Early photojournalists recorded suffragettes and ‘mush-fakers’

Christina Broom only began to experiment with photography in her forties, using a box camera.

Her life – and contribution to photojournalism – is being honoured with a blue plaque at the house in Munster Road, Fulham, west London, where she lived and worked, alongside her daughter Winifred.

Her pictures, including soldiers setting off to fight in World War One and members of the Royal Family, appeared in what was then a male-dominated newspaper industry.

From the early 1900s, Broom began to sell postcards of her photos from a stall beside Buckingham Palace, showing images of contemporary London, including historic images of the women’s suffragette movement.

Broom regularly photographed activists and public demonstrations in support of women’s right to vote. Her work included portraits of leading figures such as Christabel Pankhurst, who co-founded the Women’s Social and Political Union.

She died in 1939, but her daughter carried on living in the same house in Fulham, which was filled with thousands of her mother’s photographs, until her own death in 1973.