Portraits of William Avery
When this website was launched in 2014 the only known portrait of Mr. William Avery, the man who created Avery style needle cases, was an 1885 drawing of him which appeared in his funeral memorial booklet printed in 1899. However in March 2015 we received the photograph below from Raymond McLaren of Dartford, Kent, UK. Ray is a fellow historian who is researching the fishing tackle manufacturers from the Redditch area. This photograph was originally part of the Redditch historian Alan Foxall’s collection. It shows a group of people who attended the Wesleyan Methodist Quarterly Meeting at Park House in Headless Cross in June of 1894. The local newspaper, The Redditch Indicator, printed this photograph in their Saturday May 23, 1936 edition under the headline “A Peep Into The Past”. William Avery is located in the second row from the bottom, the fourth person from the end on the right side.
A special thank you goes to Alan Foxall for saving this photograph and to Raymond McLaren for sharing it with us.
Wesleyan Methodist Quarterly Meeting, June 1894 (click on the photograph once to see a larger version of it, then click on it again to see an even
larger version.)
Close up of W. Avery at the Wesleyan Methodist Quarterly Meeting in June 1894.
Drawing of William Avery from his 1899 funeral booklet.
