Horace Roye: The Photographer of Nudes Who Beat Obscenity Laws Twice
Some photographers just take pictures. Horace Roye smuggled diamonds in South Africa, castrated sheep with his own teeth, ran with Oswald Mosley's fascists and the Communist Party on alternate nights, and put the first nude photograph ever published in a British national newspaper on the front of the Daily Mirror. He beat two separate obscenity prosecutions, invented a 3D nude photography process, was friends with the man who claimed to have found a supposedly cursed Mayan crystal skull, held off armed revolutionaries in Portugal with a shotgun, and was still water-skiing in Morocco at 78. He was murdered in his own home at the age of 96.
Quick Answers
● Who was Horace Roye? A British photographer, born Horace Roye-Narbeth in 1906, best known for nude studies and glamour photography from the late 1930s through the 1950s, working professionally simply as Roye.
● What was Tomorrow's Crucifixion? A 1938 photograph Roye made for the North London Recorder showing a naked woman on a cross wearing a gas mask, published almost full page on the eve of the Munich crisis to warn of the horrors a future war might bring.
● Did Horace Roye go to prison for obscenity? No. He was charged twice with publishing an obscene libel in 1958 and acquitted both times, later publishing his own account of the case in a 1960 booklet called Unique Verdict.
● How did Horace Roye die? He was stabbed to death by an intruder he apparently knew, at his home in Rabat, Morocco, in June 2002, aged 96.
From Drapery Apprentice to Diamond Smuggler
Horace Roye-Narbeth was born on 4 March 1906. His father ran a drapery firm and held socialist politics, while his mother had money of her own and insisted on sending him to a private school, Godwin College in Margate, where by his own later account he didn't particularly distinguish himself. He was expected to join the family drapery business, and took a job at Debenham and Company to learn the trade. He lasted about as long as it took to arrive at work one morning still in his tails after a night out, which got him sacked on the spot.
In August 1924, restless and looking for something more interesting, he boarded a ship for South Africa and found work on a farm. The hours were brutal and the jobs unpleasant, the worst of them being castrating sheep with his own teeth. When a way out presented itself, he took it, and that way out was diamond smuggling. Once that became too risky to continue, he returned to London and drifted through a string of jobs, a restlessness that would define the rest of his life.
Fascists on Monday, Communists on Tuesday
Back in London, Roye threw himself into whatever offered a decent scrap. He was fond of boxing, and by his own account he went around with Oswald Mosley's fascists and the Communist Party on alternate nights, apparently more interested in the fighting than the politics of either. In the same stretch of his twenties he worked as a bookmaker, a dance instructor and a nightclub owner, and served as Assistant Director to E. A. Dupont on the 1929 silent film Piccadilly. Somewhere in among all of this, his interest in photography began to take hold. He spent time at Walter Bird's studio learning the darkroom side of the craft and studying how Bird worked with clients, until he judged himself ready to strike out on his own.
Blackmail Accusations and a Fresh Start as 'Roye, From Paris'
Bored of London, Roye first tried Rio de Janeiro, which didn't work out, then settled in Paris instead. His early clients were mostly British or American, but as his reputation grew he picked up a genuinely French clientele too. That success didn't last. He was accused of blackmail and of employing a young Swedish woman without the correct work permit, and rising hostility toward foreigners in France, fuelled partly by an influx of refugees fleeing Germany, made his position increasingly difficult. In April 1936 he sold up and returned to London, reopening his studio under the deliberately continental sounding banner 'Roye, from Paris'.
Tomorrow's Crucifixion
It was the summer of 1937 that set Roye on the path that would define his career, when he began specialising in studies of the nude. The following year, in the jittery months before the Munich Agreement, the North London Recorder commissioned him to produce an image that captured the ghastly possibilities of a coming war. The result was Tomorrow's Crucifixion, a surreal photograph of a naked woman on a cross, wearing a gas mask, with smoke billowing behind her. Published on 12 August 1938 across almost the entire front page, accompanied by responses from clergymen and other community leaders, it caused a genuine stir and is now remembered as one of the more striking pieces of British photojournalism from the lead-up to the war.
The First Nude Photograph in a British National Newspaper
Around the same time, publisher George Routledge and Company asked Roye to put together a book of nude studies, which became Perfect Womanhood in 1938. Several of its 48 photographs were exhibited at the London Salon of Photography, and one image, titled Sport, was published as a full page picture in the Daily Mirror on 14 September 1938, believed to be the first nude study ever printed in a British national daily newspaper. Roye later reflected that attitudes in France had actually been less tolerant of nude photography than in Britain, reasoning that several British portrait photographers who'd also photographed the Royal Family had been publicly exhibiting and publishing nude studies for years with little controversy.
