Bridge Postcards of 2023

We begin the annual round up with less familiar views of London’s Tower Bridge followed by a pair of medieval-themed examples from Germany (Bonn and Berlin). The double-decker arched viaduct at   makes a splendid sight.  A pair of bucolic scenes from the Peak District (Monsal Dale and Hathersage) follow - I’ve a soft spot for Hathersage having first seen it from the top deck front seat of a Sheffield City bus in 1978 that had just made a spectacular winding descent from the viewpoint known as Surprise View that very much lives up to its name.  Next is a distant view of Saltash and the river Tamar followed by much steelwork on a single span railway bridge in Costa Rica. There are more rail bridges from Riga, Jutland, Porto, Florida and Texas.

 

Mother of Parliaments

It’s our very own National Theatre of Cruelty, an antiquated forum of futility.  On one side the benches are occupied by the defenders of property rights and privilege, drawn from the products of private education and Oxbridge, supported by subaltern recruits from the lower orders attracted by the prospect of personal enrichment and all too happy to identify with the interests of their social superiors.  All of which enables them to operate in a culture of impunity. Opposite them is a motley assortment of lost causes including sundry nationalists, an official opposition with a nominal commitment to social justice, minority parties and some empty spaces that the most intransigent of nationalists refuse to occupy.  Bewigged courtiers in pantomime costume strut back and forth bearing fundamentally useless objects of veneration without which proceedings cannot go ahead.  

Teams of scribes and record keepers toil away in the orchestra pit while the Remembrancer lurks in the under gallery, poised to intervene should anything arise that is less than favourable to the interests of the City of London. (The Wikipedia description of this shady character is at such great pains to point out how little influence he has, that you may wonder why he exists at all.)  The chamber has been designed to facilitate the exchange of insults and though much time is devoted to this, it’s an offence of the utmost gravity to accuse another member of lying.  Otherwise accountability is nugatory, members may attend as little as they wish without sanction and their degree of participation and voting is for them to decide.  As a general rule the greater their majority, the poorer the service offered to constituents leaving them well placed to take on additional, often better paid jobs.  These tend to be in the legal profession, in business and financial services (in an advisory capacity) or as well rewarded gobshites on GB News. There is no inspectorate of MPs and no requirement to report their activities to constituents.

Supporters of these anachronisms loudly proclaim that they are what makes Parliament so unique and special while remaining silent on the point that they act as enforcers of the status quo, inhibiting any change that might result in wealth redistribution or rebalance the existing power structure.  Even the architecture has a part to play - Barry and Pugin’s Gothic Revival extravaganza invokes the England of stately homes, medieval Oxbridge colleges and ancient private schools - a Hogwarts orgy of ornamentation entirely familiar to members who have grown up with it but disconcerting and intimidating to those of more humble origins for whom the message is “this place is not for you”. Every attempt to update facilities and procedures fails in the face of furious opposition and an exorbitant refurbishment plan is currently stalled while ongoing repairs are costing the taxpayer £2 million a week.  There’s an almost irresistible impulse in British public life to employ delay as an avoidance strategy (contaminated blood scandal, Grenfell, Hillsborough, Post Office/Fujitsu IT scandal) so it seems inevitable that Parliament itself should fall victim to institutional procrastination.  In the spirit of doing more with less (so often commended by government), a budget solution would be a repurposed fulfilment centre in the Northumbria town of Haltwhistle, the geographic centre of the UK.  Appleby Parva in Leicestershire is the centre of population in the UK and suggests an alternative location.  Ancillary services and committee rooms could be housed in site offices and Portakabins which would have the merit of giving parliamentarians a taste of the working conditions enjoyed by millions of their constituents.  Compulsory annual reports to constituents could include attendance, voting and speaking record, donations received and freebies, income earned from additional occupations, assistance to constituents, links to lobby groups and details of overseas jollies. A little bit of accountability and transparency, could be simply posted online once a year - it’s never going to happen.

Walt Disney’s Family Album (1937)

It’s impossible to over estimate the extent to which the emotional life of every child exposed to the output of the Disney Corporation is formed and shaped to create an insatiable demand for the irresistible embrace of the Disney Universe. For almost a century, children have been at the centre of what has grown into a global grooming project as an entertainment portfolio that began with the moving image has expanded to include mass merchandising, retail stores, theme parks and dedicated streaming services.  There’s an acute understanding of the juvenile appetite for sentiment and spectacle layered over eternal themes of sibling rivalry, jealousy, cruelty, suffering and redemption.  Every feature is attached to a bulging package of ancillaries - models, dolls, princess costumes, soundtracks, illustrated books, sticker collections, action figures, backpacks, board games, stationery and customised clothing - entirely designed to separate fools from their money. It’s a massive corporate presence that generates enormous revenue streams and yet, despite this long performative diatribe, two things must be conceded.  To begin, some of the products are undeniably ingenious, amusing, sensitive, compassionate and offer cunningly contrived entertainment that can be appreciated on many levels, enough to undermine the most curmudgeonly resistance.  And secondly, with very little effort, the company has roused the intemperate fury of the ineffable Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, triggering a feud that is currently grinding its way through the US legal system.

