Desmond O’Neill was a hugely successful and well known society photographer back in the day. Mrs Savill invited him every summer to photograph the Paddock Wood year groups, you remember...

our smaller group photos...

                                                                                        Ascot....

Queen Charlottes’ Ball

                                                                            and the end of the summer term Ball...

I’m sure you remember and maybe even have your own collection...

Sadly, Desmond died in 2003 but his studio lives on, run by his son Dominic.

Towards the end of 2013, I discovered that the Desmond O’Neill Studios have a very big presence on the social scene. Dominic was hugely enthusiastic of my request for any photos of Paddock Wood. He not only discovered his father’s very detailed spreadsheet of over 10,000 photo negatives, but set about the hugely time-consuming task of converting many of these negatives to photos and uploading them up onto his website for you to see - an purchase if you wished.

This is the list of some of the 10,000 or so photos available. Take the first year he took photos, 1951. The reference you see is CX 1-21, this means there are 21 photos for the Dance in that year. In 1966, he took 52 photos, and so on...

I’ve huge amounts of admiration for Dominic ; he spent hours converting negatives to photos,  scanning and uploading them. Some girls ordered photos, but because only a few grasped the nettle, he had to put a halt on the work, as as the financial cost of the work he did, outweighed the number of photos ordered by us, sadly.

Many years have been uploaded onto his website, please click here to visit and view them

www.donfeatures.com

Once you’ve landed on the home page, please click the small box, top right, with 3 lines in it. Then click on Archive & Collections, then Open Collections,  the rest I hope is obvious.  Ordering is easy from Dominic directly on the website and copies may be ordered for delivery electronically by email - makes it so easy - or a hard copy, whichever you’d prefer.

If you’d like to get in touch with me, if the link or way in isn’t working, please email me directly on:   pippa.anderson@me.com

The Desmond O’Neill website of Paddock Wood photos