A Bombed Studio and a Mail-Order Empire
In 1939, Roye joined fellow photographers John Everard and Walter Bird to form Photo Centre Limited, sharing overheads out of Bird's studio on Savile Row. The trio produced three books together, starting with the cheekily titled Eves Without Leaves in 1941, with images also appearing in the magazine Men Only. The partnership took a direct hit, almost literally, during the Blitz in September 1940, when a bomb struck the rear of their studio, leaving it damaged enough that looters got in before a second bomb finished the building off entirely. Bird joined the Auxiliary Fire Service and Everard went on assignment with the RAF, while Roye, exempted from military service due to a recent illness, ended up doing work for the Ministry of Information and the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office.
With wartime demand for glamour photography and pin-ups running high, Roye set up a mail order operation called The Camera Studies Club. Everard and Bird declined to invest in it but were happy to sell him their pictures, and the business became a genuine success. One of its early releases, the Phyllis Dixey Album, named for the popular striptease performer who ran the wartime Peek-a-Boo revues at the Whitehall Theatre, led to a follow-up titled Phyllis in Censorland, which reportedly sold in enormous numbers.
Diana Dors, a Future Cabinet Minister's Wife, and a Cursed Crystal Skull
Roye's portrait work brought him into contact with genuine film stars, and in 1945 he was commissioned to photograph every woman under contract to the Rank Organisation. Among his sitters around this period was the actress Valerie Hobson, years before she became better known as the wife of politician John Profumo, at the centre of the scandal that brought down a government in 1963. A signed colour portrait Roye took of actress Margaret Lockwood was later used as the artwork for the original British quad poster of the 1945 film The Wicked Lady.
In 1954, working with a fellow photographer known as Vala, Roye developed the Roye-Vala 3D process, and the Camera Studies Club promptly launched a Stereo Glamour Series of 3D nude and pin-up books, featuring sitters including Diana Dors. Some of the sittings for the series took place at Farley Castle, home to Roye's friend F. A. Mitchell-Hedges, a self-styled adventurer sometimes described as a real-life prototype for Indiana Jones. Mitchell-Hedges claimed to have discovered the so-called Crystal Skull of Doom at a Maya ruin in British Honduras, now Belize, with his daughter Anna, and to have believed it capable of willing a person's death. Roye photographed a showgirl from London's Eve Club posing with the actual skull. The discovery story has since been seriously undermined, with records suggesting Mitchell-Hedges more likely bought the skull at a Sotheby's auction in 1943, but the object and its legend endured regardless.
Twice Charged, Twice Acquitted
As the 1950s wore on, publishers and photographers found themselves increasingly tangled up in obscenity prosecutions, even over material that had circulated freely for years. Rather than pull back, Roye pushed further, publishing a limited private edition series of unretouched nude studies, some showing pubic hair, deliberately testing how far the law would let him go. In May and June of 1958 he was charged twice with publishing an obscene libel. He was acquitted both times. He later wrote up the whole episode himself in a 1960 booklet with a title that left no doubt about how he felt about it: Unique Verdict, the Story of an Unsuccessful Prosecution.
A Shotgun Siege in Portugal, Then Retirement in Morocco
Restless as ever, Roye retired to Portugal, where he designed and built two private parks. That retirement was interrupted in dramatic fashion during the Carnation Revolution of 1974, when he found himself besieged in his own house and held out against armed revolutionaries with a shotgun before eventually being forced to sell up and return to England. In 1980 he made one final move, settling in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, where he lived out the rest of his life. He became Morocco's oldest British expatriate and the longest-serving member of the British Institute of Professional Photographers, spent his days feeding Rabat's stray cats, water-skied on the Bou Regreg river until he was 78, took up parasailing at 75, and kept swimming almost to the end. He was married three times, his last marriage to a Canadian model named Marilyn, with whom he celebrated a golden wedding anniversary before her death in 1993.
Murdered at 96
On 11 June 2002, Roye was found dead in his Rabat home by his housekeeper. He had been stabbed at least eight times, and by most accounts he apparently knew his attacker. He was 96 years old, and left behind four children, three of whom survived him. It's a genuinely dark end for a man who'd spent nearly eight decades finding new ways to survive close calls, from diamond smuggling to obscenity trials to an armed siege, only to be killed at home in his nineties by someone he trusted enough to let in.
A drapery apprentice turned diamond smuggler, a fascist-adjacent boxing enthusiast who spent his other evenings with communists, a man who put nudity on the front page of a British newspaper for the first time and then beat the law twice when it tried to stop him, and finally a murder victim at 96 in a country he'd adopted as his own. Horace Roye's life reads less like a photography career and more like a very long, very strange novel that somehow happened to be true.
