In the summer of 1943, when Antony Armstrong-Jones left his prep school — Sandroyd — for Eton, no less, the headmaster wrote in the boy’s final report that:

the 13-year-old ‘may be good at something, but it’s nothing we teach here’.

At Eton, Armstrong-Jones excelled at sports. In March 1945, he was in the ‘extra special weight’ class of the School Boxing Finals. The following year saw him earn two flattering mentions for boxing in the Eton College Chronicle. In 1947, he was a coxswain in the school’s Fourth of June Daylight Procession of Boats. The Fourth of June is Eton’s unrivalled sports day, with parents coming along to enjoy the contests and the festivities. Rowers wear boaters draped with elaborate garlands of flowers, a tradition that dates back to the 18th century to celebrate George III’s birthday. The King was one of the school’s greatest patrons.

Gentlemen’s outfitters New & Lingwood‘s post, complete with photos about the day, explains:

At a certain point in the procession, the crews of each boat stand and raise their flower adorned boaters to cheer the [King], the School and the memory of George III whilst shaking the flowers from their boaters into the river. They then resume their seats and row on for the next VIII to do the same.

The three most senior boats stand with their oars fixed resting on the water whilst the remaining boats raise their oars to the vertical and then salute with their boaters, a tricky thing to do. Sometimes, the consequences are obvious, and early baths result.

All the boys are dressed in naval uniforms of the mid 19th century, the coxes as those of Officer’s and the oarsmen in those of Ratings (Able Seamen).

But I digress.

Armstrong-Jones went up to Cambridge to read architecture at Jesus College. Whilst there, he coxed the winning boat in the 1950 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race along the Thames, an early highlight of the social season. Tatler has a photo of him afterwards.

Having failed his second-year exams, he moved to London where he became an apprentice to the Royal and society photographer Baron, Stirling Henry Nahum (1906-1956).

Biography tells us that creativity ran in Armstrong-Jones’s family:

His great-grandfather was famed Punch magazine cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne, and two of his uncles were noted architects …

His mother was the debutante and socialite Anne Messel, who became the Countess of Rosse when she remarried. One of her brothers, Oliver Messel, was a stage designer.

His father, Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was a barrister. He and Anne divorced in 1935, when Tony was only five years old. Anne married Michael Parsons, the 6th Earl of Rosse, later that year. Rosse had several estates in Ireland and was known as The Adonis of the Peerage.

Tony’s sister, Susan Anne Armstrong-Jones, also married an Irish peer, John Vesey, the 6th Viscount de Vesci.

From this we can see that Tony had many connections in high society. Not surprisingly, his uncle Oliver, recommended him for commissions of theatrical portraits. Other photographs, which were fashion shoots, appeared in Tatler and Queen magazines.

The auction house Christies notes that during those early years:

This raffish figure with a studio in Pimlico and a fondness for motorbikes had developed quite a name for himself by the late 1950s.

The third photo in this Tatler feature shows Armstrong-Jones in 1957.

That was the year that someone at court suggested that he be the official photographer on the Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth tour on the Royal Yacht Britannia. The aforementioned Christies profile notes that not everyone was on board with the suggestion:

The Duke’s personal secretary, Michael Parker, however, flatly rejected the idea on grounds that Armstrong-Jones was ‘far too bohemian’.

Parker appears to have been overruled, as Armstong-Jones took the official photos of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh during their tour of Canada that year.

Meanwhile, Princess Margaret was getting over her relationship with the dashing Peter Townsend, a divorcé. They met when the latter was still married. He divorced his wife in 1952, the year that Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne and became Defender of the Faith. The romance caused no end of controversy, especially when Townsend proposed in 1953. Marrying someone who was divorced went against the Church of England’s teachings and it was decided that the Princess and Townsend had to break up.

An April 2023 Tatler article gives us the highlights:

They had reportedly become engaged in April 1953 following Townsend’s divorce from his wife, Rosemary Pratt, Marchioness Camden, in order to commit to Margaret.

However, in 1955, Princess Margaret officially announced the end of her engagement to Townsend on the radio, saying, ‘mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others’. Townsend was a divorcé and so marriage to him would have been scandalous. Their relationship was depicted in Netflix series The Crown. 

Princess Margaret met Armstrong-Jones at a dinner party in 1958.

The Tatler article says (emphases mine):

Both Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend went on to marry others: Townsend married Marie-Luce Jamagne in 1959 and in 1960, Princess Margaret married Antony Armstrong-Jones. Their relationship between the princess and Armstrong-Jones was kept a secret until they officially announced their engagement on 27 February 1960. Antony, who was made Lord Snowdon on their wedding day, was a photographer and – significantly – the first ‘commoner’ to marry a King’s daughter in over 400 years. 

Armstrong-Jones proposed with an engagement ring designed to look like a rosebud; probably a reference to Princess Margaret’s middle name, which was Rose.

