‘One remembers not to give the Queen a thump of joyful friendliness’: Remembering Norman Parkinson — revolutionary fashion photographer and Cecil Beaton’s only homegrown rival

Norman Parkinson (1913-90) told an interviewer, late in life and perhaps a little wistfully, that he might liked to have been a racing driver. In his youth he had been the proud owner of an Italian ‘Mille Miglia’ OM tourer, a novelty on British roads. He was also something of a ‘debs delight’ and, according to his memoir, England’s junior waltz champion. Some of his earliest pictures were of motor cars shot on 10-second exposures, their blurred forms like fleeing spectres of metal and rubber. A 1936 portrait of his father in driving helmet and goggles is titled ‘The Age of Speed’.

It was during the turbo-charged Modernist 1930s that Parkinson’s pictures came of age. In time he would become one of Britain’s best-known fashion and portrait photographers with a career at Vogue that took him