Introducing The Easthope Postcard Collection

A week ago we stopped by in the Midlands to buy a couple of large boxes full of 78 rpm records and was also given a box of old postcards. I love postcards as regular readers will know and I've hardly made a dent in this collection yet. But I've seen enough to know that there are cards from all around the world and going back a good few years!

So let's start off fairly close to home with this postcard of Wallasey in the 1950s. Some lovely old cars in the background and with some examples of another source of fascination with me - the street furniture, in the shape of the Keep Left signs on the roundabout.

I have been once, or twice perhaps, to Loch Lomond up there in Scotland and whilst it is undoubtedly a beautiful place, I've never seen the loch looking as blue as this! This shouts out "I'm a 1950s/60s postcard!" at me. I'd be willing to bet that that boat in the distance wasn't really red, that the chap wasn't really wearing a red jumper. The company artists always added some bright red and/or yellow to give their postcards a bit of zip!

A little later on and the real colour of the sea is allowed to show through, as in this postcard of Southend. Even so postcard photographers tried to find at least one person wearing something red!

When you find a postcard of the QE2 luxury liner, it's a pretty safe bet that somewhere in the collection there will be a few postcards from more exotic places. The exotic far east can wait for another entry, but let's dig out one foreign postcard to finish with.

I've chosen this one to end this first look at the collection. It's from the late 1940s or early 1950s and shows Montreux on the shore of Lake Geneva. Taken in glorious black and white, the quality of this postcard is excellent. Given that this is a lake in Switzerland it's perhaps unlikely that whoever sent the card back to England arrived there on the QE2...