He had designed the ring himself.

The couple married at Westminster Abbey on May 6, 1960, with 2,000 guests in attendance. Theirs was the first Royal wedding to be televised, and 300 million people watched it worldwide. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, officiated. An appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony followed. The couple took a six-week honeymoon on the Royal yacht Britannia. Tatler has a fascinating photo album of the day.

One of the memorable items of the day was the Poltimore Tiara that Princess Margaret wore. A 2023 Tatler article, ‘Sale of Princess Margaret’s wedding tiara reportedly left Lord Snowdon heartbroken’, gives us its history:

Princess Margaret’s late ex-husband, Lord Snowdon, who died in 2017, was reportedly ‘crushed’ that his children sold his former wife’s wedding tiara in 2006, a new episode of Channel 5 series, Secrets of the The Royals, reportedly claims. 

The episode claims that ‘David Linley and his sister Sarah broke their father Lord Snowdon’s heart’ with their decision to sell 800 of their late mother’s items, including the Poltimore Tiara, according to the Daily Mail, who appears to have seen a preview episode of the series. Speaking on camera, Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, wife of the 11th Earl of Sandwich, reportedly adds, ‘This Christies’ auction was heartbreaking for Lord Snowdon… in fact, he wrote to his children asking them to stop it.’ Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret had divorced in 1978.

Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones’s two children, the 2nd Earl of Snowdon (formerly Viscount Linley) and Lady Sarah Chatto, raised nearly £14 million by selling their mother’s items in 2006, four years after her death aged 71 …

The tiara was sold for £920,000, which far exceeded its estimated value of £150-200,000. A picture of Princess Margaret sitting in the bath, wearing nothing but the tiara, was released to the public by her family in 2006, before being removed from public view 11 years later.

The tiara, made in 1870 by Garrard – the royal jeweller behind Princess Diana’s engagement ring and the Amethyst Cross which was recently sold to Kim Kardashian – features an elaborate cluster of diamonds, scroll motifs and a brown ribbon which makes the tiara almost appear to float upon the head.

Originally made for Lady Poltimore, the wife of the second Baron Poltimore and Treasurer to Queen Victoria’s household, it remained in her family until it was acquired by the Royal Family at auction in early 1959, months before the then Antony Armstrong-Jones proposed to Princess Margaret that October.

The princess wasted no time in wearing the tiara. She donned the twinkling diadem to the ballet at Covent Garden in May 1959, during a state visit from the Shah of Iran. She also wore it as a necklace on a number of occasions before her wedding day; the flexible design of the tiara allowed it too be broken down into a necklace and 11 brooches.

But it was on her June 1960 wedding day that the tiara had its starring moment, perfectly finishing the silk organza Norman Hartnell gown. The 2006 buyer of the tiara remains unknown.

But I digress.

Christies says that the Duke of Edinburgh enjoyed joking to the courtier about the fact that the photographer he had deemed unsuitable in 1957 had married into the Royal Family:

the Duke of Edinburgh found great amusement in telling Parker that the ‘bohemian’ was to become his brother-in-law.

The couple settled into married life:

The couple settled into apartments at Kensington Palace, but Lord Snowdon (as the groom officially became known) kept his friendships with London’s leading writers, actors and artists.

Biography says:

In the 1960s, Lord Snowdon landed a job as the picture editor of The Sunday Times magazine. By the 1970s, his work had placed him among England’s most well-respected photographers.

Of Snowdon’s approach to his subjects, the Christies article says:

As for the style of his portrait photography, it has been described as ‘immaculately ordered but emotionally detached’. Which is to say, his images are pure, powerful and uncluttered, yet marked by a certain distance between himself and his subjects.

‘I don’t want people to feel at ease,’ Snowdon said of his approach, as if happy to leave any friendship he had with his sitters at the studio door. He wasn’t one for chatting while he worked. On getting down to business, ‘an almost unearthly feeling of suspension’ developed, [one-time Vogue art director Patrick] Kinmonth says, as the photographer set about the ‘palpable hunt for his image’, waiting for the sitter to reveal something telling about themselves.

Meanwhile, Cecil Beaton, about whom I have written, was still photographing the Royals. However, Snowdon had greater all-round access to the family and took any number of candid shots.

A Town & Country magazine article, complete with Snowdon photographs, says:

Before Snowdon, Cecil Beaton had been the royals’ go-to portraitist. Like Snowdon, Beaton was a photographer who himself became the subject of renown, a socialite with an artsy bent who gained access to the most elite circles, a Vogue photographer who turned his lens to the Windsors. But when the Earl of Snowdon began snapping the royals, he did it in a markedly new way.

