John Topham

About

British Social Documentary Photographer 1908-1992

John Topham began his working life as a policeman in the East End of London in the 1920s, where he carried a camera and took photographs of daily life in Kent, especially around the Sidcup area. A now very famous photograph of Mary Smith, a “knocker-up” who woke London dock workers with a peashooter, was his first published photograph. He sold it for five pounds, a week's wages, to the Daily Mirror newspaper, and decided to become a free-lance photographer