107-Year-Old Sad Note Postcard

A postcard from my own collection this time. Cliftonville is an area of Margate in Kent. We stayed in a hotel on the seafront several times when I was around 14-17 and I remember it well if only for the rather lovely memory of being 15 and a girl rushing up to me in the street and flinging her arms round me and planting a smacker of a kiss on my cheek. I'm easily pleased like that...

This is not a rare card. On searching online for information about the Newgate Capway, all I managed to find were adverts for similar postcards. They were variously dated from 1905 onwards. Searching for Newgate Gap led to a little more information. The gap was a cutting through the cliffs, made by farmers who collected seaweed off the beach for rotting down as fertiliser. The bridge dates from 1861 and had a framework of iron with wooden decking. It was replaced in 1907 by one with steel and concrete with sides encased in decorative marble. This in turn was refurbished in 2005 with the marble smashed off and replaced with bricks and concrete - very classy...

The message side of the card is a trifle hard to read... Even the postal franking is a bit hit and miss. You can make out "10AM OC 1 09" so I would hazard that it was posted in October either on the first or between the 10-19th in 1909. Hence it showed a bridge no longer in existence at the time of posting! The written message has fared even less well, having faded just about to nothing. Most of the address though is readable: It was sent to a ship - SS Dartmoor or perhaps Dartmouth (?) care of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company at Victoria Dock, Canning Town.

The cargo ship SS Dartmoor was built at South Shields in 1892 and was sunk during the First World War by U-Boat UC50 en-route from Gibralter to Garston (Liverpool) with a cargo of ore. A search for SS Dartmouth failed to turn up any relevant information - possibly exacerbated by the fact that the town of Dartmouth has a lot to do with ships...

To try to read the message I used Adobe Photoshop to play with brightness and contrast, hue and density of colour, until most of the message could be deciphered. I'm missing the name of the person it refers to I'm afraid, but this was no "Wish You Were Here" message. It says:

"D.16 (or 46). P----- had an accident, call if able." It is signed I (or J) with a long surname beginning with H - Hunnisford, Houseman - it could almost be anything. The card raises more questions than it answers. Which is part of the appeal of postcard collecting. The photos are interesting, particularly those from the beginning of the 20th century, but just on a very few occasions, the message gives a brief, but not always complete, glimpse of events that affected the people involved. And without asking to plough through any old documents of ship departures from Victoria Dock (it would have been the Royal Victoria Dock by this date) this is where we must leave the unfortunate P-----.

Message On This Side Please...

I've been taking a break from scanning my own photos and have been catching up with my postcard collection. There's quite a few of them... Quite a while ago now, someone gave me a box of postcards and it turned out to hold 700 of them! I've just managed to finish scanning them and they will give me a few articles for the future! We've already seen those sent by A. Edgar Pedley during World War One from that collection.

Today's cards come mainly from my own flicking through boxes of postcards in antiques stalls and shops. They all feature my home town of Blackpool. This one is of Talbot Square, opposite the North Pier and includes the Town Hall on the right, which at that time had a tall spire on top of its tower.

Although addressed, it was never posted. Whilst today we would probably think of this as the "back" of the postcard, the opposite is actually true. The side with the address is the front and the photograph is the back. In the days long before emails, postcards were a cheap way of sending messages. They were used for all manner of communications, from ordering food from the local butchers to birthday and Christmas greetings. They started off being just plain white card. The address went on the front and the message on the back.

Then in 1902 when picture postcards were becoming popular, the post office decided to allow people to write their message on the front on the left hand side with the address going on the right hand side. This card dates from those early days of the 20th century with the header of the left hand (rather narrow!) column stating "For inland postage this space, as well as the back, may now be used for communication. For foreign postage the back only. (Post Office Regulation)"

My own guess is that this early postcard was bought as a souvenir of the new relaxed regulations. They probably wrote their own name and address on it as a mark of ownership. Originally in pencil this has been partially inked over.

The sending and collecting of postcards grew enormously. The sheer numbers of surviving cards to be found in antiques shops, car boot sales and on Ebay is evidence of how eagerly they were received and treasured by their recipients. This card was sent from Blackpool to Nailsworth, Gloucestershire on 12 September 1906.

