Bodleian Library Acquires Rare WWII Scrapbook of Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton
A wartime scrapbook assembled in the 1940s and long hidden from public view has found a permanent home at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Compiled by Roland Haupt between 1943 and 1949, the album brings together more than 150 photographs by British photographers Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton, including unpublished and little-seen images from their World War II coverage.
The acquisition adds an unusually intimate record of two of the era’s most distinctive visual chroniclers. According to London-based photography dealer Michael Hoppen, who facilitated the sale, the scrapbook reflects “a very personal album with personal choices.” He also noted that many of the images would not have been published at the time, despite Miller’s wish to see them in print.
Haupt’s descendants said that both photographers delivered undeveloped film to him for processing before the images were sent to their editors. The book, assembled over several years, preserves that private exchange in physical form: contact sheets, portraits, battlefield scenes, theater clippings, and other fragments arranged into a single narrative of war, travel, and artistic exchange.
Miller’s section is especially revealing. Best known for her work as a war correspondent for British Vogue, the American-born photographer followed the U.S. Army from Normandy to Berlin after becoming accredited in 1942, even as British troops barred women from covering them at the front. Haupt’s inscription calls her “my favorite photographer Lee Miller” and traces that journey with evident admiration. The scrapbook also includes a lesser-known version of David Scherman’s famous image of Miller in Adolf Hitler’s Munich bathtub, a photograph that has become one of the defining images of the war’s final days. In this version, Miller’s boots, still dirty from the visit to Dachau, remain visible at the edge of the frame, sharpening the image’s uneasy charge.
Beaton’s photographs chart a different but equally expansive wartime path. He began by documenting the Blitz in London before traveling abroad in 1942, working in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, India, Burma, China, and North Africa. In Haupt’s album, his images of desert debris and military aftermath sit alongside portraits and ephemera, creating a layered account of how war was seen, staged, and remembered.
For the Bodleian, the scrapbook is more than a cache of rare photographs. It is a carefully preserved object that links two major photographers through one collector’s eye, and it offers scholars a fresh archive for understanding how wartime images moved between private circulation and public history.
