Description:Benjamin Stone was not the only person from Birmingham to have sought out distant locations in the late nineteenth century. Based in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham, Helen Caddick was another remarkable traveller who criss-crossed the globe in search of knowledge about other cultures. It is not currently known if Caddick and Stone had any connection. The main sources of information we have on Caddick are her own private (unpublished) diaries later given to Birmingham City Archives:
“It will, no doubt, be somewhat of a surprise to many Edgbastonians to learn that they have living in their midst so adventurous a lady as Miss Helen Caddick, who has explored most quarters of the globe, except for those occupied by perpetual snow or polar ice. She has wondered far and wide...and has studied humanity of all shades and colours in its natural environment…with her the passion for travel is so strong that she finds it impossible to refrain from wandering” (Edgbastonia, Vol. 20, March 1900).
As a female traveller with an unconventional background in higher education and non-conformist religion, Caddick (a Unitarian of the Church of the Messiah on Broad Street) certainly faced a very different set of social expectations than Sir Benjamin Stone. Whilst Stone was publicly hailed as a photographic and anthropological entrepreneur undertaking the important task of documenting social traditions, Caddick did not receive the same public attention for her travels or her photographic records of other cultures. Twelve volumes of these diaries exist, many of them hundreds of pages long, painstakingly created with typewriter entries accompanied by hundreds of vivid photographs inserted into the binding.
The fact we have Caddick’s written impressions of places and people as well her photographs (unlike the Stone Collection, where only the briefest of captions exist for many photographs) makes them an astonishing resource for learning about attitudes towards travel, gender, race, culture class and of course, colonisation. However, whereas Stone personally turned to photography as a dedicated craft, it may be more likely that Caddick used photographers on many of her journeys, or bought local pictures for her records.
It is interesting to explore, chart and discuss similarities and differences between Caddick’s diaries, created by a groundbreaking woman whose social mobility was radical for the time, and the Stone Collection, produced by a lifelong conservative with a passion for history, travel and collecting. Was Caddick more sympathetic towards the people and cultures she describes in her diaries? Although her attitudes towards English social traditions were clearly more unconventional than Stone's, her descriptions of other cultures display a range of impressions from intellectual fascination to aloof English superiority.