Christina Broom with her husband Albert Broom had a shop at 87 Streatham Hill. Broom [née Livingston], Christina [known as Mrs Albert Broom] (1862–1939), photographer, was born on 28 December 1862 at 8 King's Road, Chelsea, seventh of the eight children of Alexander Livingston (1812–1875), a master bootmaker, and his wife, Margaret, née Fair (1826–1884). Both parents were Scottish, her father from Muiravonside, Stirling, and her mother from Edinburgh. Christina was always small, but a sturdy, independent child who enjoyed family holidays at Margate, in Kent, and went to school there, boarding at Miss Searle's Claremont Academy. She excelled in swimming, rifle-shooting, and angling and enjoyed the open air and especially fishing all her life. Margate became a second home, and she joined both Margate and the Dolphins fishing clubs.
On 15 August 1889 Christina Livingston married Albert Edward Broom (1864–1912), who worked in the family ironmongery business at Brompton. They lived with his parents in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and when Winifred, their only child, was born they moved to Napier Avenue, in Fulham. Albert's sport was cricket and he became captain of Battersea Cricket club. In 1896 he was hit by a cricket ball and suffered serious disablement. At about the same time the family business failed and Albert and Christina invested in a stationery and toy shop in Streatham; Albert's trade card described him as an 'accountant and auditor, specialising in laundry accounts'. By 1903, however, the shop had failed to thrive.
Completely untrained, Christina Broom borrowed a small box camera and experimented. Her first photograph was of the prince and princess of Wales opening the Holborn to Tooting tramway. Then came a portrait of the Derby winner Rock Sand and local street views. In the contemporary craze for postcards these sold well, so she progressed to a larger, secondhand camera, moved her family to Burnfoot Avenue, and began to photograph in earnest. The gas-lit coal cellar became her darkroom; Winifred left school in order to help, mass orders were encouraged, and Christina once printed 1000 postcards overnight. Albert did the neat labelling on the early cards, but his condition worsened and in 1912 he died. Mother and daughter moved again—to 92 Munster Road, Fulham, their final home—and set to work again. Christina became known professionally as Mrs Albert Broom.
While producing postcards Mrs Broom had become an established press photographer, though necessarily of a static kind. In 1904, while getting to know her camera, she had photographed the Scots Guards' sports in Chelsea and had sent copies to their colonel. He approved of these, and from 1904 to 1939, unusually for a woman, Christina Broombecame official photographer to the household brigade, with a darkroom in Chelsea barracks. She sold the prints to the soldiers at 2d. each, which included an envelope for writing home, and this led Lord Roberts, then commander of the Irish Guards, to pronounce that she had increased recruitment, which had diminished after the South African War, and that she should take official army portraits. This she did, mainly of traditional hierarchical groups but also of less formal, off-duty moments. In one, for example, three privates lounge and smoke, while in others soldiers are saying farewell to families before embarkation. From 1904 to 1930 Mrs Broom ran a stall in the royal mews. Although forbidden to do so she attempted to photograph Edward VII's charger Kildare being trained. Reprimanded, she sent in her card to the king; he recognized her name and commanded that she be allowed to take and sell pictures of royal postillions, coachmen, coaches, and the stables. Sadly, unfortunate criticism by her of a customer ended the enterprise.
Because she lived near the Thames, Christina Broom also became the regular photographer of the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race. Her most memorable pictures, however, are probably those of the women's suffrage movement taken between 1908 and 1913, which comprise a virtually unique record of the less flamboyant moments of their campaign. These include photographs of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Christabeland Sylvia Pankhurst, and Louisa Garrett Anderson in the Women's Sunday procession and meeting in Hyde Park on 21 June 1908, in which a quarter of a million women took part, and of Christabel Pankhurst at the International Suffragette Fair, 1912 (both Museum of London collection).
At an earlier date Mrs Broom had become acquainted with Ernest Brooks, an official photographer to the royal family at Windsor. In 1920 Brooks was disgraced for publishing unsuitable pictures of the young Prince of Wales in a 'crossing the line' ceremony but he sold Christina many of his negatives, mainly royal portraits; it is not always evident, therefore, whose negatives she used in producing prints. Brooks also introduced her to David Wilson (1873–1935), a cartoonist, from whom she commissioned political lampoons of subjects that included tariff reform and the Russo-Japanese War, as well as political personalities. These she had reproduced by lithography and contact print and sold as postcards.
Christina Broom continued to flourish throughout the 1920s and 1930s, publishing, for example, in the Illustrated London News, The Tatler, The Sphere, and Country Life, and covering most important London events. During the late 1930s she became chronically ill, and on 5 June 1939 she died, at home in Fulham, after a fishing trip at her beloved Margate; she was buried on 9 June in Fulham old cemetery. Considering her tiny stature and the heavy equipment that she and her daughter, her only assistant, had to manage, the consistently high quality of her work is remarkable. In the early 1960s Winifred Broomgave most of her collection of her mother's work to the Imperial War Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Museum of London. Collections of Mrs Broom's glass negatives are held at Maidstone Art Gallery, Kent, the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, and the Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Collections of her prints are also held at the Guards Museum, London; the Gernsheim Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Texas; the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies Library; the Hammersmith and Fulham Archive; the National Army Museum; and the Imperial War Museum, London.
