there was still a large collection of glass plate negatives in storage there . Whether they represented the full Tattersall and Davis collections of many decades is unclear . William Keil , the manager of Retzlaffs , knew that his friend Apia Coroner , Peter Rasmussen , was a photography enthusiast and the latter agreed to take the collection into storage . Florence Funck , Peter ’ s daughter , recalls a single large box , perhaps a half a metre in dimension , which contained hundreds of glass plates stacked vertically against each other in layers without protective interleaving . Their condition “ was not the best anymore ,” Florence recalls . This is understandable given the rigours of Samoa ’ s climate . In addition , she recalls that on a couple of occasions some men from a government department visited and extracted some plates that they said were relevant to research they were doing . “ I don ' t know what happened to those ‘ borrowed ’ plates ,” recalls Florence . New Zealander John Dearing , who worked in Apia for a year or two for the Retzlaff family , quizzed Peter Rasmussen about the fate of the Tattersall plates . “ In 1979 , I asked Peter what had become of them and he took me out to his back garden / plantation in Moto ’ otua , near the hospital . He pointed put where he had stored them in his old copra shed , and then said that they were mostly destroyed in the 1966 hurricane . The shed had been demolished by that storm and , though there might have still been a few boxes of plates under his house , we were in no position to check on that occasion .”
As with so many settler families who were household names in the islands in colonial days , the Tattersalls have disappeared from Samoa . Herbert Tattersall emigrated to Australia , while Ralph came to New Zealand . Regardless of this , the Tattersall name is indelibly etched in the photographic history of Samoa .
Click here for chapter references
Click here to return to table of contents
| To Walk Under Palm Trees - The Germans in Samoa : Snapshots from Albums | Tony Brunt
241