Michelin in America

Marius Rossillon (1867-1946) created the rotund Michelin brand character, Bibendum in 1898, the same year that the French tyre manufacturer began selling its products in the USA. Rossillon was a professional cartoonist who signed his work with the pseudonym O’Galop. In 1911, O’Galop’s images of Bibendum would famously adorn the London HQ of Michelin, rendered in stained glass. These examples of advertising to an American audience come from 1920 by which time Bibendum had become more animated - more jovial, less sinister, no longer a deflated armadillo.  We are introduced to Bibendum as a man of the people, wrapping a protective arm around a snappily dressed customer, towering over a roadside billboard with a cigar between his lips or gazing benignly from on high as vehicles queue outside a Michelin workshop.  Elsewhere the product occupies centre stage while Bibendum, in miniature form, does a lot of gesturing and pointing. The overriding priority was that the public should accept Bibendum as an all-American and never mistake him for a cheese-eating surrender-monkey.  All Michelin advertising in 1920s America was produced in-house by locally recruited advertising managers. Some vintage postcards follow.  First is Bibendum en Famille on parade at the Nice Carnival followed by a view of the original Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand. After this is a hand-drawn card showing Bibendum en avion, taking part in an aerial targeting contest organised by the Michelin company in 1911 to support a campaign to prepare for future conflict. Last is a card and pamphlet featuring Michelin’s attempt to enter the railway market in 1933 with a diesel powered railcar that ran on rubber tyres.

Follow this link for a 2008 post about the splendid Michelin Building in London’s Fulham Road.

 

Postcard of the Day No. 116, Observation Car, San Antonio, Texas

The world’s first commercial electric railway opened in 1881 at Lichterfelde in Berlin.  This marked the end of the era of horse drawn street trolleys and over the following 25 years electrically powered streetcars dominated the American streetscene. When this image was recorded in the early 1900s, San Antonio was a city of 53,000 - today’s population is 1.5 million.  Streetcar routes were instrumental in shaping the growing city and land values soared along all new routes. Car number 211 is an Observation vehicle operating a special service - possibly a sightseeing excursion or a trip to a sporting event. Formalities of dress have been conscientiously followed, the staff being especially well turned out. Hats are universally worn in the full glare of a Texas sun. Other than the Steampunk splendour of the ornate vehicle, two details stand out. One being the casual hand that rests on the shoulder of a colleague, the other being the louche air of the couple on the extreme left who show no interest in boarding the vehicle. Streetcars came to be regarded as troublingly slow, a hindrance to other road users and haunted by ‘unsavoury’ passengers. Views that were constantly amplified by Big Oil in a nationwide campaign to switch to diesel powered buses. When streetcars were retired from the city streets in 1933, San Antonio was the largest city in the US to be dependent on buses, presumably cleansed of ‘unsavoury’ elements.

 

Bovril Charity Competion 1923

This contest was announced in the Christmas 1923 edition of “The Graphic” magazine - a publication similar in page size and contents to the “Illustrated London News”. The set of 16 Bovril posters in thumbnails comes from the cover of “The History of Bovril Advertising”. This was an undated in-house production (no ISBN) issued in about 1970. The book tells us that the aim of the contest, (which required a donation of £5, equivalent to £13.50 in today’s money to enter), was to rank the first 12 out of 16 examples in order of popularity. For prize winners, the sums were impressive - out of a total of £30,000 (£1.6 million today) prize money, £12,000 (£648,000 today) went to the overall winner. The equivalent of £3.8 million was donated to hospital charities.

Bovril’s viscous charms may hold little attraction for the modern consumer but its distinctive red labels on black jars can still be glimpsed on the lower supermarket shelves but the days when it was one of the most intensively advertised products will not be returning. It began life as a Victorian product in an era when anything new in the marketplace had to fight hard for attention.  Outdoor advertising was virtually unregulated and popular magazines catering to an increasingly literate public, swelled their revenues with pages and pages of implausible and outlandish claims that largely went unchallenged - consumer protection was not a thing. Relentless publicity campaigns put the Bovril name into the public eye at every opportunity with constant appeals to patriotic fervour while building a strong association with good health and physical strength. In 1893 its factory manager, S H Benson, left to start his own advertising agency with Bovril as his first client. It would go on to be one of the most successful British agencies of the 20th. century until it was acquired by WPP in 1989. Two examples of Victorian advertising are at the end of the post.

More on Bovril can be seen at Prevents That Sinking Feeling (2007) and British to the Backbone (2017).

 

Industrial Sheffield at Kelham Island

The city of Sheffield had a great industrial economy based around steel, heavy engineering, cutlery and tool making that declined in the post-war era due to increased competition from Europe and Japan - it all but expired in the 1980s as Thatcher-led deindustrialisation took effect.  Free market fanatics inspired and applauded the project, taking inordinate pride in following up with a policy of having no economic planning of any sort over the following decades. The local authority-run, free admission museum at Kelham Island does an excellent job explaining and illustrating the scale of steel and engineering enterprise in the days when it was known internationally as “Steel City”.

The museum entrance is dramatically marked by the towering presence of the UK's last working Bessemer Converter used by British Steel until 1974. Invented in 1856 by Henry Bessemer for the conversion of iron into steel at a substantially lower price than hitherto. The first working examples were installed at Bessemer’s works in Sheffield in 1858. At the centre of the museum is the imposing River Don Engine - built at the John Brown Atlas Works (Sheffield Brightside) in 1904, a 3-cylinder 12,000hp steam engine designed to power the process  of armour plating by rolling steel backward and forwards in rapid succession. Hence the ability to reverse the driving wheel in an instant, which is demonstrated in a two minute gas-powered firing twice a day. It remained in use into the 1970s at British Steel River Don works before removal to the museum site in 1978. Described as the most powerful steam engine operational in Europe and still an awe-inspiring sound and motion experience! Watch the brief video at the end of the post to get a flavour.

Other moving exhibits include an impressive Crossley Gas Engine built in 1915, once employed in a rolling mill in Penistone - now powered by electricity for demonstration purpose. Crossley Brothers was formed in Manchester in 1867, building pumps and presses. Their most successful development was  building 4 cylinder gas engines. Enemies of the demon drink, they steadfastly refused to do business with breweries. In the upper gallery there’s a display of locally built Sheffield-Simplex cars - this business was active from 1907 to 1920.  Despite a reputation for innovation and experimentation, the company never broke through to the mass market and left little trace apart from these examples.  On the ground floor is a recreation of a Victorian street occupied by the premises of master cutlers at least one of whom is still working. The cutlery trade is represented by period examples of lavish displays of bladed items, cutlery and hand tools.

Stored alongside the museum car park is a 1951 built Diesel Electric 0-4-0 shunting locomotive designed for internal use at the Templeborough Steel Works in Rotherham. Constructed at the Sheffield works of the Yorkshire Engine Co. It has languished here since at least 2005 and obviously deserves a better fate but most local authority museums lack the resources to restore and display items like this. Sheffield native and Reform Party supporter, Mr. Christopher Harborne found £5 million pounds to slip into Nigel Farage's already well stuffed pocket. It will never happen but would be good if he could find some spare cash to help out the museum service in his old home town. It’s impressive that the city museum service still occupies a key position in cultural life in a time when resources have never been under greater pressure.

 

Natural Peas in Crosspool

In 2024 a Ghost Sign was revealed in the Sheffield suburb of Crosspool when a large advertising billboard was removed from a gable end at the neighbourhood shopping centre. It was a much faded version of what can be seen here.  A story of local reaction unfolded in the local press - elderly residents recalled seeing the original sign in their youth. As an exercise in graphic design it has to be said it’s very basic. But, perhaps its very simplicity spoke to the omnipresent popular yearning for  simpler times and a campaign to see it reinstated was widely supported. A year later the sign was restored to its former self, modestly promoting the virtues of tinned processed peas to the wider world. Follow this link to see how it was achieved. Not everyone was delighted, some felt it should have been preserved in its damaged condition, maintaining its identity as a Ghost Sign.  Others believed the sign had little merit and preferred to see the entire gable end as a potential space for Street Art. The last photo features the frequently elusive 51 bus, behind which the billboard can be seen as it was in 2007.

 

Harrogate - the wider picture

The invention of panoramic postcards was a nice but impractical idea. Much effort went into producing often genuinely startling wide angle views but the cards themselves, being twice the width of every other postcard, were exceptionally vulnerable and few arrived at their destination without sustaining some damage. Despite this the hunger for novelty drove their production and most surviving examples were retained as souvenirs. Many were then folded for convenience in storage which often, as in this example from the prosperous Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate, led to division into two sections. Urban scenes like this are relatively unusual but at their best can record a vast amount of period detail.  The back of this card identifies it as a “Panoramicard” printed and sold by the foremost High Street newsagent of the day, WH Smith, whose Harrogate shop dominates the left side.  Opposite is the Exchange Public House and Billiard Rooms adorned with hand painted signage promoting itself equally to adherents of Temperance and consumers of Malt whisky and Guinness stout.  WH Smith still exists in much reduced form having retreated in 2025 to train stations, airports and motorway services after selling off its High Street stores to private equity. They now operate under the undistinguished name of TGJones.

 

Eric Fraser - the Masher and the Bathing Belle

It’s the turn of the egregious Masher and the chaste Bathing Belle today. Perennially camera shy, the Masher was a popular subject for cartoonists in magazines like Punch and Passing Show who made fun of his over estimation of his appeal to the opposite sex. Sensing his attempt to transcend the barriers of class, they sneered at his sartorial efforts to pass himself off as a dandy. Here he is portrayed as a weedy cigar-smoking weakling leading a trio of decorous innocents into dangerous waters where aquatic frolics could soon go wrong. In the second image his roving eye directs his male gaze on to the most conspicuous  unattached females. The British comic postcard was a popular subject for collectors, though I suspect the numbers are rapidly dwindling. I find them hard to take thanks to the combination of clumsy drawing and coy innuendo.

Images of Bathing Belles are ambiguous figures, composed to project mild titillation while  embodying maidenly virtues. Victorian anxieties around uncontrollable passions triggered by glimpses of female flesh inspired a wide range of modesty-preserving costumes for the female swimmer. On postcards their expressions often suggest deep discomfort with the effort of flirtation. After the Great War attitudes and fashions changed to favour female exposure over concealment and postcards uneasily reflected that, whilst trying to avoid offending older generations who held to their puritan instincts. Many modern reproductions of Victorian swimwear can be found on eBay - perfect if you’re planning a John Ruskin-themed beach party.