Percy William Pilcher

Percy William Pilcher (5 July 1866 – 3 May 1937), ARCO, was an organist, composer, and a railway photographer, who was one of the first in Britain to capture images of moving trains. 250 of his glass plate negatives from the F. Burtt collection are held by the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York, the earliest of which has been dated to around 1881–2. Pilcher sold much of his work to F. Moore’s Railway Photographs (later the Locomotive Publishing Company), who published them as uncredited prints and postcards. The corresponding negatives are also now in the possession of the NRM. Biography Pilcher was born in Boston, Lincolnshire on 5 July 1866, the son of Margaret (née Westland) and William John Pilcher, FRCS, LRCP. He was educated at Bath College from 1879 to 1884, before moving on to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he changed subjects from medicine to music. Graduating with a B.A. in 1888 and an M.A. four years later, In Shrewsbury, Pilcher is reported to have been on the committee of the local motorcycle club in 1910. He became a member of staff at Shrewsbury School in 1918 and remained there until his retirement in 1935. The couple had four sons, the eldest of wh