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Room for six more cards on the tableJim Crawford - PPM September 1998I made three New Year resolutions at the start of 1997; first, I would cut down on the beer, second, I would persevere and keep on writing the begging letters to the Duke of Edinburgh, and third, I would search out at least one exceptional comic postcard at every fair I attended during the year. The heart is willing but the flesh is weak, and the only resolution for the three that I managed to keep was the last one. here are some of my successes.Teddy Tail birthday postcards are great eye catchers, and besides being attractive they have a timeless freshness about them. They are also notoriously thin on the ground. I found the one illustrated at Barrie Rollinson's Chester le Street fair priced at £8. It was 'postally used in 1938. I was a Teddy Tailer myself when I was a small boy in the thirties, and I still have a soft spot for the Daily Mail mouse. The Teddy Tail League was the only organisation I ever managed to join. The Boy Scouts rejected me because of my spots, the Girl Guides said I didn't have the legs, and I was drummed out of the church choir for watering the communion wine. Apart from the Foreign Legion and Salvation Army, the Teddy Tail League was all that was left! Nottingham was the scene of my next triumph, when I came across a nice card from Charles Crombie's "The Rules of Golf" series priced at £12. Classic golf comics like this are harder to find than golf balls in the undergrowth, and when they do turn up, the handicap is often a double figure price tag. I suppose I am what is known as an armchair golfer who has never struck a golf ball in anger. Why anyone should want to propel a small ball into an equally small hole hundreds of yards away has long puzzled me. I prefer to use the game as an excuse to get away from the wife and her shopping jaunts. I park my clubs and myself in the club house, watch the racing on the telly, eat pork pies and quaff ale all afternoon. A sportsman through and through! It is always nice to come across something different on the comic postcard scene, and I was lucky at Bloomsbury recently when I found a card from The Bazaar Exchange and Mart series priced at £8. This series is unusual in that it uses two drawings, one on each side of the card, to illustrate the message. In this case, on the address side the words You Can Exchange are followed by a cartoon of a horse, and on the other side the words For A are followed by a cartoon of a car. More plainly, You can exchange a horse for a car. Two nice drawings, but unfortunately not signed. So far I have traced only two other cards from this series - You can exchange a sofa for a safe, and You can exchange a lawnmower for a sewing machine, but there must be many more. The Tuck Celebrated Poster card advertising Force Breakfast Cereal came my way at Sheffield. Sunny Jim was the brain child of two girls who entered their drawing of him in an advertising competition organised by the Canadian Wheat Flakes Company in 1902. The elegant Regency dandy with his fashionable waistcoat, his periwig and his monocle, was a runaway winner and the accompanying jingle: High o'er the fence leaps Sunny Jim, Force is the food that raises him... became almost as famous as Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Sunny Jim appeared on several comic postcards in one form or another, and during the following decades he became something of a cult figure, along with other famous advertising characters like the Bisto Kids, Robertson's Marmalade golliwogs, and Fry's Five Boys. This small piece of advertising history cost me £15. Edward VII was the favourite Aunt Sally of French caricaturists. His reputation as a bon viveur and womaniser was well established, and it was a French wit who remarked that Edward had a collection of ladies garters that stretched back for years... Most Englishmen at that time said that the best thing between France and England was the North Sea, and Charles Orens clearly agreed on this 1905 postcard for which I paid £20, also at Sheffield. The price of suffragette comics has rocketed recently, rising from around £8 a card to an astonishing £25-£30 almost overnight. Scarcity, it seems, has caused a radical re-think in early postcard circles, and I was pleasantly surprised to find the one illustrated lying cosily in the Social History section of a dealer's stock at Preston, marked at only £10. I know a good thing when I see one and I handed over my beer money and my bus fare home without a murmur. This is a very colourful card and the suffragette looks a lot like my mother in law after a night on the cooking sherry. Come to think of it, she looks a lot like that when I'm sober, too! Bamforth published a lot of cards of this type, and it is said that the people posing on them were all company employees. Bamforth must have been nice to work for. We never had that much fun at the vinegar works. So 1997 proved to be a good year as far as exceptional comic postcards were concerned, and I was quite satisfied with my haul. As for the other New Year resolutions I made, I haven't fared quite so well. I haven't managed to cut down on the beer yet, although I did stop sending the begging letters to the Duke of Edinburgh when he started sending his to me. I'm addressing them to Shirley Bassey now instead, so far without success. But 1998 is another year, and so far things are looking good. My search
for the attractive and unusual in comic postcards continues. I'll bring
you up to date in 1999. |
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