Montague Glover
- The Story
Montague Glover was an architect, an army officer awarded the Military Cross for bravery in World War 1, and a talented amateur photographer. When he died, in 1983, he left behind an archive of thousands of negatives. Taken between 1918 and the late 1950’s, they document an era of gay life which is always assumed to be hidden from history. Far from it, for nearly fifty years “Monty” Glover lovingly recorded the faces and bodies of the men he slept with and admired. Most of all, he delighted in recording the stunning good looks of Ralph Hall, the six-foot, blond-haired East Ender with whom he shared his life for nearly six decades. These now famous photographs of Ralph are both a celebration of masculine beauty and a precious record of a life-long gay relationship.
The story of these photograph’s survival is almost as extraordinary as the images themselves. None of them were ever published in Glover’s lifetime, and when he died at the age of eighty-six his lover Ralph Hall packed all of the surviving negatives and prints in a pair of cardboard boxes and stored them in the loft of the cottage in Warwickshire which the two men had shared. When Ralph himself died, just four years later, a local firm of auctioneers was instructed to clear the contents of the cottage; fortunately, the auctioneer himself looked in one of the two boxes just as they were about to be thrown out. Intrigued by what he saw, he immediately contacted historian and gay photographic archivist James Gardiner, inviting him to come and see if the pictures were of any interest. James jumped in his car, seeing the photos for himself, he realised at once the significance of what had been found…
In 1992, Gardiner published a selection of Glover’s photographs, accompanied by his account of Monty and Ralph’s life together, in the pioneering queer history-book A CLASS APART. The moving story of Monty and Ralph’s 1930’s romance, their war-time separation and their subsequent long life together made the book an immediate best-seller. The pictures of Ralph in particular, have since gone on to become part of the visual language of queer culture, a testament to the power of beauty - and the power of love - wherever they are shared. Read more on Montague Glover - Wikipedia
