Rev. William Black's Caving Photograph Album

The Reverend Black was born in 1905. In the early 1930s he was working in Cleckheaton, and explored many of the caves in the Yorkshire Dales with a group of friends using home-made ladders. Remarkably, he built his own camera for underground photography, and in the course of the next few years took many superb cave photographs all over the British Isles. These include some important pictures of Penderyn Cave which was destroyed by quarrying shortly after his visit. His photographs were good enough for him to be invited to give a talk on the Irish caves at the BSA Conference in Swansea in 1939.

Rev. Black died in 1974. Seven albums of caving photographs, together with a copy of his autobiography, 'Life of a Twentieth Century Parish Priest', were generously donated on permanent loan to the British Caving Library in 2010 by his family, and we welcome this opportunity to make them more widely available.

The first five photograph albums have a page size of 138 mm by 208 mm, and the other two 202 mm by 270 mm.

Volume I - Caves of the West Riding
Volume II - Caves of Caves of Yorkshire and Lancashire
Volume IIIa - Caves in Ireland - 1934
Volume IIIb - Caves in Yorkshire. How Stean Caves, Nidderdale. Nov. ’34, Feb. ’35
Volume IV - Caves in Yorkshire, Derbyshire and County Fermanagh. 1935
Volume Va - Sea Caves in Sark. June 1936
Volume Vb - Alum Pot, Long Churn, Kirkdale, Thor’s Cave, Goyden Pot, Catnot Cave
Volume VI - Ireland - Sept. 1937, Alum Pot - June 1938, Calf Holes -July 1938, Gaping Gill - Aug. 1938, Sell Ghyll Hole - Aug. 1938
Volume VII - No title page, but many Welsh caves including Penderyn Cave, and some Yorkshire caves