By Coach to France 1938

This is from a holiday scrapbook recording a coach trip to France and Switzerland in May 1938. Luggage labels mark the route taken. The happy travellers can be seen, lined up for a photograph en route - the group leader is in the centre - he is described as a professor of English from the Sorbonne, a fluent linguist and “possessed of a first class knowledge of the history of France”. Missing is the photographer and chronicler of the trip. He’s an articulate observer of rural life and the natural world. When recording his impressions of human behaviour, he favours a sardonic tone that shades into pomposity and, on occasion, downright misanthropy, nowhere more so than when commenting on the physical imperfections of the ageing dowagers of Aix les Bains at their leisure in the casino. Orléans is a source of irritation - constant reminders of England’s defeat at the hands of Jeanne d’Arc overshadow the pleasure of a superb lunch at the Grand Hotel d’Aignan. Despite being a “port city”, Bordeaux meets with approval. Half the hotels in Biarritz are closed due the Spanish Civil War. At the Hotel de France in Pau they were served with the “finest lunch in all France”. The scale and mass of the fortified city of Carcassonne “impressed itself in detail more permanently upon our recollection than any other place we visited”. Nightingale song is heard in Avignon but Provence is too hot for comfort. In Geneva there was “a tablet to the memory of Woodrow Wilson, the man who fashioned the boat of peace and wouldn’t row”. Swiss pluralism is commended thus, “Happy is the state which has the genius to keep the demon of racial intolerance at arm’s length”. There’s an opportunity to do some snowballing in the heights of the Jura but all too soon the coach is back at Calais after overnight stops in Vittel and Amiens. A three hour crossing to Dover in storm force winds followed by a traffic jam in Kent concluded the trip and the participants went their separate ways with scarcely a mumbled farewell.

Ten years of this sort of thing

Today is 10 years since the first post on this blog. The longevity comes as a surprise – most such ventures soon wither away. The next 10 years, actuarially speaking, are more problematic. But as long as it’s not a tedious chore, we carry on. To mark the occasion today’s images are a selection of analogue scrapbook pages, the kind of activity that used to occupy me until this space offered a place for digital scrapbooking. Somewhere to share imagery that may not be of universal interest but for which there is a minority audience. Only fate will tell if it lasts another 10 years but for now, it trundles on.

Scrapbook 1929

For many years I have been acquiring vintage scrapbooks whenever the opportunity arose. There are now about 25 examples on my shelves. They fall into two categories – the specialist, devoted to a single subject such as travel, fashion, dogs, flowers and gardens, trains, cars or cartoon strips, and the generalist, almost always a varied selection of imagery guided by a female sensibility. A hundred years ago compiling scrapbooks was a respectable occupation for young ladies of leisure whose prosperous parents encouraged any time consuming activity that might offer distraction. Wartime scrapbooks were a popular way of recording the progress of the conflict but after 1945 the scrapbook went into sharp decline – never quite disappearing but of marginal interest. The recent revival of interest is curious but perhaps it meets a need for something physical and tangible as opposed to digital. What you see online suggests that for many participants it’s a way of recording a visual diary. At its most basic it seems to be no more than tastefully rearranging pre-purchased materials. 

This example is the work of a child at the end of the 1920s – female and from a good home with a ready supply of printed material to be snipped and pasted. The pages are organised thematically – floral display, party food, holidays, Christmas, wild life, plus some gentlemen’s pursuits - hunting with dogs and tobacco products. Illustrations by Lawson Wood, Beatrix Potter and Harry Rountree can be seen alongside trade cards from Typhoo Tea and Player’s Cigarettes. Some enduring consumer products such as Bird’s Custard and Bovril also feature. Please click on the YouTube link below to view the pages.