R. S. Brooke—Dundas' First Photographic Images

by Stan Nowak
This article was first published October 10th, 2003 in the Dundas Star News. Reproduced with permission of the author.

Back in the 1850s, King Street was a mud road, and there were hitching posts along the board sidewalks. 'The Checkered Grocery' (today's Char-broil Restaurant) at King Street and Miller's Lane was a dominant downtown feature with its unique wall pattern. Can you just imagine it? Well, you can do more than just imagine it—you can see it. On a fine day in 1856, a gentleman stood on the corner of King Street and Sydenham Road, looked east towards Hamilton, and did a remarkable thing—he took a photograph. That photograph, taken by R.S. Brooke, is acknowledged as one of the earliest, if not the earliest, known photographs of our town.

Brooke was the first photographer to set up shop in Dundas. What he photographed in 1856, and for over thirty years afterward, is recorded for posterity in our historical periodicals, local museum, library, and some local businesses (like the Collins F&B Warehouse). "He was the first to introduce the ambrotype to this part of the province" (Dundas True Banner: January 24, 1862). An ambrotype was a less expensive alternative to the daguerreotype, and it became the dominant form of photographic portraiture in the 1850s. Basically, it is an underexposed negative on glass, that was mounted on a black background to give a positive illusion. By 1862, he was working with both ambrotypes and photographs.

Richard Sarly Brooke was born in 1828, Yorkshire, England. He arrived in Dundas in 1855 after military service in South Africa, and billed himself as a 'photographic artist' from 1856–1887. His studio—"R.S. Brooke's Portrait Rooms"—was on the north side of King Street, just three doors east of Sydenham Road, although some advertising of the time lists his location right at the corner of King and Sydenham, where the Bank of Montreal is situated today. From 1887–1896, he was a manufacturer of nitrous oxide, or 'laughing gas', which he claimed to have invented, but this is highly unlikely, since the uses of nitrous oxide are documented well before Mr. Brooke's time. During his lifetime, he also sold sewing machines for the New England Sewing Machine Company, and was an optometrist's assistant. Mr. Brooke died on September 28, 1896 and is buried, with his wife Elizabeth, in Grove Cemetery. His legacy is the photographic record which captures the early images of Dundas from less than a decade after town incorporation to twenty years after Confederation.

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