About the Richard Filmer Archive
This website is part of the Tools and Trades History Society (TATHS) website whose main contents are at www.taths.org.uk This site contains a series of photographs which are available for personal use. Copyright terms are shown below.
Introduction
The late Richard Filmer was a TATHS Vice President and a keen photographer of crafts and hand tool trades. During his travels around the world, Richard amassed a collection of around 6000 photographs. Unfortunately, Richard kept the details of the slides entirely in his head and there is no actual indexing of the photographs. On his death, Richard left the slides to his friend Steve Salter who has kindly agreed to convert the slides to useable photographs and make them available on the TATHS website for personal research purposes only. Converting the slides is a mammoth task and initially there are only about 500 images on this site. More will be added in batches as they become available. The images have been arranged into categories of trades or subjects. Those available now are:
Brush making; Carts; Carving; Coaches; Coopering; Food Preparation; Rake making; Shavehorses; Smithing; Stone and Clay working; Textiles; Tinsmithing; Wheelwrighting; and Woodturning. There is also a Miscellaneous section containing mainly portraits and landscapes.
Copyright
Copyright of the photographs is held by Steve R. Salter and the Tools and Trades History Society and the photographs here are watermarked accordingly. Higher resolution unwatermarked images are available on application to TATHS at
About Tools & Trades History Society Membership
We are not primarily a collectors' club but most of our members do own quite a lot of tools and some of them have studied their specialist interests in depth.
The society owns a substantial collection of tools, which is on permanent public display at the Amberley Museum and Heritage Centre, near Arundel in West Sussex. All members are urged to visit Amberley as often as they can. We also have close links to the Hawley Collection in Sheffield.
There is a series of notes on the preservation and treatment of tools. We have a small collection of videos recording tool making techniques and a popular section on mystery tools or "whatsits" as most members describe them.
Jane Rees has kindly made available a selection of her photographs of various tools and trades. In this section you can also view images from the collections at Amberley showing examples of craftmen-made tools and engineering tools.
There is a fascinating selection of articles ranging from Japanese marking instruments to WW1 saws.
The accumulated wisdom of TATHS members through the ages! Here you can find all sorts of techniques and tips for restoring old tools. Some of them may even work....