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...

Black and White, Sepia and Just a Dab of Dulux on a Postcard

Here's another of the postcards I bought last week at the antiques place.

This was posted from Southend-on-Sea on 21 August 1939 and shows the bright lights of that seaside town before they were extinguished a short while later for the war time blackout.

This started out as an ordinary black and white photograph, taken in daylight. Then the sky area was masked over whilst it was printed, then the mask moved to allow a dark sky to be exposed onto the paper. Before that happened a small disc (possibly a coin on the original enlargement) was placed on the paper which has remained white under it to act as the moon.

Then the finished print was sepia coloured for the brown effect of the sky and foreground detail before certain bits were treated to an artist's touch to add the yellow red and blue highlights. The sea was given a blue wash which proved too tricky to bother about having anything other than blue lights on the pier and seafront to the right of the photo! A clear bit was added for the moon to "reflect upon". A bit of green paint was literally scribbled over the dark garden area to the right of the pier boardwalk and there we have the final result - Valentine's post card G.5936 (this is a real photograph).

It was sent to the Blades family in Retford, Nottingham with the message almost all as one sentence:

Southend. Having the day here today been lovely but had a thunderstorm this afternoon there's Percy and Mrs J. and J here. Cheerio Molly xxx