The painted backgrounds and stoic composition that Beaton had used to mimic centuries of royal portraiture were gone. Snowdon shunned bulky, large-format cameras in favor of newer, lighter ones, allowing him to move and improvise. That, combined with his genuine intimacy with his now-family, allowed him to capture something close to spontaneity.

Close, because the royals had a diminished capacity for informality. “The royal family is photographed so frequently, and certainly by the time that Snowdon began photographing the royals, they were very used to sitting for photographs,” Susanna Brown, the V&A’s Curator of Photographs, explains. “They cannot help but perform for the camera; they’ve been so well trained.”

Even after the couple divorced, Snowdon remained close to the Royal Family:

Long after his marriage to Princess Margaret ended, Snowdon continued to photograph the royal family. (And for the record, Kinmonth says that despite Tony and Margaret’s well-publicized troubles, even after they separated, “they got on like a house on fire.”)

One Tatler article I read said that the Queen Mother was deeply disappointed to hear that the couple separated. She said it was a shame, because ‘Tony was so good at charades’.

By then, Cecil Beaton had suffered a stroke and would die in 1980.

Town & Country‘s interview with Patrick Kinmonth reveals Snowdon as a witty, yet humble, man:

Lord Snowdon never aspired to “high art,” whatever that is. He claimed it was his interest in gadgets that first drew him to cameras, but he wouldn’t commit to a career behind the lens until pursuing, then flunking out of, an architecture program. Even then, he flatly refused to acknowledge his work as art.

After the Sunday Times published an investigation he’d worked on with journalist Marjorie Wallace, she recalls him writing to her, “Darling, thank you so much for the words. I just take the snaps.”

This attitude may have been a holdover from the very beginning of his career, when he was just Antony Armstrong-Jones, an upper-middle-class son of a barrister and a remarried Countess, when he’d document society events at the “grand houses.” Back then, explains Robert Muir, a curator and former British Vogue picture editor, event photographers “went round the side, you didn’t go through the front door.”

Armstrong-Jones eventually found his way to the front door. If he rejected high art, high status was much more up his alley. Snowdon seemed to revel in the notoriety his 1960 marriage to Princess Margaret afforded him. “He made this dimension of royalness into a strange kind of fairy dust,” Kinmonth says. And it was sprinkled atop of his already charismatic personality.

His newfound fame as Princess Margaret’s husband reinforced something that had already been percolating in the public imagination: the photographer as star. The London creative set in the 1960s had a tendency to treat rising lensmen (sadly, they were mostly men) with the same renown as actors, artists, and filmmakers—even as Snowdon continued to insist, with a grin, that he was just a “snapper” …

It’s not possible to separate Snowdon’s oeuvre from his royal biography—nor would he want that to happen. He knew his reputation was inseparable from that of the Windsors, Kinmonth says, and “it was something he was much more delighted with than disappointed by.”

The National Portrait Gallery has an extensive set of Snowdon photos from the 1950s through the 1980s. The Guardian also has a stunning retrospective, as does Christies. Tatler has a splendid collection of photos of Snowdon throughout his life, both alone and with Princess Margaret, as does The Sun.

Biography tells us more about Snowdon’s later years:

In the late 1990s, Lord Snowdon was awarded life peerage, affording him the title of baron and securing his seat in the House of Lords following the exclusion of hereditary peers.

In 2001, Lord Snowdon’s photography was featured in a career retrospective held at the National Portrait Gallery. In 2007, his work was exhibited in a show called “In Camera: Snowdon at the Pallant House Gallery,” in Chichester, England.

After Snowdon spent four years collaborating with writer Anne de Courcy, his biography was released in 2008, confirming speculation that Snowdon had many affairs throughout his marriages and fathered an illegitimate daughter (Polly Fry of the Fry chocolate dynasty) just prior to marrying Princess Margaret, as well as an illegitimate son (Jasper) during his second marriage with Country Life features editor Melanie Cable-Alexander …

Christies says that Snowdon was particularly empathetic towards the disabled:

His experience of polio, incidentally, left him with a slight limp — as well as a lifelong concern for disabled people. He’d go on to fight a successful campaign against British Rail to improve its access to wheelchair passengers; and in 1980 he set up the Snowdon Award Scheme (now the Snowdon Trust), a charity that helps disabled students in further education.

Today, David Linley is the 2nd Earl of Snowdon. Tatler says:

He inherited his father’s title to become the 2nd Earl in 2017. Recently divorced from his wife, Serena, he has two children, 23-year-old Charles, Viscount Linley, and 20-year-old Lady Margarita Armstrong-Jones. Honorary chairman for Christie’s Europe, Middle East and Russia, he’s also a furniture designer and is known to be close to his cousin, King Charles III.

Between Cecil Beaton and Lord Snowdon, the Royal Family were blessed with two outstanding photographers, each with his own inimitable style.

Tomorrow, I will take a look at Hugo Burnand, King Charles III’s official photographer.