One evening in March 1960, there was a flurry of excitement in the newsroom of the Glasgow Herald. Word had come through that a global celebrity was expected to touch down at Prestwick Airport. The Herald photographer on back-shift happened to be Edward Jones, and as he was despatched to Ayrshire he reflected that his nice quiet night had been disrupted.
The celebrity turned out to be Elvis Presley, whose time in the U S army was coming to an end. His brief touchdown at Prestwick - he was en route for the States - sparked a frenzy at the airport, with hundreds of fans congregating there in the hope of seeing him.
A media posse also descended, Edward in the thick of it. His camera shutter clicked as he recorded the scenes. He was just 24 at the time.
Was he an Elvis fan then, The Herald asked him in 2010? ''Certainly not,'' he replied. ''I always regarded these people as being the beginning of the end of popular music. The Beatles were the same.'' He was, it turned out, more of a Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby fan.
Edward, who has died at the age of 89, was one of Scotland’s best-known press photographers. His images of Presley at Prestwick were among his most famous.
“Although many people envy him for having had this opportunity, he wasn't a big Elvis fan and actually preferred jazz or Bing Crosby”, says his son, William.
In his time at the Glasgow Herald Edward shot many other famous people: the Queen, Spike Milligan, Richard Attenborough, SNP MP Winnie Ewing, Frankie Vaughan and Joe Loss.
The photo of Vaughan, taken in June 1971, shows him with his light-grey suit drenched in water while visiting Easterhouse’s new swimming pool after a 19-year-old labourer dived into the water and soaked him. Frankie cut short his visit. “I had bronchial pneumonia four years ago”, he said, “and I could not afford to take any chances”.
A few years earlier, in 1967, Edward had been one of the photographers on hand as Winnie Ewing celebrated her landmark by-election victory in Hamilton.
Edward was hooked on photography from an early age and in 1950, when he was aged just 14, he was recruited by the Hamilton Advertiser, where he honed his craft until he joined the then Glasgow Herald in 1957.
His career path echoed, to an extent, that of the world-famous photographer Harry Benson, who had started on the Hamilton Advertiser before making his way to Fleet Street and, later, America. “Five or 10 times I tried to get a job with The Herald and failed”, Benson told this newspaper in 2005. “For pictures, it was the place to be. It was where every photographer wanted to work”.
Edward himself worked at the Herald for 44 years, leaving to freelance in 2000, a job he did for four or five years.
According to his son William and daughter Margaret: “He liked to take pictures that demonstrated the social history of Glasgow and day to day.
“He would take pictures of children in ragged clothes with dirty faces playing in the streets and coal men making their deliveries, but try to capture them in an artistic way.
“He particularly liked to take photographs of cityscapes in an atmospheric manner where there would be mist or fog - for example, the fog in George Square with statue, which featured in the paper and in the Times Past exhibition in 2004".
Edward also liked to take photographs of industrial scenes in Glasgow and the river Clyde. In 1970 he won an Ilford Award for a photograph called "Industrial River”; he remained very proud of it.
“Dad would try to avoid taking a simple portrait”, his children add. “His pictures could have people in them but they were always interacting with their environment and not looking straight at the camera. The people often looked as if they were unaware that the photograph was being taken.
“He liked the variety of the jobs that he got at the Herald and he would always try to put an artistic slant onto a job even if it was a mundane job.
"One example of that was when the car registration plate number changed. He didn't just take a picture of a number plate. He had a photograph of a long row of cars with the sun reflecting on each windscreen so that the picture became a sort of optical illusion and you needed to look twice at it before you realised what it was”.
Occasionally, his picture editors would urge him to go out at Christmas time and shoot whatever caught his eye. The results were evocative shots of people buildings in the snow, or the George Square ice rink or festive lights.
“Similarly”, Edward’s family say, “if he was out at the weekend and noticed something interesting and photogenic but maybe not strictly a news story, he would take a picture and let the picture editor see it.
“He was always really happy when a photo like that was accepted and appeared in the paper. One example was a shot of two dogs in the driving seat of a 2CV car, which did feature in the Herald”.
Craig Alexander, the Group Picture/Multimedia Editor at The Herald and Glasgow Times and The National, said: "Eddie had an exceptional eye for seeing what was not obvious to most in a photographic situation.
"With his calm and gentlemanly way he could get his subjects to relax and give the best to the picture. It didn’t matter if it was a celebrity, or just some kids in a class — he was the same with everyone. This is proven by the images we've selected from our archives all these years on
"I was once told this quite generous man was the most feared by other photographers on photo-calls as he would come in and do his thing. There would no big fuss; he'd just get the job done but he would then develop his negatives and he would have a brilliant and completely different image. It could be achieved by using available light or by finding a different angle from everyone else. He was a true gentleman and a brilliant news photographer".
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