1-192-006 - © London Museum/Heritage-Images

Cleaning shells for manufacturing, 1900s. A man in a back yard with a barrel full of water for cleaning the shells. A couple of shells are on the window sill behind him. Galt came to London in 1890 to work as a missionary for the London City Mission. In the early 1900s he took a series of photographs, mainly of the East End, which he had made into lantern slides to illustrate lectures publicising the work of the Mission. Galt sought to show that though there was great poverty in the East End, the people were not sub-human, as was popularly imagined by the middle-classes, but ordinary folk trying to do their best under difficult circumstances.