Rosalind Mann

Rosalind Mann (1925–2020) was a portrait photographer whose clients famously included ‘girls with pearls’, as well as aspiring actors, writers and politicians. She trained as a society photographer, working as an assistant to Karl Schenker before joining the Wrens and working as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park.

She set up her first studio in Hampstead, London in 1965 and took 3,760 portrait sittings before she retired thirty years later in 1995. The collection includes portraits of actors and writers as well as the commissioned and complimentary portraits of ‘girls in pearls’ – young women whose engagements were announced in The Tatler or Country Life.

Rosalind was born in West Hampstead to Louis and Clara Lechem (née Shinwell), both from Jewish families who arrived in the UK in the 1890s. Her mother’s twelve siblings raised in Glasgow included the Labour MP Manny Shinwell. After leaving school at 15, Rosalind worked at the Mayfair studio of society photographer Catherine Bell, and then with Karl Schenker, whose clients included many celebritities and artists.

In 1943 she joined the Wrens, working as a bombe operator at two outstations of Bletchley Park: Eastcote and Adstocke Manor, The monotonous work of noting down seemingly random numbers was nonetheless important, and her team were congratulated on their contribution to the sinking of the Scharnhorst in 1944.

After marriage to Monty Pearlman in 1945 and raising two daughters, Rosalind became an assistant to photographer Helen Craig in her Hampstead studio, before establishing her own business. Her studios at Cambridge Terrace Mews in Regents Park, then in Portland Road in Holland Park, and finally in Oxfordshire, became a fashionable port of call for girls with pearls seeking engagement photographs, as well as actors and other artists needing publicity photos.

Her clients included actors Alan Rickman, Hayley Mills, Lindsay Duncan and Nigel Havers; the conductor Mark Elder; Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, and the menswear designer Tommy Nutter.