The founder, Herbert Stewart Bale (1859-1929) came to Liverpool from Australia in 1899 and started an advertising agency. He found that it was hard to get good photographs and his son, Edward Stewart Bale (1889 - 1944), began to take photographs for the agency.[1]
The Stewart Bale archive at the Merseyside Maritime Museum's Archives and Library holds some 195,445 negatives (62,845 glass negatives & 132,600 film negatives) principally dating from around 1924 to the early 1980s. The film negatives are currently in frozen storage in order to preserve them and are, therefore, inaccessible. National Museums Liverpool is hoping to digitize this collection with external funding so that it becomes fully accessible and is in the process of planning this project.