At nine years old, Jim Jarché helped his father photograph a dead woman in a slum house in Rotherhithe in the middle of the night. Her husband wanted the picture to send to relatives in Australia. While his dad popped downstairs to get the tripod, Jim stood in the bedroom doorway in near-darkness, until light from a candle suddenly revealed the lifeless subject “so close that I could have touched her”, he recalled in his 1934 memoir, People I Have Shot. “Her eyes were wide and staring and her lower jaw had fallen open… When my father arrived on the scene a few minutes later, he found me screaming myself into a fit.”
Very soon, however, the boy had forgotten his terror and was more interested in watching his father “focus up”, holding for him a magnesium ribbon which served as lighting — accidentally setting a lace curtain on fire in the process. Luckily, this rather unusual introduction to photography removed Jarché’s fear of the sight of death — it could surely have done the opposite — and “put a stiffening in me”, which served him well, he said, in his later work as a press photographer: “a full life, both amusing and interesting, but also one in which a man needs the eyes of a lynx, the patience of Job, and the strength of a lion, coupled with the hide of a rhinoceros.”
Now Jarché is receiving fresh attention thanks to a documentary in which his grandson, the actor David Suchet, best known for playing Hercule Poirot, picks up a Leica M3 camera to find out for himself what challenges Jarché faced.
As a child, Suchet would sit on his grandfather’s lap for hours, enthralled. “I was closer to Jimmy than to anyone in my life,” he says. “I was a little estranged from my own father, because he was a very Edwardian surgeon, busy, a bit distant. A kind man, but very formal. I was not the clever one, and I was the middle one, so I never got time with my dad. But Jimmy gave me time. He was my hero.”
Advertisement
Jarché was a big man — an amateur wrestling champion, full of colourful stories — and Suchet idolised him
Jarché was a big man — an amateur wrestling champion, full of colourful stories — and Suchet idolised him. “Jimmy was an entertainer,” he recalls. “He could talk for hours. He would wrap you round in his positive energy and focus on you like there was nobody else. He’d make you laugh. He was an immensely powerful man, not frightened of anything. He’d had a hard life, but he was warm, he loved people. You can see it in his pictures.”
Jarché’s images appeared in Life, the Daily Sketch, the Daily Herald, and the Illustrated London News. He was tenacious and crafty, frequently beating rivals to scoops, yet never sneery, whether his subjects were VIPs or “ordinary” folk.
He photographed Scottish “kipper girls”, Welsh coal miners and their ponies half a mile underground (having reassured them his new kind of flashbulb would not cause an explosion), and allied soldiers in north Africa during the second world war. “To be a jobbing press photographer then, you had to be a Jack of all trades and master of everything,” says Suchet.
His grandfather documented the construction of the London Underground, the tense siege of Sidney Street, an armed battle between police and a gang of thieves in east London in 1911 that Winston Churchill, then home secretary, oversaw from the street; and the decadence of Berlin’s nightclubs just after the first world war when the rest of Germany was starving — their clientele mostly “war-profiteers who had bled their country while their country bled for them. There were stout old men with arms of satyrs who had waxed fat on the troubles of the Fatherland”.
Advertisement
He took risks, balancing precariously on cranes, ladders or scaffolding to get aerial shots nobody else had. He once sneaked a shot of King Edward VIII at a cabaret with his new lady friend, Mrs Simpson, before the affair was public knowledge. “Who is the mystery woman?” ran the caption. “I wonder if the King knew, at some level…” Suchet muses. “I wonder if, subconsciously, he wanted it to come out.”
Then there were the politicians — Ernest Bevin, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee (nonchalantly mowing his lawn three weeks before VE Day) — and other prominent figures: the aviator Amy Johnson, the suffragette Charlotte Despard, Albert Einstein. “If I’ve inherited anything from my grandfather, I hope it’s the ability to mix with all sorts of people,” says Suchet. “I’m not interested in social standing. I’ve had the privilege of having lunch with the Queen and the privilege of spending time with the homeless.”
