As of the 2nd of November 2023, we have moved our weekly meeting venue from our clubrooms at 78 High Street to the Border Club. By a twist of fate, the Border Club is located on what was the premises of JED Murray’s photography studio which means we have come full circle.
Photography in Hawick goes back to the early 1850s when the town’s earliest known photo was taken - a boy standing on his hands! By the 1880s there were several photographic studios in the town. JED Murray, a leading figure in the town’s Common-Riding for many decades, was also a leading local photographer and had a studio in Hawick from 1886 into the 1930s. Many of the framed photographs and glass negatives from those times were given to Hawick Museum.
Hawick Camera Club was started in 1937, and after a break during World War 2, resumed in 1948. Finding Club premises was often a problem. The club started off in the studio of JED Murray, then owned by his son Melgund, and moved to premises just off Hawick High Street in 1957.
The Club has continued to thrive over the ‘darkroom to digital’ period of more recent times. In 2013 the Club had a hugely popular 75th Anniversary Exhibition at Hawick Museum with prints going back to the 1950s. Many members of the Club have gone on to establish a career in photography both in and out of Hawick.
More than a thousand photographic portrait studios were established throughout the UK in the decades between 1839 when the Daguerreotype process was introduced, and the end of Queen Victoria's reign in 1901. Remarkably few of those studios have survived to the 21st century in any sort of recognisable form. JED Murray’s studio in Hawick, now The Border Club, is one of those few.
JED Murray. 1902-1972
Glazed roof and walls boarded up or removed.
Used since 1973 as The Border Club.
