The Organisation of the Royale Studio Archive

This article explains the structure of the Royale Studio Archive at mitchmen and how to navigate it to find what you want to see.

 

 

Royale Studio - Corporal Punishment (from The Arrest, ERTR-1)

This blog, The Royale Studio blog

Contains articles about the history of Royale, Basil Clavering, the man who set it up and how they operated plus articles of general interest. The labels in the right-hand column/sidebar help you find specific types of article*. 

 

Also in the right-hand sidebar there are handy indexes of the Royale Storyettes and their Models, which link directly to profile pages (see below).

 

*(There are more articles at the mitchmen blog, which is where this project started. These will gradually be transferred to this blog but in the meantime I will create temporary linking posts here to simplify access. Ultimately, the mitchmen articles will be recast as trailers pointing to this dedicated blog.) 

 

The Profile Pages 

For storyettes, the profile pages provide background information, the cast list and an outline of what they are about. They have links to the cast members and a detailed article in the Gallery blog which will have all the photos I have been able to find plus a commentary highlighting the features of interest in each image, with political and historical background where appropriate. 

 

For the models, the profile pages give similar background information plus a list of their appearances in storyettes and solo sets, including some posed for other photographers. Again each one is linked to a fully illustrated article in the Gallery blog.

 

You can by-pass the profile pages by going direct to the Gallery, but you will have to search for older articles there, since they are listed in order of addition. The label gadget on the right-hand side lists model names and other things which may help.  

 

The Royale Studio Gallery 

has articles which display all the available photos from each set with comments and information about the background to the storyettes and links to the models who appear in them. I pick the best copy I have of each image for the Gallery, but many of them have been AI-enhanced for presentation purposes. However, the unenhanced originals plus other variants such as appearances in different magazines and advertisements can be found in the Open Archive folders. 

The Gallery has a variety of display options* that, for example, show thumbnails of the articles for visual selection.  You can access these formats through the tab at the extreme left of the top bar which defaults to 'Magazine'. 

*Sorry, but this 'dynamic' feature doesn't seem to be available on my iPhone but it works on my PC and android tablet.

  

The mitchmen Royale Studio Open Archive 

will be the new home, the database, of all the Royale material assembled under this project. It is presently under construction and housed in a Google Drive folder belonging to the mitchmen blog. Anyone can access it using the link below.

mitchmen Royale Studio Open Archive

In the mitchmen Royale Studio Archive, the pictures produced by Royale, Hussar and Dolphin Studios are grouped mainly by Model Name or by Storyette (or Playlet as they were later called by Hussar). There are also a few themed Collections of miscellaneous photos which I cannot assign to either of these groups.  

Notes about Naming and Labelling

I have tried to assign Royale's original names to each storyette, but it's not possible to identify them in every case. Where storyettes circulate under other names I usually point this out in the blog article relating to it. Some stories were given acronyms by Royale e.g. Navy Gash = NAGA. Sometimes the names of the models were used for identification (e.g. ERTR in the picture above which stands for Eric and Trevor/Trefor). I quote these acronyms in the Archive folder name and in the filename where appropriate.

The Storyettes and Collections listed in the sidebar at this blog have been numbered by me in no particular order, purely for convenience in identifying them and naming the files which belong to them. The numbers do not represent any sort of sequence. Thus, Royale 02 - Navy Romeo is abbreviated to R02 in the file names of pictures, which have the form 'R02-picture sequence number-title'. In some sets, I have (inconsistently) used the Royal acronym instead of the R number.

I have not separated out the sets by studio names. Hussar eventually superseded both Royale and Dolphin, but I am still trying to establish how or why they were differentiated (see article on Studio names and timelines). The original attributions have been quoted where I know them, but some were published under different studio names at different times. I am trying to date the stories where I can, but there don't seem to be many reliable sources (see Dating of Royale sets). My best guess of the publication date is shown in the sidebar list and I may eventually resequence it by date.