Categories
Adverts Ephemera Victorian

Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite’s Dad, 1809

Categories
1950-1999 Adverts Ephemera

Hidden Treasures – Liverpool Echo, 1951

I’m happy to hold, read and buy any old Victorian book, really. I’m quite a visual, tangible person in general – I can’t concentrate very well on audio books and need to see the words on the page to really get into a story. I never much liked Jackanory as a child because of that (apart from Rik Mayall’s one obviously). And I’m the same with history. I’ve read so many history books (well, I do have a history degree) but seeing an old building, reading an old book, holding a piece of ephemera that has survived against the odds – they’re what brings the past to life to me.

So, when I found this 1889 book, Charles Stuart Calverley’s Fly Leaves, in a charity shop, I was interested at first purely because of its age. But I bought it mainly because, flicking through, I found that a torn page of a Liverpool Echo from 1951 had been used as a bookmark. And I really wanted to read that page. Any newspaper given time is fascinating. The most commonplace of things, the events, the layout, the adverts (especially the adverts) suddenly represents a time in a way you don’t realise while it’s your present.

Fly Leaves itself wasn’t especially interesting to me. Or at least it wasn’t until years later, when I found an appendix at the end with a spoof Charles Dickens exam on The Pickwick Papers which really made me laugh. With questions such as naming all the component parts of a dog’s nose and deducing Mr Pickwick’s maximum speed:

But the Echo was fascinating. It’s the front page, folded up for 60 years.

Along with a strangely high number of adverts for Private Detective agencies, here are some highlights from the so-very-closely printed page.

“What colour did you say you wanted your crease-resisting chiffon velvet gown, Mrs Clarkson?”

An advert to remove hair, moles and veins by Myra Howell’s diathermy techniques. She was a long standing presence in Bold Street – I’ve also seen adverts of hers from 1919. (An interesting side note – medical diathermy machines were used in the UK in the Second World War to jam German radio beams used for nighttime bombing raids in what was called “The Battle of the Beams”)

An advert for E Rex Makin’s Solicitors, that must surely have been newly set up in 1951, seeing as he’s still going, and I saw him in town not too long ago. A slightly legendary figure in Liverpool life, he is. Not only has his firm been going a very long time, but he was Brian Epstein’s solicitor and involved in setting up the Beatles contract with him. Plus, he’s supposed to have invented the word “Beatlemania”.

“Wednesday night is Landing Craft Night”

I love this advert – a wallpaper company gegging in on an upcoming General Election.

Categories
1900-1949 Music

Golden Slumbers, 1938 and 1969

I was an enormous Beatles fan as a teenager (well, I still am). In fact, they’re the reason I live in Liverpool now. I came up here for a University Open Day twenty-two years ago, spent all of ten minutes in the history department, then took the rest of the day off to look for another kind of history – old Beatles haunts around the city.

I remember reading about how their song Golden Slumbers from the 1969 album Abbey Road came about. Paul McCartney was saying he had seen a music book at his dad’s house with a old song of that name in it. He liked the title and, as he couldn’t read music to find out how the tune went, he wrote his own melody instead.

This is the original, from The Weekend Book, 1938. As you can see, Paul kept part of the lyric mostly intact.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4spkG8LizyE

 

Categories
1950-1999 Games

Friday Fun – So you think you know the Beatles! 1970

From the Pelham Pop Annual, 1970 – a fairly difficult Beatles quiz.

The Pelham Pop Annual aimed to only feature artists that would stand the test of time and, looking at their features, they mostly did well. Cliff Richard, Tom Jones, The Who are all here. Unfortunately, the annual only seemed to last for the one, 1970, edition though.