James ‘Jimmy’ Jarché (1890-1965), my grandfather, was one of the most sought-after photojournalists of his generation.
He was born to immigrant Lithuanian parents in Rotherhithe, near the docks by Tower Bridge, in 1890. Jimmy’s parents arrived in London after living in Paris for a while, where his father, Arnold, worked as an assistant in a photographic studio.
In London, having set up Tower Bridge Photographic Studios, Arnold would take classic portraiture pictures during the day, but after hours his work would take a macabre turn. With no photographic unit of their own at that time, the Metropolitan Police would call on Arnold to photograph the dead bodies lifted from the Thames, assisted by Jimmy, who was then only 13. He would often be left alone with the bloated, groaning corpses while other matters were dealt with.
It was a hard life and it toughened him up. Also he was left blessed with great charisma, not to say chutzpah. He would happily wrestle with the dockworkers during the day and perform at the Magic Circle in the evening.
He was also an extremely loving grandfather, and in later life my brothers (actor David Suchet and broadcaster John Suchet) and I adored him.
When Jimmy’s father died suddenly, he and his mother ran Tower Bridge Studios until Jimmy eventually left to train as a staff photographer. He worked on assignments for the Daily Mirror, the Daily Sketch, Weekly Illustrated, the Daily Herald and Life magazine, among others.
Jimmy undertook a huge number of photographic assignments for publications like these, but never as a freelance. In those days, freelance photographers simply didn’t exist.
He was competitive, certainly, when it came to getting the ‘scoop’. He was described as having the ‘sharpest elbows in the business’, but he would have detested the methods of the modern paparazzi. Without the opportunities to make a very good living as a freelance photographer, he was simply on a publication’s payroll, and was paid relatively little.
He was immensely prolific during his 50 years on Fleet Street. His earliest picture was published by the Daily Mirror in 1909: of Louis Blériot, the first person to fly across the English Channel. He also photographed the spot where Blériot slept overnight on the cliffs at Dover, to make sure he got the scoop.
Jarché’s most memorable shots include one of a young Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, during the siege of Sidney Street in 1911. In his memoirs, People I Have Shot, Jimmy writes, ‘Perhaps for sheer excitement, I never did anything equal to the Sidney Street Siege.’
Jarché also snapped the first photo published in a British newspaper of the future Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson in a nightclub in 1936. Until this point, the British press had resolved to be discreet regarding Edward’s affair. A week after the publication of this image, the King abdicated the throne.
In his early career, Jarché used what all press photographers used at that time, a collapsible 9x12 plate camera. By the 1930s, he’d found a Leica camera, which used 35 mm, was lighter and was therefore more portable. He swore by his Leica. He told his grandson Sir David Suchet that the best lens through which anyone can view any subject is ‘the one that God has given you: your eye’.
In People I Have Shot, Jarché muses that some of the ‘best shots have been the cheapest’. He then recalls the events that led him to snap Limbs and the Law, which cost him threepence in bus fares – and brought the newspaper nearly £400 in reproduction rights.
It was to Jimmy’s eternal regret that he missed the financial opportunities afforded the freelance photographers of today. If he had owned the copyright of his own catalogue, it would have been worth a lot of money, and provided him with the security in later life that he lacked.
Jimmy died in August 1965, just a month after my 12th birthday. My brother John (the journalist, author and broadcaster, awarded an OBE in 2023) is nearly ten years older than me; Sir David is nearly eight years older.
So they obviously remember Jimmy more clearly than I do, particularly since a large part of my life up to then had been spent away at boarding school.
David idolised Jimmy, inheriting his talent (and listening to his advice on photography) to become a highly regarded – and published – amateur photographer in his own right, as well as an ambassador for Leica cameras. Avoiding an autobiography in the accepted sense, in 2019 he published David Suchet Behind the Lens: My Life.
One story we all remember with great affection is how Jimmy met his wife, Elsie. She was an actress and one of the two ‘Sisters Robinson’, a music-hall song-and-dance act (the origin of the name is not known).
As a regular visitor to the Hackney Empire, Jimmy was soon enchanted by Elsie and would wait to meet her at the stage door every night, only to be rebuffed each time. Today, he might be called a stage-door Johnny.
One night, he hired a white tie, tails and a top hat and waited again by the stage door. Jimmy pushed a red rose in front of Elsie and said, ‘This is the last time I’m ever going to ask you out, and this is the last chance you’ll have to say yes.’ They were married a few weeks later.
I remember as a young boy seeing Elsie taking a big bag of granulated sugar and emptying the whole thing onto her lino kitchen floor. She would stand in the sugar and demonstrate her immaculate music-hall soft-shoe shuffle, or ‘sand dance’. She was a talented and much- in-demand music-hall performer, with a wonderful singing voice.
It makes the family immensely proud to see Jimmy’s many images reproduced today, because we usually spot them only by chance. They are very rarely credited to James Jarché, a Fleet Street legend and the pre-eminent photojournalist of his time.
The Oldie March 2024
