In this video we take a look at the career of Allen Daniel Coon, one of the pioneers of photography and cinematography in Ulster. The video tells something of his story, with many examples of his postcards, and tracks down his last resting place.

The previous post on this blog is all about Allen Coon’s postcards produced for W.J. Ross of Finaghy Stores in 1927, but these are just a small sample of his vast output produced between his arrival in Ireland in 1902 and his death in 1938.

Allen Daniel Coon was born in Buffalo, New York in 1867. The son of a Baptist pastor and, tradition has it, a native American mother, his career followed a fairly conventional path in its early years. He read law at university and then established himself as an attorney in Buffalo. But at some point he tired of this life and took the road to prospect for gold first in California and then in Alaska. One assumes this was not entirely successful because at some point he took up photography. He was a friend of George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, and may have been related to him. Either way he travelled to England with him in 1900 moving to Ireland a couple of years later to set up his own photography business.

This was right at the beginning of the boom in the sale of postcards. In 1902 you could send a picture postcard for a halfpenny and expect it to be at a local destination at lunchtime. For skilled photographers the opportunities were obvious and operating initially from Londonderry, later from Letterkenny and ultimately from Moira (each place was printed as his location on the front of his postcards) he produced hundreds of postcards of impressive views, street scenes, local landmarks, prominent buildings and sometimes interesting people.

It is recorded that he charged local traders less than £5 for 2,000 postcards, which also included their name on the back of the card. From about 1924 he started numbering the cards starting with the last two digits of the year they were produced which is very helpful in dating the cards.

In the Census of 1911 he was recorded as living with his wife of three years, Clara, at Church Wall, Londonderry where he recorded his profession as Photographer and Theatrical Showman. Also recorded were their two eldest children (Gladys and Gaynor) and the fact that while his wife was a Presbyterian he declared himself to be an agnostic.

The Theatrical Showman side of his profession was not an idle boast. Although his income from postcard sales must have been steady he was also perpetually ‘on tour’ travelling all over the north of Ireland with his camera and darkroom, setting up in towns as he went to film moving pictures and then show them to a fascinated populace along with films of Charlie Chaplin and other entertainers. In fact he also seems to have had an interest in some of the earliest cinemas established in county Donegal and in Belfast but his commitment to travelling from town to town with his films never waned right up to his death.

After partition he moved from Letterkenny to Moira and was ultimately buried there in the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church graveyard after his sudden death while on tour in Sligo. It is clear that his family had a close association with the Church, other family members are buried in the churchyard, but in the 1940s when the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian denomination launched a tercentenary appeal for the Sustentation Fund (1642 – 1942), Allen Coon’s wife Clara and his daughter Sylvia were amongst the members of the little congregation at Moira who gave their support. Indeed Miss Sylvia Coon was also one of the two local appeal officials for Moira.