Postcard of the Day No. 115, Saintes, Passarelle du Passage à Niveau

Saintes is a small town in Charente-Maritime on the railway linking La Rochelle with Bordeaux. A local postcard photographer has succumbed to the charms of robust displays of structural steel near the town station and, on a gloomy winter day, aimed a camera at the footbridge and level crossing that both join and separate the two halves of the town. For some this would have been seen as a modern intrusion into a traditional townscape, for others it was a minor wonder of the age. A trio of curious youngsters, with wheelbarrow and a passing facteur, with bicycle, have paused to witness what happens. In a drowsy town, any break with routine is welcomed. Especially if there's a chance of seeing their likenesses in print. The original photographic plate would have recorded much more detailed visual information than the limitations of the printed card would permit, but the enlarged details with all their imperfections have a charm of their own.

 

Postcard of the Day No. 112, Starcross

Captain George Peacock was born in 1805 into a naval family in Exmouth. He served in the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy as well as pursuing a career as a surveyor and inventor.  In 1831-32 when sailing in the Royal Navy in South America he surveyed some potential  routes for a future Panama Canal.  The value of his pioneering work was recognised by de Lesseps 50 years later when the canal was finally constructed.  Four years later he surveyed the Corinth Isthmus and proposed a route for a canal, for which he was, many decades later, honoured by the Greek sovereign. By 1840 he was sailing with the Pacific Steam Navigation Company in South America for whose benefit he set about developing business opportunities. In Chile he established the first coal mine in the continent, after which he explored nitrates in Chile and located guano deposits in Peru.  In 1841 he supervised the construction of the first railway on the west coast of South America. Inventions were many and various, including an improved screw propellor for steamships, a desalination treatment for sea water on board ship, an early form of life jacket and anti-fouling paint for the protection of iron hulled ships.

Not content with all this, after retirement to Starcross on the Exe Estuary he designed and built the Swan of the Exe in the 1860s, a 10 berth sailing yacht in the form of a swan, equipped with two large wings that served as sails. Internal fixtures and fittings were said to be comparable with those in a First Class railway carriage. Four small swan-shaped launches were built, one of which, known as Cygnet was employed to ferry passengers from the shore to the yacht and can be seen in these postcards.  This eccentric vessel became a celebrity in the Exe Estuary and was written up in the press.  By the time these postcards were on sale the Peacock Swan was over 50 years old and in the care of his descendants.  There’s a mass of conflicting information about its ultimate fate, some witnesses claim to have seen it afloat in the 1930s after which it seems to have become unseaworthy and downgraded to the status of garden ornament. Cygnet did survive and is now on display at the Museum of Topsham on the opposite bank of the Exe.  Artist and designer Enid Marx (1902-98) made a colour linocut of the Starcross swans in 1936 that can be seen by following this link.

Postcard of the Day No. 88 - Cox’s Walk, Sydenham Hill Wood

Back in 2012 we posted about a footbridge in Merton – this is another South London footbridge with a story attached. In 1870-71 Camille Pissarro lived in the Norwood/Crystal Palace area to escape the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. Pissarro found plenty of subjects for painting within a few miles of his temporary home and his easel was set up on this footbridge on Cox’s Walk for the painting of Lordship Lane Station in the collection of the Courtauld Institute. The Courtauld painting is misleadingly titled Penge Station, Upper Norwood and dated 1871. Given that Pissarro returned to Paris in June 1871 we can assume the painting was done in the Spring of that year. Railway subjects were attractive to Pissarro, who, like his colleague Monet, had an interest in reflecting contemporary life in his work. It was the Crystal Palace and South London Junction railway, opened in 1865 that ran through Cox’s Woods. Known as the high-level railway to Crystal Palace, it closed in 1954.

A few miles away on Denmark Hill, John Ruskin was preoccupied with his doomed and protracted courtship of Rose La Touche and the plans for the Ruskin School of Drawing shortly to open in Oxford. Ruskin professed undying hatred of the modern world and placed railways near the top of his long list of most-abominated. From his study he wrote wistfully of the pleasing woodland vistas and pastoral strolls forever ruined by the intrusion of the London to Folkestone railway line. It was his misfortune to live through the decades when the Great North Woods that once stretched from Deptford to Selhurst largely disappeared under suburban sprawl. Sydenham Hill Wood is the largest remaining area of this lost woodland. But even Ruskin was not entirely unmoved by the power of engineering technology and once confessed the “amazed awe and crushed humility” he experienced at the sight of a locomotive “taking its breath at a railway station”.