Interior of Joseph Mellor’s home

c. 1930

Mellor Papers, Photograph Album, Box 11

Unpublished

Joseph Mellor and his wife Emma moved to Manchester, England in 1899; Mellor never returned to New Zealand. The Mellors lived at several addresses in and around Staffordshire and this interior shot is most probably from their home on Regent Street in Stoke-on-Trent where they lived from about 1930 to 1937. Above the fireplace are three portraits. In the middle is French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet (1748-1822); on the left is English chemist, Michael Faraday (1791-1867) who like Mellor had little formal education and who Ernest Rutherford called ‘one of the greatest scientific discoverers of all time’; and to the right is Robert Bunsen (1811-1899), famous German chemist and developer of the Bunsen burner. Note the shelves hold just some of Mellor’s 15,000 books.