The lost history of Britain’s most innovative SLRs - and the camera that's rarer than a Stradivarius

The UK has a long history of manufacturing low-cost, fairly basic cameras, such as the various Bakelite-bodied Kodak, and similar cameras. But during the early 1950s and into the ‘1960s England was also home to a small number of highly innovative cameras, even if they’re not household names today. I think it’s high time we took a look at the main four in the order they came to market…

Although announced in May of 1947, the Reid III was not made available until April of 1951, Following the war, the British army contracted with the British aircraft instrument maker Reid & Sigrist (Leicester) to produce a 35mm camera. Reid & Sigrist make the Reid III, a version of the Leica IIIb, using the now-royalty-free patents of Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar. They used the Leica thread mount, while adapting other features according to their assembly needs. The early camera featured M-sync (for flashbulbs) and, by 1953, X-sync (electronic flash), as well. The cameras are typically fitted with a Taylor-Hobson Anastigmat 50mm f/2.0 lens in a collapsible barrel.

The Reid was of high quality and finish, but also of high cost, and was more expensive than an imported Leica IIIf, even with a UK import duty of 25%. In 1958, a simpler version, the Reid I, without the slow speeds or rangefinder, was introduced, and some 500 units are made – mostly for the British military. By the time production ended, in 1964, between 2,800 and 2,900 Reid cameras had been made.

Just one month after the Reid was marketed, in May of 1951, Wray Optical of Bromley, Kent, introduced the only British-designed and built SLR... the Wrayflex. It had a cloth focal-plane shutter with speeds of up to 1/1000sec, but shared the 24x32mm negative size with Nikon’s model 1 rangefinder camera. While it yielded up to 45 shots on a 36-exposure roll, it had the same problem of mounting transparencies in standard 35mm slide mounts.

Three different models were produced. The first two (1 and 1a) had a sleek, low-profile appearance as they used a system of mirrors rather than a pentaprism to provide the reflex viewing image. Unfortunately, the resulting viewfinder image is rather dim compared to their competition and was laterally reversed.

The third British model, the Wrayflex II, was produced from about 1959 and had a pentaprism, which made for a brighter, laterally correct viewfinder, while giving it a taller profile. The Wrayflex now took standard 24x36mm images. However, by then, the (mostly Japanese) competition offered fully automatic diaphragms and instant return mirrors and sales slowed.

The Wrayflex featured a unique reflex mirror, which moved back towards the shutter, then up, allowing the use of deep-seated lenses and obviating the need for retro-focus wide-angle designs. This design was not followed by other makers, except for the Japanese Bronica 6x6 SLR - perhaps because it creates significant shutter lag. Only five lenses in four focal lengths (35, 50, 90 and 135mm) were available and, over a 10-year run, just 3,000 were made.

The Wrayflex has the distinction of being the only 35mm camera conceived and designed by two women: Mrs. Katie Studdert and Mrs. Helena Ruth.

Development of the Ilford Witness began in 1947 by ex-Leitz and Zeiss-Ikon engineers, with a prototype shown three years later. But production delays pushed retail availability into late 1952. The Witness was a 35mm coupled-rangefinder camera made in the UK by Ilford in Bolton, Lancashire. It had a focal-plane shutter with speeds 1 to 1/1000 second plus “B” and “T,” with the slow speeds (1 to 1/25 second) controlled by a separate dial. The shutter was synchronized for bulb and electronic flash, with separate sockets on the front of the body.

The Witness had a unique lens mount. Based on a standard LTM screw mount, it had an ingenious “interrupted thread” bayonet modification. On both the camera and the lens mounting threads, three grooved channels machined at 90° to the threads enable the lens to be pushed (instead of being screwed) directly into the camera mount. A simple quick twist then engages and secured the “interrupted threads.”

Some say the Witness had a higher level of quality than either the Leica or Contax cameras of the day. But production difficulties and management's decision to focus on cheaper models, led to its being discontinued in 1953. The Witness, with its total production of just 350 (most fitted with Dallmeyer Super Six f/1.9 lenses) and few survivors, is far rarer than a Stradivarius violin (of which 512 examples survive).

The last of our British gems is the Corfield Periflex, introduced by K. G. Corfield Ltd of Wolverhampton in 1953. It was a 35mm camera resembling the Leica Standard. Its claim to fame was a unique retractable periscope which lowered into the light path for through-the-lens focusing. Pressing the shutter release popped the spring-loaded periscope out of the film path before the focal-plane shutter fired.

In 1959, the company moved to Northern Ireland, where several new models were made until the mid-1960s, when production ceased with the number of cameras made thought to be on the order of some tens of thousands, but nobody knows for sure.

Read more of David Young's ongoing series on classic cameras