Ernest James Dalzell Warrillow, MBE, MA, ARHistS, ARPS

Ernest Warrillow was born in Etruria, Staffordshire, in 1909 and went to Newcastle-under-Lyme High School, which he left in 1927 to become a junior photographer on The Sentinel, the Etruria local paper where he was employed for fifty years. But, though a painstaking professional, Warrillow was more than a mere taker-of-pictures, and became well known throughout the Potteries and farther afield as a local historian. He published several books, including The History of Etruria and its associations with Wedgwood, Arnold Bennett and Stoke-on-Trent and The Sociological History of Stoke-on-Trent. His feeling for history gave him a perceptive eye for the significant image and his photographs form a valuable record of bygone street scenes, canal-scapes, industries and civic and domestic buildings, many now demolished. Keele University awarded Warrillow an honorary degree when he donated collections of photographs, negatives and papers to the library and a room in the building is named after him.

Rooted though he was in his home town, Warrillow became a knowledgeable collector of French objets d’art, often picked up for a song in flea markets and restored with the same patience and expertise that went into the building by hand of the five hundred cameras he owned at one time or another. He enjoyed nothing more than restoring vintage cars and, as a young man, drove a lovingly restored Wolseley Hornet two-seater. Later, the immaculate old Rolls Royce in which he drove to photographic assignments became a feature of the Etrurian townscape. After an active life, devoid of illness, Warrillow suffered a stroke at the age of ninety and died six months later on 12 January 2000, a few days short of his ninety-first birthday.