Ken Ruth Collection

Sons of Jasper Ruth, a photographer and early postcard publisher based in Aveton Gifford, Ken and his brother Alan set up a photography business together in North Street, Ashburton in 1939. From these premises they set about taking hundreds of black and white photographs of the moor intent on competing in the growing popularity of the postcard market. Though many of their postcards were published and sold through Ken’s own outlets and elsewhere, their enterprise foundered against post-war competition from national companies now pro-ducing postcards in colour.

Later, the brothers going their separate ways, Ken set up a studio and photographic supply business in West Street, Ashburton and, in 1947, opened a tourist attraction called Pixielands at Dartmeet. Here, along with other souvenirs, he sold pixie-related figurines and postcards.

In 2015 the Dartmoor Trust Archive was gifted over a thousand glass plates and film positives dating from the 1940s through to the early 1960s comprising black and white photographs of Dartmoor and South Devon.

Today the collection is seen as particularly valuable as it covers a period in which many pro- fessional photographic collections were discarded or destroyed. Local newspaper archives in particular were lost as their offices closed, sometimes being subsumed into regional and national groups which had no use for ‘old pictures’.