Horace Isaac Jeffrey

Florist and market gardener at Ninfield. Jeffrey published real photographic cards of local events, for example "Hospital Sunday" at Herstmonceux and Hooe and "Hospital Parade" at Boreham. The cards are labelled on the back "Horace I. Jeffrey, Ninfield" or in a few cases just "Jeffrey" on the front. The photographs have faded and yellowed with age, but seem to have once been black and white. The captions, which sometimes fail to mention the location of the photos, are handwritten in an informal manner with loops on many of the letters. 1908 and 1909 postmarks have been reported. It can be assumed that the cards record fund-raising in different villages on different days, perhaps even in different years.

Some view cards of Ninfield that were published anonymously at about the same time as the event cards have captions in what appears to be the same handwriting, and may therefore have been published by Jeffrey.

Jeffrey was born in 1869 at Saffron Walden in Essex. His wife, Elizabeth Jeffrey (née Bird), whom he married in 1894, came from Long Melford in Suffolk. In 1901 Jeffrey was head gardener at Oak Hurst Court on Tilburstow Hill Road at Godstone. The house is now run as a nursing home. Horace and Elizabeth had one daughter, Muriel Agnes Jeffrey, born at Capel in 1898. They moved to Ninfield in around 1908 (there is an entry for them in Kelly's 1909 Sussex Directory though not in the 1907 edition) and were still living there when Kelly's 1922 Sussex Directory was compiled. The 1911 census lists Jeffrey as a market gardener, working on his own account. He died in 1925, aged only 55.

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