George Wilson Bridges

[3] He toured around the Mediterranean taking 1,700 early pictures including Egypt, Greece, the Holy Land and Mount Etna erupting.

Whilst still a member of Trinity College, Oxford, he visited France, Holland, Flanders, Germany and Switzerland.

From late November 1817 he was rector of St Mark's church in Mandeville where he was meant to oversee the Jamaican parish of Manchester from 1817 to 1823.

Bridges, with the approval of the vestry – one member dissenting – let this house out as a tavern, and was allowed to retain £240 currency of the £300 annual rent.

The case revolved around two men, Louis Celeste Lecesne and his brother-in-law John Escoffery, who were thrown off the island using powers under an Aliens Act.

[10] His libel against Lecesne and Escoffery was that Bridges wrote that they "were impatient to sheathe their daggers in the breasts of its white inhabitants".

In 1837 he met the leading British abolitionist Joseph Sturge and it was noted that there was no hostility despite Bridges earlier position.

[13] In 1837 the separated couple were to face a disaster when a boat accident in St Ann's Bay, Jamaica resulted in the loss of all four of their daughters.

Bridges became intrigued by the calotype process and persuaded Talbot to support him with photographic paper for a major project.

In 1846 Bridges lent his wooden house at Rice Lake in Ontario called Wolf Tower to Catharine Parr Traill.

In 1847 it was recorded that the Jamaican government would give 30 pounds annually to a Mr Stewart towards the upkeep of the infant son of the Reverend George Wilson Bridges.

Bridges' first stop was Paris, where he had a state of the art camera made for himself by an optician named Charles Chevalier.

This was not entirely altruistic as Bridges was sending one copy of each exposure back to Fox Talbot so that he could develop the pictures.

In 1851 he was in Egypt but during his travels he also visited Italy, Sicily, Greece, Turkey, the Holy Land and the rest of North Africa.

In return for forty pounds each year Bridges took care of the Gloucestershire parish and St John's church.

When his estranged wife Elizabeth died in 1862, he published a book entitled Outlines and Notes of Twenty-Nine Years.