feature Percy R Salmon FRPS (Fellow of Royal Photographic Society) Percy ‘Peepbo’ Salmon retired to Melbourn after an illustrious career as a photographer and journalist, and lived at the Cross, where he had a birds eye view of village comings and goings, hence his nickname. He spent much of the following 20 years writing a weekly column for the Royston Crow. In March 1933 the Crow wrote about ‘Peepbo: ‘our Melbourn correspondent, with his pithy pars, his fun and sobriety, his pathos and humour, and his faithful recording of village happenings, has caused his weekly column to be looked upon as a leading feature with our readers, yet few realise he is anything but the inexperienced scribe he would have folks believe’. Percy R Salmon was born in 1872 in Waterbeach into a family of farmers and market gardeners. His father was W. Salmon, subsequently of Cambridge Borough Police, and a nephew of Superintendent C. Salmon of Cambs County Police. His first lessons were given by his grandfather who had a night school at the farm, teaching adults who were keen to learn. Very soon he, like his father and uncle before him, escaped to Cambridge where he started taking a close interest in photography. He joined the Cambridge Camera Club and won the Club’s Silver Cup in 1894. He made a speciality of country life pictures, and the photograph which won him the cup was a picture of a girl at a farmyard well. This was Miss Eliza Dickerson of Little Abington, whom he married 9 years later. He still had the photo on the wall when he and his wife retired to Melbourn in 1934. Percy Salmon was a prolific journalist and wrote under the pseudonym of both Richard Penlake and L. Tennant-Woods. He travelled extensively in Italy, the
Middle and Near East, sometimes disguised as an Arab and wrote a number of books on these countries. In 1899 he was travelling in Palestine and on St George’s Day visited the tomb of the Saint. Several locations are suggested for the tomb, but he favoured Lydda, which is on the Jaffa to Jerusalem Road about twelve miles from Jaffa. St. George was a soldier in the Roman Army in Lydda and was tortured and killed when he refused to worship idols. He went out to Egypt with Kitchener during WWI, lived in Jerusalem, then travelled through Lebanon, Asia Minor, Turkey, Greece and Italy and a newspaper correspondent and photographer. In 1915 he published an article in ‘The Star’ entitled ‘Our Enemy in Gallipoli’, at that time the Germans were the rulers in Constantinople. In 1917 he wrote in the ‘Daily Express’ ‘Wounded Officers in France – when and how visits may be paid’. (Application had to be made to the War Office in Whitehall, open day and night, and usually only one visitor was permitted to travel.) Before retiring to Melbourn the Salmon’s lived in Hither Green, Lewisham, SE London. He was a Freemason, and was elected to the ‘Pen and Brush Lodge’ in London, restricted to journalists and artists, where in January 1917 he became Worshipful Master. He was sub-editor of Practical Photography from 189296, Editor of Photographic News from 1901-05, of Year Book of Photography 1901-05, and Active Editor of Photographic Dealer from 1906-09. He spent several years with Cassel & Co Ltd, publishers, in the Editorial Department. His publications included ‘All About Photography,’ ‘Wonderland of Egypt’, ‘Home Portaiture,’ ‘A Photographic Expedition to Egypt, Palestine Turkey and Greece’. Four years after his wife died in 1950 he left Melbourn to live with his widowed sister-in-law in Histon, after completing 60 years of journalism, 20 of them for the local press. His interests were numerous, and his cuttings contain information on cooking, the best ways of catching mice, a test for ghosts and many more! Many of the photographs in ‘A Glimpse into Melbourn’s Past’ and ‘Pictorial Melbourn’ were taken by Percy Salmon. Most information was taken from an album of newspaper cuttings donated to the History Group by Terry Dash. Ann Dekkers melbournmagazine
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