Butchers and Sons

[tombob]

hi there i have ended up with and old 6x9 plate camera (it seems - the darkslide is rusted over) made by butchers and sons, it appears butchers created cambo but this is pure guess work from the markings on the camera to give you an idea on date its old enough to have aperture infront of the front element. it seems to be a similar model to the camera used for those infantly famous photographs of fairy's in the early 1900s. was wondering if anyone has come across these or can tell me more then the scraps i've found over months of pointless ebay searching

[Dan Fromm]

Tom, Norman Channing and Mike Dunn wrote a book British Camera Makers that contains a discussion of Butcher & Sons and the various firms that succeeded it. It was published by Parkland Designs of Esher, Surrey. Look for a copy. eBay is very much the wrong place to look for enlightenment or even information.

[tombob]

thanks i'll look for it, though i must say ebay wasnt exactly top of my list of searching for information

[Struan Gray]

The basic details of the Butcher company are fairly widely available on the net. There are also many web pages created by fans of the Ensign cameras from the Houghton-Butcher company formed by merger during WWI. These two links have most of the basic info:

http://www.camerapedia.org/wiki/Butcher

http://www.ensign.demon.co.uk/ensigncamerapage.htm

[seepaert]

The Cambo cameras were and some digital models still are manufactured in a small town in the Netherlands since 1947. It seems highly unlikely to me, that such a firm would ever be called Butchers and sons.

The firm was purchased by Calumet, but still keeps operating under their original name. It allways used lenses made by others and right now they use third party digital backs.