Achtung! Postkard!

[martc]

Pretty impressive amphitheatre-type thingy in the background...

 

 

Now recently restored and now "the largest out door theatre in Europe"

[Richard]

 

Two very early postcards from Scotland, a place we never hear anything about nowadays; is it still up there?

 

This was collected in Dundee at 6.45 on the evening of September 10th 1910. Only went as far as the mysterious 'Miss French' in Glasgow to a nice address: c/o Mr Tulloch, St Vincent St, opposite Unitarian Church (no remembering to use Postcode in those days, just a vague indication to point the postie in the right direction):

 

 

Spending the holiday here having a good time J.B. Duncan

 

A very early ppc image of our old friend, the Tay Bridge.

 

 

 

You can see the sites of three serious train crashes from where this picture was taken. The Tay bridge obviously, as you can see from the stumps of the original bridge, Wormit and Invergowrie.

[Karmann Ghiaman]

Remind me to avoid the services of Scotrail in the River Tay area...

 

This one from Holland is so fucking weird that I am going to show both sides (since you'd think I was making up a prank message if I didn't. Plus it's typed):

 

 

 

Another world. At first I thought that the 'lambs' really were lambs and that they were on a farm, but as it is clearly some sort of sinister religious community we can only assume that THE LORD HATH SMITTEN HER UNRIGHTEOUS DUGGS, YEA BRETHREN, YE MILK FLOWETH NOT.

 

For fans of John Le Carre, this was sent from what was then West Germany in 1958:

 

 

Reichsbahn Hotel

Stuttgart

 

My Darling,

This card shows the Main Railway Station in Stuttgart and the Hotel in part of the same building just out of sight on the left [Did I say that It was the text message of its day?]. 

 We got here at about 4pm. Air travel may be fast but my word they keep you waiting about! We left Elmdon about 1/2 hour late & London about 3/4 hour late. We stopped at Frankfurt, which is a very busy airport to pass through immigration. (1 hr stop) There was a heatwave on! Its pretty hot here at about 9pm it started to rain and there's a real downpour now & thunder & lightning too!

 All my love, Auf Wiedersehen, Hedley

 

Sent to Mrs Hunnisett (it's true), not in Camberwick Green but now living in Brum. Nowadays this guy would have a waste-of-money i-phone and do updates of his banal adventures on Twitter every twelve minutes. He would have 14 followers, down from a peak of 23.

 

 

St Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna. Never sent, Splitty with roofrack and Beetle beside the coach though!

[carlo]

Wonderful threads

[mercrocker]

This is the stuff I like to collect.......A boring field with a non-descript caravan or two dotted about.    But.....wait.   What's the car?    Only a bloody Crayford W116 S Class!!

Feck me. 

 

Unfortunately the message is more Ford Prefect than Autobahnstormer

 

"Dear Peter and Russell

 

This is the site we are staying on.  Its Very nice.  We watch the rabbits out eating the grass in the evenings.  Love from Nan and Grandad "

 

I can imagine that causing an anxious micro-second when being read out to Peter and Russell by Mummy or Daddy until they realised what it was the rabbits were actually doing....

 

Oh, its Blackmore near Malvern if you need to start hunting down that Crayford....

 

 

 

[AnthonyG]

That Stuttgart railway station hotel is alright, stayed there for a couple of nights when I went to see the Mercedes and Porsche museums in 2010. There was some sort of union rally going on at the time, with lots of whistle blowing for some obscure reason, maybe it is what German workers do instead of going on strike.

[Karmann Ghiaman]

Give us more pay or ve vill blow ze vistles und disturb visiting Englanders in ze hotel, bitte.

 

Down in the Berner Oberland:

 

 

6th Friday

 

I have been thinking of you today going for a drive with May & G.I. [not the May from Top Gear, though he's probably old enough to have been a small child when this was sent]. I hope you had a lovely day like it is here although yesterday Friday was very wet. We had an hr to wait here & are now nearly at Turin. TAKE CARE of yourself. Lots & lots of Love SCRAWL 

 

It was sent to a doctor in Sydenham, but must have been put in an envelope, no stamp. Instead they've rather poignantly written I wrote this but couldn't post it. It also says The train is going very quickly, Bless you! and Please keep this card

 

They were the text messages of their day, oh yes. Early use of 'Take care'. (My favourite was on the big bunch of flowers left outside Kensington Palace which imparted that sensible advice to the recently-deceased Princess a few hours too late.)

