In 1839, the invention of photography was announced to the world, and almost immediately the race was on to create colour photographs. Within a year, Sir John Frederick William Herschel had registered colours on paper coated with light-sensitive silver chloride, but was unable to fix and retain them. Next came the cyanotype, which produced a bright blue pigment that could be toned to create violet, red or green. This still failed to reproduce any subtlety of tone, and many photographers wishing to render the world in colour as they saw it remedied the problem by colouring their images by hand. The search for inherent rather than applied colour went on and, over the next few decades, many processes were tried out.

These beautiful photographs of the British at work were among the first colour pictures published in The Times. They appeared in the Thirties, and it had taken many years of perseverance and experimentation before they could be published on a regular basis.

In 1897, The Times had published its first colour plate, a portrait of Queen Victoria on the occasion of her diamond jubilee. The image, however, was printed in Germany, and regular colour was still a far-off dream. By 1914, halftone photographs had begun to appear in the paper, the inspiration of the new proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, who had pioneered the picture paper in founding the Daily Mirror. Northcliffe was determined to bed photographs into The Times, ignoring in the process the letters from his stuffier readers who had already objected strongly to the introduction of black-and-white line drawings in advertisements, muttering that The Times was turning into a “threepenny Mirror”.

A man named Ulric Van den Bogaerde was appointed the first staff photographer on The Times in 1914 and, five years later, he became the paper’s art editor. Soon he was responsible for producing a full page of photographs in the paper six days a week, plus more photographs in the Weekly Edition.

Bogaerde was a pioneer and a perfectionist. Throughout his long career at The Times (he was finally persuaded to retire in 1957, at the age of 80) he experimented with new techniques and equipment to reproduce subtleties of tone. Ordinary life in Britain was covered in these picture pages (known as “the pretty pages”), and one admirer of a series on British trains wrote: “I want to be the man who a week ago took that amazing picture of a locomotive at full bend. I understand that the photographer was on that train himself; or that strictly speaking only one of his toes was on it, the rest of him being hanging out. What I want to know is, could I get his place as soon as he falls off? I am willing to take half his salary.” The writer signed himself Mr Anon. He was

Sir James Barrie. Bogaerde’s son, the actor Dirk Bogarde, recalled fond memories of his father’s devotion to the paper. “From our earliest days my sister and brother and I were made aware that whatever happened we had to take second place to The Paper. It really caused us very little grief, and we were proud to be known as ‘newspaper children’. Nightly the telephone would ring with news of kings falling from mountain peaks, train crashes in Scotland, assassinations in Bolivia or floods in India: all this went completely over our heads, naturally, but a marvellous sense of excitement was always in the air.” But Bogaerde’s real dream was colour. “He had started experimenting with it as early as 1931 for use in the Weekly Edition, and was determined that one day he would see his beloved picture page in all the colours of the spectrum.”

An eight-page spread of colour photographs appeared in The Times Weekly Edition on December 10, 1931 – the first in a British newspaper. The cover was headlined “Special Feature: Photographs in Natural Colour”, and on the front was a shot of the Southdown Foxhounds meet near Plumpton in Sussex. This was the beginning of the documentary era, and the camera was its star.

National Geographic Magazine had started printing colour photographs in 1921, many of them taken by the American Helen Murdoch, who had done a round-the-world tour a few years earlier, taking pictures in many countries including Egypt, India, Burma, China and Japan. She used the autochrome method, which had been devised in 1907 by the Lumière brothers. It was the first colour process that was simple enough to be mastered by any competent photographer. Employing microscopic grains of potato starch, its great advantage was that it could be used in any plate camera and did not require special equipment.

Following on from Bogaerde’s first colour spread in 1931, he began commissioning and publishing colour photos every week, normally on the picture page on Saturdays. The photographers were anonymous, but may well have come from his earlier team, who were apparently possessed only of surnames, as Dirk Bogarde recalled, much like at school: Greenwood, Horton, Bell. And, as with Bogaerde’s earlier tentative experiments with his picture pages, these also showed life in Britain, succinct and in full colour, coaxing vernacular culture and the working existence to centre stage. It was, perhaps, one of the quietest revolutions in English history, establishing a new field and a new mode of vision. If we now know that soap manufacturing or a fibreglass factory can be touchingly beautiful, that is because Bogaerde’s pages proved it to a nation that hadn’t noticed before.

Every Saturday, readers of The Times were presented with these mesmerising images of the British at work: women calmly working away making plastic cups and plates at a plastics factory in St Helens, Lancashire; wallpaper-making at Belgrave Mills; a cotton-spinning mill in Bolton; or the dispensary at Westminster Hospital, in which the chemist stands in his white coat surrounded by glass vials and bottles filled with drugs and tinctures in different colours.

These are beautiful photographs, composed with great care and shot with available light. “Bogaerde must have given a very clear brief, because these photographers certainly knew what they were doing. They took very few frames because of the time and the cost, and they had to get their picture right,” says Chris Whalley, who is in charge of The Times picture archive.

“The autochrome colour method produced incredibly impressive images for their time,” says Martin Barnes, curator of photographs at the Victoria & Albert Museum. “There were many shifts made in the colour process in the Twenties and Thirties, as well as shifts in aesthetics. Some photographers favoured something called the tri-carbro process, which was tricky to use and produced a sort of dense, hyper-real quality to the colour, which would not look naturalistic to our eye today. The autochromes, on the other hand, were very soft to look at, much less garish than rival colour methods.”

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