Scrapbook of Samuel and Elizabeth Logan and family

Samuel Logan grew up in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. He established a boat building business and he and Elizabeth had six children including my great grandfather, John Maxwell Logan.

Samuel Logan - Photographer - Part 2

Who ARE these people?

Click to find out.

Windsor Castle at Sunrise


This photograph, fellow to the famous one presented to Queen Mary in 1931 was first published in 1938.

Both were taken in September 1930, after years of experiment. At the beginning of the century, when Mr. Logan was apprenticed to Messrs. Hills and Saunders, the Eton photographers, he found that the sun rose over Windsor Castle in the correct position for a photograph during a fortnight in September, and made his first attempt to obtain one. It took him thirty years to achieve a result which satisfied every ideal.

Exacting conditions caused the long delay. One year, the clouds were not of a quality to diffuse the rays of the rising sun; another, the ferry punts on the Eton side lay wrong; or perhaps the swans, without which a Thames-side scene is incomplete, were missing from the reach of river below the Castle.

But the interest of the picture does not lie in detail. Its attribute is rather the repose of a splendid idealism, which teaches the eye how to look on Windsor. If the hint is accepted, then it is easy to see how land and river conspire to ennoble the Castle and yet never release it from its ancient associations. The Thames, curving peaceably aside under the sharp brow of the hill, the green slopes which lift its grey bulwark of walls, the climbing trees barely outstripped by the battlemented heights ; these all exalt, and exalting, still clasp it. Straight from the tangle of the tree-tops soars that long line of towers which sentinels the sky, splendid and humane, embodying in their massive breadth the record of Windsor's thousand years. The tale unfolds as one traces their broken contours from the many-windowed palace in the east, along through silhouettes of roof and wall, relics of no one age, to where the Curfew cap juts up, red-brown as a russet beech, on the western rim. It ends in triumph which stirs the heart as one looks higher still and singles out the origin and epitome of it all, the Round Tower, a stalwart giant clutching at the clouds, and, lancing the sky to westward, the thin thin spires of St. George's, the tall flower of chapels, forever rooted in stone and forever springing.

Imagination is not slow now to divine the modern significance of Windsor's endowment of power and grace, drawn from each of the ten centuries. It is surely this. Other castles tell of "battles long ago"; other palaces hold memories of generations of kings. But Windsor is palace and fortress, shrine chivalry and heritage of the people, imperial landmark and local guardian of such friendly things as the dreaming river, the park, the Brocas meadow - remnant of a medieval estate, green playground of children and animals - the punts, the burnished steamers and the delightful swans, so unconcerned and yet so dignified in their calm domestic felicity. The very town clings to its stones. In the days in which Harrison Ainsworth set his Windsor Castle, that lurid, century-old romance which still holds the schoolroom in thrall, there were houses huddled at its feet, like children round the skirts of a kindly nurse, and although they vanished long ago, the town has ever since refused to disengage itself by more than a road's breadth.

Yet this very accessibility makes Windsor the most difficult of all royal castles to speak about. A pile of stones and documents - the hardest heart would not allow that; but neither is it a mere fairy-tale in stone - and how austerely withholds its grace from the writer or artist who would treat it so! And yet it is easy to err; to forsake fact for some

"idle tale
Or fading legend of the past;"

or in granting the claims of accuracy to resist too sternly the appeal of sentiment. Neither will do. "It is the most romantique Castle that is in the world", wrote Pepys, turning to his diary after visiting Windsor (and it is though, as he wrote, remembered delight called up a half-enraptured sigh, whose echo still trembles on the words.) Countless millions since then have known the emotion which thrilled Pepys on a February night in 1666, though none has ever come nearer to crystallizing into words that sense of enchantment. Perfectly to translate the charms of Windsor - charm, which is so much more elusive than character - must lie beyond the range of human utterance. It is drawn from to many secret dreams in hearts which ceased to beat centuries ago, compounded of the myriad fluttering thoughts of so many brains, the ringing voices of tongues, the living touch of fingers long stiffened. But since one may probe and sometimes reveal it, we have tried, in the pages which follow, to show something of the beauty, the significance, the idealism and the reality of this "most romantique Castle" and its dominions; and to show, too, how not only the neighbouring countryside, still studded with traces of its age-old influence, but the whole world, here and there, has been touched with its spell.

[anycomment]
The combined photos in the heading are believed to be Samuel and Elizabeth Logan nee Charles. This was the second marriage for Samuel having married Hester Rutt who had been widowed with young children under tragic circumstances.
users linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram