Royale Numbers & The Mystery Seller

 Many of the Royale images in circulation today have numbers in their corners. 
They have various formats, but what do they represent?

1. Numbers in White Boxes

Royale Studio - Catalogue Thumbnail Sheet for set 'W'

'

Numbers in bold characters which appear inside a white box in the bottom left corner are Royale's own numbers, used on their thumbnail sheets to show the sequence of the pictures and for customers to reference when ordering full size prints. 

I've yet to identify the soldier seen undressing in front of a mirror and getting down to exercise in Catalogue 'W'. It's a fairly typical Royale set with a genuine service uniform paired with Royale's ultra tight shorts. The routine of getting different 'real' men to perform the same, slightly embarrassing, erotic ritual is part of the appeal of Royale Studio's work.

Royale Studio - Navy Gash 08

Thumbnail pictures often turn on their own having been cropped from the full sheet,

sometimes apparently with scissors!

The example above is from 'Navy Gash'

2. Numbers Inside White Circles

Royale Sailor Punished in Shorts 2

A lot of other pictures have smaller numbers inside little circles in the bottom left corner.

This example is from Royale 01 'More Sailors in the Rigging' 

Clearly 401 isn't a sequence number within a set, they usually only comprised 16 - 24 pictures.

They can't be Royale's unique identification numbers either, the values are are too low for that. The ones I have only go up to 401 but Royale produced dozens of sets. There are 117 just in the Catalogue Sheets I have, representing something like 3000 pictures.

So what are these circled numbers?

The pictures in my possession which have them come from various different Royale sets, so to get to the bottom of this conundrum, I collected together them altogether. There were 45 in all, all good quality scans of original photographs. Straightaway I could see from the filenames that they all came from Sailor Al's 'Originals' collection which was controversially released to the internet some years ago. 

(See footnote on Sailor Al in 'Sailors In The Rigging - 1b'). 

Pictures in beefcake magazines in Royale's time (1959-63) do not have these numbers,

although one turned up later. This points to an obvious answer, that these are simply the numbers 

that a collector used to identify the photographs he owned.

~

The next question is: - Do these numbers tell us anything about the sets they belong to?

For example, in Royale 01 'More Sailors in the Rigging' there is another photo, seemingly from the same set as 401 shown above, it's numbered 391 (below). Does this mean there are 9 pictures between these two in the original set?

Royale Sailor Punished in Shorts 1

Well, no, because in the collected group, 

I can see there are two pictures from other sets with numbers in-between 391 and 401, 

including the one below, 394

Royale - Footballer Punished

Just this one example tells us that the numbering is not meaningful. So even where 'runs' of pictures that look connected can be identified (e.g. a run of four images numbered 331-334 in Royale 93 Sailors Caned) that doesn't tell us for sure that they appear in that sequence, nor that they are even in the same set.

It's possible they were numbered in the order of their acquisition. Then small groupings of related images would occur because collectors could choose which of  the more expensive, larger prints they wanted from the thumbnail sheets like 'W' above.

3. Numbers inside Black Boxes

There is a further small group of 6 pictures which have white numbers inside black boxes, always accompanied by a star. These too can be traced back to the 'Originals' collection

It looks as if these stars have come from a sticker sheet (notice how it overlaps the number). The numbers are probably stickers too (remember this is pre-computers!). The circled numbers just discussed are probably the same because the numbers on them slant at various angles. Perhaps sheets of numbered stickers were specially produced in those days for collectors of all sorts and I guess businesses would have a use for them too. 

As it happens, the picture above (107) from 'Sailors in the Rigging' also exists with circle style numbering - and it's a different number, 279 (see below). 

 The existence of duplicate copies with different numbers suggests that they were originally from two different collections which ended up being merged to form the 'Originals'. These photos were considered to be porn and were publicly unsaleable through normal channels, so passing on complete collections to other, like-minded individuals was the only safe way of disposing of them. That was how collections came to be merged.

Sailor Al told me that he acquired most of his collection from a man who had worked with 'Guys in Uniform' Studio and had previously been connected with Royale. In fact the 'Originals' collection also includes a number of pictures from Guys in Uniform (given filenames with MIU numbers, for Men In Uniform). None of these, that I know of,  have numbers in their corners. It's a purely Royale phenomenon.

Given his background the original owner may not have bought them from Royale like a normal customer but acquired them through his job there or from another Royale worker. That might explain the large size of the collection. It's even possible he may have rescued them when Royale was raided which might bring us full circle back to the possibility that the numbers were put on by Royale, even though we can't see a rational basis for them doing so. 

Postscript

Royale Models photo in Bonham's Auction

Collecting all my numbered Royale pictures into one folder for this investigation threw up one completely unexpected result. I found some of them were duplicated by images I had acquired quite recently from the catalogue of a  sale of Basil Clavering pictures at Bonhams (Jun 2021). Five images reproduced in the Bonhams' listing had circled numbers in their corners and 3 of them duplicated images I already had (the one shown above was one I didn't have). 

It seems this sale must have been of Sailor Al's 'Originals' collection. 

The provenance Bonhams gave closely matches the story I had been told by him (see above). 

The sale raised £22,000 for around 850 prints plus negatives etc. About a third of that amount was the buyer's premium (the auction house's commission). I don't know who the actual seller was in the end, but I hope the new owner of these pictures will share more of them with us all.