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.