Born: 17 August 1880, United Kingdom
Died: 15 March 1945
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Louisa Laura Butler, Lulie
The following is excerpted from a 2025 interview with Dr. Zoë Burgess, Senior Research Fellow at the University of West London’s London School of Film, Media and Design, and Film Curator at Wessex Film and Sound Archive.
So one early example is Louisa Gauvain, née Butler, and she actually is the earliest woman I’ve been able to identify during the course of my work. She came from a middle class family, her family were a doctoring family, her father and grandfather had been surgeons. They were well off, they didn’t have a huge number of domestic staff. So one of the key indicators looking at biographies is quite often identifying how many domestic staff families had in the early years of when these women were born. So Louisa’s family didn’t have a huge amount of wealth that was apparent from census records. So they were comfortable, but they were modestly well off. And she had a family around her who were involved in medicine. Now Louisa trained, we believed, to become an apothecary’s assistant, which in the closing years of the 19th century was essentially providing primary care to individuals. She was essentially being a GP, but she wasn’t allowed to be a doctor because she was a woman, so she was providing this care. And she trained in this area, so she had lab training, so she had access to chemicals. And so we’re looking around 1900 when she was undertaking her training. So this is around the time when still photography was becoming more and more available to people. And I think it was around that time that still photography, you didn’t necessarily have to develop everything yourself, but she would have been in a position where she would have actually been able to have access to chemicals to do still photography developing herself. So we know she got into still photography first. And then she later met her husband, Henry Gauvain, and they married in 1913. And we have at Hampshire Record Office, there are a collection of photographs that were taken by Louisa during the course of her husband’s work. And the film that’s attributed to Louisa dates from 1913. She became involved in filmmaking really through her husband’s work. So she was in many senses, working as a professional in the medical industry. And that’s how she came to filmmaking. She wasn’t necessarily doing it for leisure, there was a very specific purpose to that. However, she wasn’t a professional filmmaker. So she’s one of these characters who comes to filmmaking for a very different reason from someof the women we’ve been talking about who may have lots of excess leisure time. She’s a really interesting character. And that film is available. It’s called Plaster of Paris. And I think the Welcome Collection have it visible online.
Her name was not recorded next to the film in the catalog. So on the film and the collection of still photographs there is an attribution written by Henry Gauvain, her husband, which says “taken by my wife,” but until I did the research, we didn’t actually know who Henry Gauvain’s wife was and what her name was. We now know she is Louisa Gauvain.