Reality check?

I've been playing chess today with Laurie Arthur Davis: not yet seven, he's already able to surprise me.

The subject of the above trick picture is his great-great-grandfather, Arthur Bertram Davis - playing against himself: born in 1885, he would have sat for it while Victoria was still Queen.

I like to think the image was created by the player's father, Arthur Henry, who thus set a photographic ball of thread running down through the Davis family.