Father Browne: a Life in Pictures

‘GET OFF THAT SHIP – PROVINCIAL’

This was the telegram that saved Frank Browne’s life, and won him sudden fame when the Titanic sank.

From the sedate life of a Jesuit student, he went straight to the trenches of World War I where his service as a chaplain saw him decorated for bravery.

His passion for photography kept his Collection growing through his travels in Egypt, South Africa, Australia, Italy and all over Ireland and England – where one of his biggest commissions was to photograph Churches of England in case they should be bombed by the Germans.

He spent ‘The Emergency’ in Ireland since his superiors felt a 60-year-old should not enlist in World War II. Wherever he was, he never stopped taking photographs – even rigging up his camera to photograph himself under anaesthetic. (He was once – falsely – accused of trying to photograph a nun while hearing her confession.)

He died leaving nearly 42,000 negatives to lie undiscovered in an old trunk. E. E. O’Donnell, the man who finally opened that trunk, has written a fascinating biography, illustrated with prints of these negatives, most of which Father Browne never saw himself in positive form.