Jesse Taylor's story
JESSE TAYLOR (1865 – 1938) Campden Photographer
Jesse Taylor was born in Redcliffe, Bristol in 1865, the fifth son of William and Mary Taylor. William was a pianoforte maker and the 1881 census shows that the eldest son followed his father’s trade but Jesse, then 15 years old, and one of his older brothers were watchmakers.
Ten years later Jesse, still a watchmaker, was living in Bedminster, Bristol with his wife Alice who was from an old Ebrington farming family, the Stanleys. The 1881 census lists Alice as a music teacher in Bristol, living with her grandfather. The music connection must have brought Jesse and Alice together.
The Taylors moved to Chipping Campden in about 1893, probably to be near her family and he set up his watchmaking and repair business in a shop in the High street.
In 1895 Campden held the first of three Grand Floral Fetes and in the following year Henry Taunt, an established commercial photographer in Oxford, came to make a record of the whole event. This may have inspired Jesse Taylor to expand his business in the High Street as he is listed in Kelly’s 1897 Trade Directory as a watchmaker and photographer.
From then until his death in 1938 Jesse Taylor took well over three thousand photographs of life in Campden and the surrounding villages.