The workmen wore thick overalls and gloves to clear the jumble of glass and cardboard boxes piled high in a London attic.
Their instructions were to throw away everything and redecorate. However, Terry Thurston, the foreman, took a second look at the "rubbish" buried beneath a thick layer of dust, cobwebs and broken glass, and knew he couldn't throw out the thousands of glass negatives scattered everywhere.
But for his alertness, history would have ended up in a skip. Although he did not know it, Thurston had saved for the nation one of the largest and most important collections of 19th and early 20th century portrait photographs.
"I wiped one or two faces and there were Queen Victoria and Lloyd George looking up at me. I just couldn't throw them out, he said last week.
The filthy and disordered mess turned out to the the archive of the Lafayette studio, a photographic firm to which Queen Victoria gave a royal warrant on March 5, 1887. The most prominent people at court, in society, politics and the services sat for the studio in New Bond Street.
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