Members at our 2007 BBQ

Cardiff
Naturalists'Society


Cymdeithas Naturiaethwyr
Caerdydd

 

 

Salmon and Ingram Diary and Locations information


The Cardiff Naturalists' Society is the longest established wildlife organization in the area having been formed in 1867.One of it's key members in the early 20th century and onwards was Harry Morrey Salmon (1890-1985) 72nd President (latterly Colonel). He was a pioneering nature photographer specialising in bird photography and conservationist and he left his collection of glass plate negatives, along with some other items to the society in the 1980s.

Between 2022 and 2025 members of the society along with staff from the Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru / National Museum of Wales worked to conserve, clean and digitise these images with a plan to put a selection of them into the public domain for non commercial use

As part of this work we scanned and transcribed many documents that were created by Morrey Salmon and also by his photographic partner Geoffrey C S Ingram 53rd President

Salmon and camera taken in 1981

Salmon and camera taken in 1981

This page has been created to make available some of these supporting documents which do not fit within the structures of the Museum's web pages (their links will be made available here when available). The following notes are important and we hope will aid in the reading of the documents and the understanding of the people and processes mentioned in the documents

The documents are provided as good faith translations. There may be mistakes as some of the handwriting and abbreviations were not easy to read.

Some of the practises mentioned such as cutting branches for a better view of a nest were considered reasonable at the time. Given the limitations of the equipment they were in fact necessary if any form of result was going to be achieved and the actions of the authors should not be measured against current practises, Neither do we support or advise these as reasonable these days and, given the benefits of modern equipment they should not be necessary

Some of the documents were created by Morrey, some (to be added later) were created by Geoffrey Ingram. At the time of creating this page (2025) all of the original documents are housed in the CNS collections at the National Collections Centre in Nantgarw. The museum have also been given an electronic copy of all the word files that the PDFs here were created from and as such should there be any problems that we are unable to resolve please contact the National Museum, details at https://museum.wales/curatorial/natural-sciences/

More documents will be added here as they are able to be prepared for internet publication. Please click the filename link to open them in another tab

Locations.pdf A document created by the project team based on research into the locations that they visited which are named in the documents
HMS Typed pages 1912.pdf A document by Morrey Salmon describing a photographic trip to Porthcawl and Kenfig in the summer of 1912 which reads somewhat like the "Rip Roaring" adventure tales of old
HMS Typed pages 1913.pdf A document by Morrey Salmon describing photographic trip to Porthcawl and Kenfig in the spring and summer of 1913, and a trip to North Wales with his father Edgar Salmon (46th President) which reads somewhat like the "Rip Roaring" adventure tales of old. Absolutely hilarous reading is the section regarding "camping" at Mr Duck's house