattersall was half-Polish (on her mother’s side), Jean-Marc sought to impress her with this collection, and by astonishing coincidence she recognised many of the situations, including the Polish school she attended in Clapham many years after these pictures were taken in the 1950s.
Further study revealed a vibrant community of those Poles who stayed on in London after the Second World War rather than return to an uncertain future in a Soviet-dominated Poland.
Jan Markiewicz (1913-93) — who had arrived in England via Switzerland and France in 1945, after internment in Romania — was part of that community and so fulfilled a role as resident photographer, in addition to his commercial work, recording all manner of gatherings connected with Polish social organisations, schools and, of course, the Polish church congregations, including a remarkable priest, Ksiadz Wróbel, as well as the Polish Government In Exile (1939-90).
It was Nicole Tattersall’s vision to reunite this archive with the community it recorded, and a substantial selection has already been seen at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum. It is currently on show in Hammersmith, and in the autumn a smaller selection will be exhibited at the Trestle Arts Base in St Albans. |
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