The man who owned 3,000 cameras

One of the largest camera collections in the world is hidden away in a village hall in a Fife coastal town – but hardly anybody knows it is there.

At least 3,000 cameras, including some dating back well over a century, belonged to the late Neville “Jim” Matthew.

He retired to the picturesque East Neuk village of St Monans after a career that took him around the world.

He took over the former Salvation Army hall to store his treasured collection. Inside the hall, row after row of cameras, accessories and memorabilia fill the shelves.

They include stereoscopic and 3D cameras as well as East European models, including many that were rare in the West.

At the heart of the collection is an array of Kodak Brownie cameras – featuring almost every model ever produced.

The Brownie was the first affordable camera and could be bought for just one dollar when it was first sold in 1900.

Jim had wanted his collection to be an open attraction, but he was getting older and in ill health, and the task posed too big a challenge.

Instead, he was limited to opening once a year for the village festival and for occasional private viewings.

“He really enjoyed talking to people about it when they came into the hall,” says his widow Dorothy.

“I had to come down and rescue them sometimes because he did not know when to stop.

“He was a very good speaker. He didn’t have a small talk but if it was something he was interested in he could talk for a long time.”

Jim, who died aged 81 at the end of 2017, had begun the collection 24 years earlier on a trip to Vancouver in Canada to see his daughter.

They were wandering around antique shops and his wife Dorothy bought him an old camera as a present.

Soon after, as Jim recovered from heart surgery, they travelled down the west coast of the US to Oregon where there were a lot of antique shops.

“He started to potter around and find quite a few cameras that he liked,” Dorothy says.

“It expanded from there. When he got his mind into something he goes all out.

“He won’t stop. He never really said why. It was just that he started and continued.”

Dorothy says Jim was collecting “at the best time” because people were getting rid of their old cameras in favour of new digital models.

“Whenever he went somewhere he would always come back with a case load of cameras,” she says.

He travelled a lot for work and pleasure and he would always search out flea markets or places selling second-hand items.

Poland proved a very fruitful destination as they were getting rid of a lot of Russian cameras from the Soviet era.