 

I have been here (around 1973 I think), but didn't go in since, like Elton in Goodbye Norma Jean (why am I thinking of that?) 'I was just a little kid...':

 

 

'...And 12-year olds aren't allowed to gamble/And so I never did.' Come to think of it, another badly-driven-blonde-beauty-who-had-married-into-royalty-but-was-still-unhappy lived there! What are the chances of that happening twice in the same century? Amazin'. Never sent.

 

More to file under the Jolly Fascist Picture Postcard category:

 

 

It only cost 30 cents to send and seems to be dated 1940, though the brown stamp has Emperor Augustus rather than Duce Mussolini on it. It was sent internally within Italy and is written in squiggly Italian, so can't understand (or even read) the text. Sorry.

 

Same country some decades later:

 

 

SIRMIONE Lake of Garda - Air-view is the English version of the caption. Never sent, but fine crud in the car park.

[Karmann Ghiaman]

It must be very nice to go to Sirmione and eat pineapple on that bridge. I also note that tayne is a superb photographer: basically the opposite in artistic skill to most of the people who took the pictures in these postcards... Thanks for the links.

 

We go to one of the world's many arseholes:

 

 

A view of Crater - ADEN

 

Unfortunately the stamp has been removed and taken the whole of the frank with it, but this was almost certainly sent by a soldier serving there in the early '60s to his nephew:

 

Hello George,

Here is a photo of the town built in the dead volcanoe. Those hills are the walls of the crater, & they go all the way round the town.

 Uncle John.

 

It is right at the bottom of the Arabian peninsular and was an important British base as long as we had Injah  . Once we gave up Injah  , not much point in hanging on to Aden (especially as most modern cargo ships/tankers are far too big to go through the Victorian Suez Canal). But we hung onto Aden till 1967, fighting various local thugs, but especially Nasser's Egyptians up in Yemen (except that we didn't (officially), that's still a secret). Aden got particularly nasty when Harold Wilson foolishly announced the exact day the British would leave: obviously the local terrorists took that information as Open Season against us and each other. Everyone prayed that the wretched volcano would simply go off again, solving the whole problem; but sadly, it never has. When a few brave British people revisit today they find the town frozen in 1967 (cinema posters still advertising Carry On Doctor, Corona ads, Mars Bars at 1/3d, etc) and the desperate inhabitants begging us to come back... And children think History is boring!  Of course being stuck in a British 1967 makes it a Paradise of Shite, but since it's all going off (again) there in Yemen it is tragically too dangerous to go and enjoy all the crud everywhere (safer to stick to Malta & Cyprus).

 

Zooming back up to Switzerland (should have shown this one earlier):

 

 

Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse. Never sent. Presumably a lot more traffic there now dodging in out the trolleybuses...

 

A place I have been to, some years after this card was sent:

 

 

RABAT Sidi Maklouf Square and Hassan Tower

 

It was sent to the Gentile Famiglia Cardani in Milan, but all Tina wrote was Con saluti. How it ended up in a box of 20p postcards in Heanor will remain one of the Greatest Mysteries of All Time. It is, of course, capital of Morocco. They have since built what claims to be 'the World's Largest Mosque' on a sort of platform sticking out into the sea, but it is all fairly dreary.Heard that the town was badly damaged by the same 18th Century earthquake that destroyed Lisbon and they never bothered to put the old buildings back up again. A lot more honking traffic now too. (And those streetlamps look nice in the daytime but probably don't actually give off any light at night.)

 

Horrible card sent to Eastbourne (once, itself, an exciting, sun-drenched holiday destination) from Barbados, 1980:

 

 

Having a lovely time 86o every day. Paradise in one small island. Best wishes to you all Bill & Marie Smith

 

Did they notice that it was posted at 'Worthing P.O.'? It is slightly to the credit of the photographer that he showed black Barbadians enjoying their beach, not sunburnt neo-colonialists, though I bet there are plenty more recent beach postcards from the West Indies with not a local in sight.

[brickwall]

RE: time machine thread.

 

I've decided I would go back in time and have all my family holidays again. Seeing these bring back memories of great times I had as a kid with my family.

[NorfolkNWeigh]

 

I didn't think I was a bus anorak,and no doubt someone will be along to tell us chassis,engine,body,operator and driver, but I'm pretty sure that The National Bus Company didn't come into being until about 1970 and that the white painting of the fleet didn't happen until 72/73. I remember my dad ,who was a Midland Red Motorways Express driver complaining when their coaches got painted white.

 

Anyway what I'm getting at is,I think that the S1 is at least 14 years old, sorry Mr Tayne .

[Skizzer]

Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse. Never sent. Presumably a lot more traffic there now dodging in out the trolleybuses...

 

Actually not - it's still pedestrians and trams only, and still looks quite a lot like that.  (Not sure why I felt it was important to share this information, but there you go.) 

[Karmann Ghiaman]

In Barbados I thought is was a black woman wearing a yellow bathing cap (but agree about David Dickinson).

 

Talking of including the natives in your postcard pic:

 

 

WARBONNET INDIAN DANCERS OF KANSAS CITY, U.S.A.

 

The Warbonnets in full costume prepare for their annual "Ceremonial," a festival of Indian dances.

 

Then it gives a phone number for Jerry Palmer, Directing Chief, in case you're interested. Clearly in modern political incorrectness terms this is so wrong in so many ways. There was a fuss in the papers a few weeks back when people at festivals (preferably blondes in hotpants) were wearing 'Native American war bonnets' and thereby insulting a whole noble race and their tragic history. Several of the nicey-nicies who had been pictured with one on issued abject apologies and promised to devote the rest of their lives to charitable causes for saving the last of the Mohicans. You would have to be a very sensitive little pansy of a Native American to really be upset by that, wouldn't you? I don't suppose that this lot had a drop of Indian blood between them, but surely they admire the culture they're imitating and are possibly helping to preserve something with their harmless interest. I've been to plenty of historical sites in America where we were told some nonsense about the 'Briddish' or wicked Redcoats shooting 'patriots', but somehow found myself able to take it on the chin. Anyway, doubt if the Kansas City Warbonnet Indian Dancers are still going in the 21st Century!

 

Card from a bit further northwest:

 

 

4/5/56

 

Dr Mrs B. I am sending this to say Eric will not be able to come back with us, so if Mrs B. would like a run he could do so

Love R, F,

Come for tea if possible

 

It was in fact sent from Sheffield to Mansfield. They were the text messages of their day, weren't they just?

 

And finally a couple from Evita's Buenos Aires, never sent, but I'm sure they evoke the Peronist atmosphere by day...

 

 

Ministerio de Obras Publicas

 

...and by night:

 

 

Lavalle, the movie street

 

REPRODUCCION PROHIBIDA   

[chaseracer]

 

 

SIRMIONE Lake of Garda - Air-view is the English version of the caption. Never sent, but fine crud in the car park.

 

Both sets of arrows pointing in the same direction.  How VERY Italian...

[Karmann Ghiaman]

P.S. : Just found three more which might be of interest:

 

 

Proves that postcard photographers have not lost the fine art of including hideous cars in pictures of historic buildings. I also like the way he's got all that metal crap, so typical of the thoughtless street furniture that pollutes our cities, towns and villages and every day helps to slightly reduce the quality of everybody's life.

 

At first sight somewhere like Malta or Aleppo, but no! It's...

 

 

...Douglas, Isle of Man. The passengers are a picture of frustration, boredom and annoyance, but Harry, Bill and Dobbin have got 'em.

 

Underground buffs will recognise this interesting transport system and its glamorous staff:

 

 

24.10.70

 

Dear Bob,

 Just a note to let you know I'm alright. Living in digs at present (address - 27 Moray Place, Strathbungo, Glasgow S.I.) Digs are good. Work is O.K. Have just been round transport museum. Should be home for weekend of 14/15 November

 T.T.F.N. - Dave

 

Did I ever tell you they were the text messages of their day? 

[mouseflakes]

We are now in our trailer tent in Pam's garden

 

Brilliant!

[DS20]

P.S. : Just found three more which might be of interest:

 

 

Proves that postcard photographers have not lost the fine art of including hideous cars in pictures of historic buildings. I also like the way he's got all that metal crap, so typical of the thoughtless street furniture that pollutes our cities, towns and villages and every day helps to slightly reduce the quality of everybody's life.

 

 

 

 

The metal crap on the pavement is the air-quality-monitoring equipment for central Oxford; it's on the High Street.  Having lived there (Oxford, not the High Street), I'm dubious when announcements are made relating to the allegedly poor air quality in the city, because the monitoring equipment is about seven feet away from the bus stop of Many, Many Buses and Continuous Engine Idleage.  I suspect moving the monitoring equipment fifty feet either way up the road, or even to the other side of the road, would result in an instant improvement in Oxford's air quality stats.  

 

Hideous Mercedes, though, isn't it?