Back in January we were contacted by Malcolm Lindsay who had acquired over four hundred photographic half plates by the Muthill photographer John McGregor and wanted us to know they were available for sale. Malcolm posted some on the Muthill Past & Present FaceBook page and they provoked a lot of interest. With Sandy Black of Muthill Village Trust, C&SM got in touch with Malcolm who kindly agreed to hold on to the photographs while C&SM considered the offer and then began to raise funds for the collection.

It was not until May that C&SM were able to get their fund raising platform in place and within days of the first mention of the appeal in the Quair, we received a very generous donation for the whole purchase amount from Janet Hughes, whose father's forebears came from Crieff. Janet is hoping to come to Crieff in September on a walking holiday and we hope that we might be able to help her in her quest for information about her family. We also look forward to being able to show her the collection which she has paid for.

The photographs we have seen are thought to be of people and places in and immediately around Muthill though we know there are others which are from further afield and C&SM will publish the photographs as they are repaired and cleaned and scanned, to allow people to see them and, we hope, help us to identify the people and the places shown. We are also keen to find out more about John McGregor. It is said that he was a bachelor and that he had two sisters but, aside from this collection and his press photographs for the PA, we know very little and hope there may be people who can help us to build a picture about the man and his work.

Currently we are waiting for Glasgow to move out of step 3 to step 2, so we can collect the plates and bring them back to Strathearn. When that happens, we will update this blog. The next step will be to scan the images in the condition they arrive here before taking them to a specialist conservator, to give us a quotation for the repairs which we know will be necessary to many of the pictures which have suffered from water damage and have paper adhered to them.

We will continue to run the fund-raising campaign for the conservation work and ongoing curation of the collection but we also want to raise funds to try to recover those pictures from the collection which were sold before C&SM were able to purchase it.

It is thought there may be other John McGregor pictures to get hold of; to secure for the collection, so we see this as a long term project but one which will be available for the public to see on this website very soon.

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