Plucky Girls

Was childhood ever like this:

"I've some special shopping to do, this morning, my dear," she announced, with quite a sparkle in her fine dark eyes, "It is cook's 'pantry day'. Of course she should have a kitchen maid, but young girls are so difficult to get these days."

"I vote we get hold of her this morning and ask her to be a sport. There are time when I think I'd like to be friends."

After that, Miss Merivale gave them a lesson on tying knots with lengths of rope."

"Would you believe it!" Miss Fraser began. "As I went into the needlework room, I met a strange young woman sneaking out of it and I fortunately had the presence of mind to grab her. It appears that she borrowed your frock, Nancy. She's a daughter of one of our charladies!"

"Oh Ruth, you were a sport to me this afternoon!" she exclaimed. And, "I hope Miss Baxter was impressed by your frock."

"Yes they are very tight Pam," explained Mr Katters. "I want you to think of these clothes as a second skin. You'll soon get used to them and one day, you might be jolly glad that you had them on."

Edwardians

Two days ago, hidden in a box of spore-infested reprints of Dickens novels, we found a small album of photographs from the Edwardian era. The photos were in poor condition: badly faded, scratched and covered in marks, but I hoped that I might be able to retrieve some of the ghost-like images from oblivion with the help of Photoshop.

I'm quite please with the result. Here is the original image:

And here's the restored version:

It's not bad. I wish I that had the time to spend hours lovingly restoring each photo, but this is the best I can do at the moment.

As usual, none of the photos are accompanied by any names, places or dates, but I'm pretty sure that I can place them within the Edwardian era rather than the Victorian.

Here's the evidence :


It's not conclusive, but from the brief amount of research I've put into this post (i.e. 10 minutes), the vehicles make it unlikely that these pictures were taken before 1901.

The following photos have a beguiling innocence about them that belie the dark social and political uncurrents of the times. As has been mentioned before, there's something terribly poignant about the image of a smiling Edwardian boy, unaware of what's in store for his generation in a few years time.

(Note the telephone line and gasworks in the background)

(The original image was so badly faded, I almost threw it away. I'm glad that I didn't)

I love this image, with the bare trees and the woman's reflection in the water. Here is a close-up:

It's incredibly satisfying to be able to rescue these images and give them a whole new lease of life on the internet. They may just be family snapshots, but they give a tantalising glimpse into a world that, superficially, seemed at ease with itself, but was actually about to change beyond all recognition.

Within a mere 20 years, the smiling young boy in the fourth photo would be living (if he survived the trenches) in the age of Freud, Vorticism, Webern, Freud, Mrs Dalloway, Ulysses and jazz.

Social Mobility

I was recently chatting to someone at work and we got onto the subject of her degree course at Sussex University, which she really enjoyed. However, she did experience one spooky moment during a lecture on postwar urban poverty.

It began innocuously enough with an introductory talk, followed by a slide show of grim, black and white scenes of urban deprivation. My colleague was relaxing in her chair, absorbed by the images being beamed by the projector.

Suddenly, to her horror, a picture appeared on the wall of her mother dragging a mattress down a street. The lecturer calmly deconstructed the image, explaining its context and meaning, unaware that the woman's daughter was sitting a few feet away from him.

What a shining example of social mobility.

Apparently, the lecturer was unaware of the photo's true origins. It was taken by my colleague's aunt, who threatened to thump her younger sister unless she posed for the picture with a mattress. The aunt, who grew up on a grim council estate, started to make a name for herself as a photographer, but inexplicably gave it up after a year.

Sadly I don't have a copy of the image with the mattress, but here is another striking photo, featuring my colleague's uncle on the right:

Clarke Hutton's Australia

As I have written before, I used to assume that Google was some sort of magical portal to the sum total of human knowledge. However, when I began my current job, I realised how limited the internet really was.

Clarke Hutton is a perfect example of this. Google his name and you will find a pitifully small number of articles, including this post, which I wrote in October. He was a highly-respected illustrator in his day - the middle of the 20th century - but appears to have been almost completely forgotten.

Last week I discovered a 1950s children's history of Australia, which was illustrated by Hutton. I have no idea if he ever went there.

Hutton's illustrations are more conventional than the ones in his 'Picture History of Britain'. Perhaps that's because the contemporary aesthetic had changed and the angular, neo-Modernist style was no longer in fashion. But even Clarke Hutton, at his most watered-down and conventional, has a quality that demands attention:











Apparently there are several titles available with Hutton illustrations, so I'll try to post some more in the near future.