Children doing what children do

These children are busy building sandcastles on the shore. It doesn’t matter where you go, or indeed when, there is always construction going on if there are children (and adults too!) on a beach. I hope that they finished before the tide came in.

Time for a snack

Four happy rabbits with fresh carrots to eat. These four date from around 1901 when the postcard was sent.

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?