After three or four years the public have got so used to the new regulations that the header now simply says "For Inland Postage Only" over the left hand column. The message itself tells us that the intended recipient was a collector of postcards. It says: "Dear Bessie, Do not know whether you have this view thought you would like one. Alice"

Before this innovation of dividing the front of a postcard to take both message and address, postcards had a small blank space on the reverse or picture side for a brief message to be written. "This is quite a favourite spot at moonlight" writes W.S. rather cryptically. I suspect he was not part of a party hoping to see phosphorescent fish shining in the shallows somehow...

This is another early example with the blank space at the right hand side of the picture. This card must also have been bought for a collection. It is unused.

For a little while though, the new system still confused some people. On the front of this the address is written in the right hand column, but the left hand column remains blank whilst on the reverse on top of the photograph this message has been written in pencil: "From Martha Jane. Am stopping here for a few days." Hmmm... not if the pier's night watchman catches you, dearie...

New Brighton Postcards

A couple of postcards sent from New Brighton in Merseyside in the early decades of the 20th century. The first features New Brighton Tower.

New Brighton's Tower was built just after the Blackpool one and set out to be better, higher, more sumptuous and with extensive gardens. Like Blackpool it rose from a building surrounding its base which incorporated a luxurious ballroom with sprung floor for 1000 dancers, a menagerie, shooting gallery and billiard room. The tower itself was octagonal in plan and 40 feet taller than Blackpool Tower so that when it opened somewhere between 1898 and 1900, it was the tallest building in Britain. Initially hugely successful, the tower remained closed during World War One and maintenance during that time was neglected so much that renovation was beyond the finances of the owners once the war was over and the tower was dismantled from 1919. The building and gardens continued but a massive fire in 1969 gutted the building and it was demolished.

The postcard was bought in New Brighton but not posted until the purchaser, Edie, had arrived home to Horley near today's Gatwick Airport. She wrote a message to her mother in Anerley, south east London which says:

Dear Mum, I arrived home safe and sound. The train reached Horley about twelve. Love to all from all, Edie

The card was posted on 3 June 1909. Unconnected but an interesting fact all the same - some three months later on 7 September 1909, a woman and her twelve-year-old son were stranded at the top of New Brighton Tower for the night when they missed the last lift down. They were found the following morning at ten o'clock and, presumably embarrassed, left the building quickly without giving their names!

This postcard has the feel of a genuine silver gelatin photographic print and is on quite sturdy card. It shows New Brighton Promenade in the late Victorian or very early Edwardian period. Not a single person without a hat can be seen amongst the many people walking up and down the pavement. Most of them wear what look like quite thick coats too, though the young girl nearest to us at the left of the photograph is carrying her coat over her arm.

The sender, only identified by initials which are open to interpretation, probably kept their coat firmly on as the card was posted on the second of January 1922 and it seems the weather was typically northern and rough! He or she writes to a Miss D Dugdale in Blackburn, east Lancashire:

Many thanks for the pretty handkerchief. I'm staying here for a few days. It is terribly rough, the boats are unable to land today. A Happy New Year. Love from (G.M.L.? F.K.L.?)

Postcard Time - Drop Me A Line!

Today we had a run out to a local antiques warehouse - one of those where you can spend a couple of hours rummaging through lots of different stalls. I seem to spend ages thumbing through books, postcards and old records and today came home without any books...

I'll show you the records another time, but for now here's a couple of the postcards that took my fancy.

The first one is a rather pointed message, sent from Manchester on 4 August 1915, to a couple in Whitley Bay over on the north east coast. The sender says simply: "Love from Marjorie". Do I sense a slight rebuke?

The other one for today is a painted view of a rather tiny Keswick in Cumberland, as it was then - Cumbria now. I think there's a couple more buildings these days...

The written message is in keeping with the printed message on the front, but with not many more words written on the reverse than the last postcard had. This was sent on 31 December 1907 from Weymouth to a Miss E Crabb in the same town - ah, a romance? The message says simply: "A Happy New Year to you, Joe"

Blackpool Postcard

One of several old postcards of Blackpool from my collection. I can't claim to be a serious postcard collector, although I have several hundreds of them in albums and scanned onto the computer. At one point I used to make a point of buying postcards everywhere we went and I've bought several vintage ones at collectors' fairs and car boots. This one shows some saucy minxes lifting their skirts up to paddle at Blackpool in the early 1900s. Probably very racy at the time...! Has to be seen to be believed particularly for the sheer ugliness of the women chosen to pose... Ye gods, that photographer needed glasses...