Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Studio portrait of 3353 Private (Pte) Charles Harold Butcher, 60th Battalion. A farmhand from Beeac, Victoria, prior to enlistment, he departed from Sydney aboard HMAT Port Melbourne on 16 July 1917 for Liverpool, England. Following training in England he joined his battalion in France in January 1918. Pte Butcher was killed in action on 27 April 1918 near Fouilloy, France. He has no known grave and he is memorialised on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial, France. He was aged 20 years. This is one of a series of photographs taken by the Darge Photographic Company which had the concession to take photographs at the Broadmeadows and Seymour army camps during the First World War. In the 1930s, the Australian War Memorial purchased the original glass negatives from Algernon Darge, along with the photographers' notebooks. The notebooks contain brief details, usually a surname or unit name, for each negative.