Have you noticed more moustaches around than usual this month? It’s “Movember,” which is a fundraising and awareness campaign for prostate cancer research. And so our monthly featured photograph shows some moustached men in the Chung Collection:
There are a couple of very fine moustaches in this photograph! This photograph is from a handwritten travel journal by A. E. Blake and H. A. Jamieson across Canada and to the United States of America, via the Canadian Pacific Railway and other railway routes, in the year 1900. Blake was British, and in a letter enclosed in the journal, he explains that he wrote up the journal of his adventure and also published several columns in The Field, a British leisure magazine which is still in print. Some clipped articles that he wrote about this journey in the The Field are also enclosed in the journal. The photographs from the journal, all digitized and available online, show the men hunting, fishing, camping and travelling by horse and wagon.
This photograph is captioned in the journal, “5 scouts : Harry, Kelly and Dick.” The photo obviously depicts 8 men, and in the journal Blake describes meeting another party, including a lady who was a “good sport” and “had done her fair share of the work.” Perhaps it was the lady who took the photograph of the men.