Born 1911 in the North London suburb of Stoke Newington, photographer, historian and collector Hardwicke Knight emigrated to New Zealand in 1957 to take up a medical photography position in Dunedin. He lived at Broad Bay until ten months before his death at a Dunedin nursing home.

After the First World War and before life in New Zealand, Knight’s work at the NUT supplemented with freelance writing, photography, art work and editing. He was also appointed Director of Medical Photography of Enfield Group Hospitals based at Chase Farm Hospital, Enfield.
Knight’s publications include New Zealand’s first comprehensive photographic history, many compilations of early Dunedin and Otago photographs, biographies of several early New Zealand photographers and of British photographer William Russell Sedgfield, three books of architectural history and a seminal history of the Otago Peninsula.

Knight was awarded a QSO in 1991. An eccentric polymath, he was well known for his striking appearance, his ramshackle Broad Bay cottage crammed with his collections and his self-proclaimed exploits, most notably his claim to have found timbers on Mount Ararat that might have been Noah’s Ark.

These Kodachrome pictures from jaffabeaut were taken by Hardwicke Knight when he lived in England that show a beautiful life of England in the early 1950s.