Advertisement
Jarché was married to Elsie, a music-hall star. “She was a dancer, legs from her ears, and he went backstage to wait for her and said, ‘Do you want a drink?’ ” She said no. “He was there the next night and the next night… and on the Saturday night, the last night before she went off on tour again, he hired a white tie and tails, with top hat, and bought a rose and said, ‘Last chance, darling.’ And that was that. She was on record as saying, ‘I never missed showbusiness once in my life.’ Because you were never bored with Jimmy.”
Jarché died in 1965, when Suchet was 18. It was a terrible blow, just before David and his brother John were due to go to South Africa to visit relatives. “He had been ill in bed, in his flat in Hampstead — he lived upstairs in our big house. I just threw myself on him and cried my eyes out. And then the next day we had to go, so I didn’t get to go to his funeral. So I never had real closure. How ironic that I was able to step into his shoes, in these two weeks of filming. I confess, I became quite emotional just thinking about it.”
Suchet admits he can be “too emotional” at times. He has a surprisingly deep, rich voice
Suchet admits he can be “too emotional” at times. He has a surprisingly deep, rich voice — utterly unlike the one he uses for the Belgian detective. “Poirot was a gift. I didn’t know I could play him — he’s very unlike me in so many ways. He works from his head, not his heart. I am a tidy person, but he’s clinical. He’s incredibly vain, and I hope I’m not. He's a confirmed bachelor and I’m certainly not!”
Like his grandfather, Suchet fell in love at first sight. He has been married to Sheila since 1976, his motto: “Happy wife, happy life.”
Advertisement
For this documentary he was tasked with photographing ballet dancers and miners, celebrities and politicians.
Unlike Jarché, Suchet did not have to worry about how to get access to his subjects, several of whom are very high-profile; that was all arranged by the film-makers. All he had to do was point and shoot, you might think — but no, the M3 is a notoriously tricky piece of kit.
The film-makers invited this magazine’s director of photography, Jon Jones, to give Suchet some expert feedback. Jones particularly liked Suchet’s portrait of the retired British army general Sir Michael Jackson standing at the Cenotaph. “I’d publish that,” he tells Suchet, to his delight. Suchet recalls how his uncle used to send him off as a child to the little zoo on Hampstead Heath.
“He would make me take a little notebook and write down what speed of film, aperture of lens, shutter speed and distance. He’d develop them in his dark room and he’d sit with me and say, ‘Now, look, you’ve lost your background there...’ And now, at the age of 65, I’m back! Learning! What an opportunity. I felt Jimmy sitting on my shoulder.”
Suchet is currently playing James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, which will come to London’s Apollo theatre in April. Between performances, Suchet is thinking of recording a one-voice reading of the Bible. “I don’t like sitting still.” The whole Bible? “Yes, I’ve read it three or four times. I’ve also read the Koran, which I think is important for every Christian to do. Jews, Christians, Muslims, we all descend from Abraham.”
Advertisement
Suchet, whose father was Jewish, became a Christian a few years ago and last winter filmed a programme retracing the steps of St Paul. This autumn, he starts on the last five Poirot stories. He made the first in 1987. By the summer of 2013 that will be it: every single Poirot story filmed. “There will be a lot of sadness. I will be filming the last story first — by then he’s a little old man in a wheelchair. I’ll have no padding and I’ll have lost a stone in weight for it. I didn’t want to film the last one last,” he adds. “I’d rather leave him alive and kicking.”
Post-Poirot, Suchet will have a lot of time on his hands. Yes, he might indulge in a spot more photography. No, he won’t give up the day job. He’d love to do Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “Who knows what doors may open to me — at my age, where people are often thinking of closing doors! It’s terribly exciting. My tombstone will read, ‘Still so much to do’.” Just like his grandfather, he wouldn’t trade places with anyone.
David Suchet: People I Have Shot is on March 25 at 10.35pm on ITV1