All this was a long time in the future when this book was published in 1937.  The colour illustrations were supplied in the form of stickers to be pasted in the book by the young reader. The star of the book was only 9 years old but the process of brand characterisation was well underway. Disney’s first full length feature (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) released at the end of 1937 marked the emergence of Disney as a major studio, even so, dreams of future world domination would have seemed implausible in those early days. But it was the end of the Disney age of innocence and a sign of what was to come.

 

T E North on the High Seas

The book illustrations of T E North were featured here a few months ago when we posted about an aviation picture book (Airways) published in 1939.  Notable for compositional originality and precision drawing, the qualities displayed in Airways faded in his post-war output in line with contemporary trends.  After 6 years of war during which he served in the RAF, rebuilding his career and adapting to a much changed commercial situation would have been difficult. The services of an assiduous agent would have been essential and it may have been an agent who spotted his affinity for transport subjects and marketed his skills to publishers. Appropriately for an artist born and bred in Hull this example is a book of maritime illustrations for young people. Atmospheric effects predominate, brought to life by more gestural brushwork and a dramatically intensified colour palette.  Perhaps the romance of the age of the great ocean liners and the cargo ship demanded a more vigorous approach.  Recent collective memory of war fought at sea and the prestige invested in building ever larger and more luxurious liners fixed all things maritime firmly in the mid-century popular imagination in a way that’s inconceivable today.  The image of the ship’s captain was a figure of steely resolve, commanding the loyalty of the crew in the face of danger from the elemental terrors of hostile seas. Young readers could be enthralled by the exotic network of international shipping, at the centre of which they were assured, Britain stood supreme and unchallenged - a supremacy that evaporated at breathtaking speed over the next decade as the nation first decolonised and later de-industrialised. 

 

Motoring Celebrities

Glaswegian tea tycoon, Sir Thomas Lipton would have been in his fifties when the camera captured him here - he worked hard to cut a dashing figure in public, active in the sports of yachting and sailing. In his youth he spent several years in the US and the commercial spirit he absorbed enabled him to amass a great fortune in the grocery and tea trades.  Investment in publicity was the key to his success. The Lipton business has been featured here in 2007 and 2020.

The first 14 years of the 20th. century were golden times for both the motor car and the picture postcard. While the motor car was the province of the rich, the postcard was cheap enough to be affordable to almost everyone.  An embryonic consumer society expanded across the nation until the outbreak of war in 1914.  When peace returned in 1918 the postcard went into steady decline but motoring would go on to dominate the next hundred years as the favoured means of transport.  Celebrity culture was in its infancy, mostly populated by military heroes, cricketers, footballers and stars of the music hall and theatre.  Inevitably they came together on the postcard and celebrities self importantly posed at the wheel of an automobile made a popular subject.

The Dare sisters (Zena and Phyllis, born in Chelsea and daughters of a divorce clerk) were truly Made in SW3 Edwardian celebrities and though long forgotten today their maidenly faces peered coyly out of many a picture postcard in their day.  More than 1,500 examples of Zena alone are listed on eBay at the time of writing.  The two sisters were 12 and 9 respectively when they made their stage debuts in a Christmas pantomime in December 1899.  Under the guidance of the ultra-successful actor-manager, playwright, producer and impresario, Seymour Hicks, they would grace the London stage in a succession of dramas, comedies and musicals for decades.

Sybil Arundale was a child performer in the music hall and graduated to Shakespeare and Ibsen parts in the theatre. Cinema and TV followed - she died in 1965.  Gaynor Rowlands’s career as a dancer was curtailed at the age of 23 when she died in 1906 during an operation for appendicitis. 

Constance Collier made the transition from the London stage to Hollywood where she found work in silent movies and went on to become a leading voice coach in the late twenties with the advent of the talkies.  In 1948 she was cast in Hitchcock’s Rope as Mrs. Atwater and her star shines on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  Her companion, Lettice Fairfax was a stage actress specialising in musical comedy - her career seemed to stall in 1925 and she died in 1948.

 

Postcard of the Day No. 113, Sutton Bridge

It seems the arrival of the camera was anticipated since the signalman has brought his daughters along to be part of the photograph. Father is stood behind them as they pose on the balcony.  Another railway employee stands in the doorway to the signal box, sporting a watch and chain.  In the distance the operator of the swing bridge has stepped out of the control cabin to be included in the picture.  All is unusually pristine and crisp - from the timber fencing to the signal gantries via the rivets on the bridge. The track work and the signal cabling is in immaculate condition.

This is the Cross Keys Swing Bridge, an east-west crossing of the River Nene at the Lincolnshire town of Sutton Bridge as photographed from the station. When it opened in 1897, one span served as a roadway while the other was used for railway traffic by the Midland and Great Northern Railway connecting East Anglia with the Midlands and Northern England, mainly for the transport of coal and it remained that way until the railway closed in 1965. The spans are only wide enough for one-way operation and two signal boxes were required to safely filter the rail traffic into a single track. Power supply for moving the bridge was initially provided by two adapted locomotive boilers installed by Armstrong, Whitworth. In latter years electric motors did the job. Commercial shipping bound for Wisbech and leisure craft still pass and the bridge remains in occasional use. Both the bridge and the Engine House (not visible in the postcard) are Grade II* listed by Historic England. 

Heywood Sumner