Twitter detectives solve Edwardian photos mystery

Mr Thomson said he "felt sorry" for the pictures when they were being thrown away and wanted to save them

An amateur photographer who found more than 100 Edwardian family photos said "twitter detectives" solved the mystery of who they might have belonged to.

John Thomson, from Bath in Somerset, took home a box of glass negatives from a bookshop 12 years ago, which he thought he had developed.

But in the past few days he discovered a further 100 images in his loft, all taken by the same person.

The internet had helped him identify the photographer, he said.

Mr Thomson has attempted to digitally sharpen some of the pictures that have detail in them like this picture from 1900

Some of the images from the new batch of photographs have become Mr Thomson's favourites, such as this picture of children playing in St Valery-en-Caux in France in 1905

Mr Thomson has been digitally restoring some of the photographs

Mr Thompson said he "felt sorry" for the items, from the early 20th Century, when the second-hand bookshop where he used to work attempted to throw them away into a skip.

"So I was working in this bookshop and they were throwing out all of the wooden boxes and I had a look inside and found these glass negatives and I've always loved photography," he said.

"They have been in my loft ever since."

The male in this picture is unknown and Mr Thomson is currently investigating who he might be

Mr Thomson discovered this picture was taken outside of the Hotel de la Plage et du Casino in St Valery in France in 1901

The amateur photographer developed more than 300 of the pictures three years ago but during a recent loft conversion on his home he found that there were 100 more photographs he had not known about before.

"When we were doing some loft work we brought them down and found there were actually more photos, all from the Edwardian era," he said.

"The twitter detectives worked their magic and they managed to find out who the photographer was and filled in all of the blanks to the story.

"It was narrowed down to someone called Sydney Fletcher who was a London banker but lived in west Sussex, his son moved to Somerset in the 1930s and we think that's how they arrived in the west country."

Mr Thomson said he would go through the newly discovered images to retrace the historical origin, and would also digitise them.