The Dormitory

Sometimes things just come together: One of the retired ladies that come to the house for conversation attends ‘old girl’ events that are held for ex-pupils of the school she attended. This postcard came to my attention recently, taken around 1900 it is the dormitory of a school.

This week I showed her a scan of it when she arrived and she confirmed that it was her old school. Not only that… Last week she attended an old girls lunch and they were discussing the bombing during the war. The school is situated close to a railway line. The dormitory was bombed during WWII and some of the girls and nuns were killed. Someone was at the reunion who was a pupil at the time and she remembers a mother arriving and taking her daughter away from the school just before. The mother told the nuns that she had had a dream about the school being bombed. The old girls discussed this and decided that the mother had probably been warned by resistance members – perhaps!

The lesson

I think most of us have done this when we were small: Teaching teddies, dolls and even little sisters (if I could get them to sit still for long enough). Looking back on those games, I realize that half of the fun was in preparing the game; making little copy booklets, finding pencils for everyone, writing out the lesson on the blackboard….

Postcards from the UK

Occasionally we buy postcards when we’re in the UK. Here are a couple of birthday postcards we found last year.

Happy Easter!

I wish you a very Happy Easter with lots of chocolate. It’s been a long winter so let’s hope that this weekend is a turning point for the weather.

Bessé-les-Echelles

I think that this postcard is the photographer’s idea of a joke. There is no such place as Bessé-les-Echelles (Echelle = ladder), the village is called Bessé-sur-Braye. Each house has a ladder leading to the upper window. I wonder why. Were the houses built without stairs to the upper floor? I looked around on Google earth and although I found some houses of similar architecture; I didn’t find this particular row.

Raphael Tuck and Sons

In 1866, Raphael Tuck and Sons started printing pictures and greeting cards in London. In 1893 Queen Victoria granted the firm the Royal Warrant of Appointment, which was continued by future sovereigns. Their first postcards were produced in 1900.

They produced many sets of illustrated postcards by notable artists of the time. Including sets of their famous “Oilette” postcards; some of which are textured to look and feel as if they have been painted in oils. I’ve written about Tuck’s postcards in the past.

These two postcards, illustrated by B Cobbe and posted around 1907, were published as part of a set by the Parisian branch of the company.

An advertisment

For a furniture depot in Bordeaux.  I wonder why they chose this picture as an illustration.  Perhaps their chairs are especially comfortable?

Merry Christmas!

Portraits

Two portraits of a little girl.  I can't read the dates on the postmark but my guess is between 1905 to 1913.

November 11th

Searching through postcard images on my computer for today 11th November I found plenty: Pictures of soldiers, pictures of ruins, pictures of cannons, pictures of battlefields, pictures of graves… Here are just a few:

Soldiers dream
 I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears;
And caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts;
And buckled with a smile all Mausers and Colts;
And rusted every bayonet with His tears.

Wilfred Owen

I'd keep these!

If I had the choice, this is a pair of postcards that I would keep for myself. I love the way in which they've been coloured. Such a pretty little girl too.

Posted before 1900

Two postcards from Paris posted before 1900. There aren’t many postcards that have survived this long.

The Moulin Rouge opened in 1889, just 10 years before this postcard was sent. The second postcard of  Les Invalides was posted in 1898.

Celluloid postcards

Four celluloid fantasy postcards. These are quite common, as objects made from celluloid were fashionable for a while. They seem to have been quite versatile. Here we see gold printing, collage, glitter, scalloped edges and the card in the bottom righthand corner looks to be very skillfully hand painted.

Celluloid is considered as the first plastic and was widely used as an ivory replacement. It was used in the film industry until replaced by acetate films in the 1950s. Table Tennis balls are made of celluloid!

Vincent goes to Summer Camp

The title of the card is; "Nothing will stop these boys from Pine Island Camp"

I imagine that Vincent wrote to his parents in the early 60s. He hasn’t put the date on his card. He’s enjoying himself a lot in the Island, despite not speaking English very well. He’s managing to get by and anyway there are plenty of sports to join in with.

Pine Island Camp in Belgrade Lakes, Maine is still running and Vincent would have been in the care of the family of the present director who was a child at the time. The camp for boys aged 9 to 15, is over 100 years old and has been run by the same family since the beginning.

This is one of my favourite parts of my job; finding out about a postcard. I found the Pine Island Camp website and really enjoyed my visit. My boys are grown up now; I think they would have enjoyed themselves there too.

The Old Curiosity Shop

Not my favourite Dickens’s novel; I felt like strangling the Grandfather throughout the book. However it does include one of the best descriptions of life in an industrial town written at the time.

Postcards of the shop are quite common, but this one is slightly different. Can you see the policeman standing to the left of the shop?

The shop is probably one of the oldest shops in Central London. It was made from wood from old ships and survived the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Café des Tribunaux

These two pictures were taken about 100 years apart. The Café des Tribunaux is in Dieppe in Normandy.

The up to date image comes from Google Earth.

Children paddling on the beach

In 1903 little children timidly enjoy the waves, the girls careful not to get their summer dresses wet. I wonder what happened to them as they grew up. They could have lived through two world wars.

A real gem!

We went to a auction in Bordeaux last Friday. It was a really good day. We managed to get some good lots and amongst the postcards was this one. There were two postcards made of the artist, Alfred Renaudin, at work on the banks of the river Moselle in the Lorraine region of France.

This is the rarer of the two. Alfred Renaudin (1866 – 1944) was a French landscape painter who was most active between the wars although this postcard was sent in 1905.

I looked on the internet to see if I could find the final painting, nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it’s in a private collection.

A stroll by the beach

Around 115 years ago Royan would have looked like this. Most of it was destroyed by the allies in WWII. I can’t help wondering if the ladies talking their walk would have been affected by the train passing so close just above them. It would have been very noisy, to say the least.

Happy Easter

Hot on the heels of St Valentine's day comes Easter.  Where does the time go?