stuff 'n other stuff

I’ve written before about lipstick and revolution in the context of the Spanish civil war and how, in a famous photograph of Republican milicianas, one of the young women is clearly wearing lipstick.

But something I didn’t know, was that lipstick had a history with rebellion – apparently suffragettes in both Britain and the USA would often wear red lipstick at demonstrations – something ‘nice’ women didn’t do in public before world war one – to emphasise their liberation from the social conventions of the time.

(There is a myth that Elizabeth Ardern handed out free red lipsticks to suffragettes at a major demonstration in New York in 1912 – unfortunately there’s no evidence that this was the case)

After world war one lipstick increasingly became associated with modernity and women would often wear it as a way of asserting their identity as liberated individuals, rather than being confined to society’s straitjacket…

From the Daily Mirror via the British Newspaper Archive – an advert for permanent lipstick – the suggestion being that a woman could kiss as many or as few men as she wanted…

A nice late example of a Queen Victoria post card from Gibraltar.

The design is basically a late ‘Empire for the use of’ like this example from Natal

We can date the Gibraltar example to probably sometime after 1898 due to the peculiar history of the Gibraltar pound.

Prior to 1898 Gibraltar used Spanish currency on a day to day basis and stamps were often issued with values in Spanish currency, even though the first Sterling denominated stamps had been issued as early as 1886.

However in 1889 Gibraltar reverted to issuing stamps denominated in pesetas and centimos, as in this 1894 newspaper wrapper (image from Wikipedia)

In 1898, as a result of the Spanish American war, the value of the Spanish peseta crashed and it ceased to be used in Gibraltar which began to exclusively use Sterling, as it did throughout the twentieth century. (When I was in Gibraltar nearly thirty years ago the ATMs dispensed Government of Gibraltar sterling notes and shops would happily accept Bank of England notes at face value.)

I am guessing that the postcard dates from after 1898. I’d also guess that as Gibraltar is a very small place, they probably printed a batch of them and kept on using them after Queen Victoria had died in 1901 rather than simply pulping all the old ones once Edward VII came on the throne.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Irish intellectuals tried to forge an Irish cultural identity distinct from being British by adopting Irish names, the use of the Irish language, and the use of the Gaelic alphabet, as distinct from the normal English/Latin alphabet.

Based on the typefaces used in the first printed Gaelic books in Scotland, it harked back to the Celtic uncial script used in early manuscripts.

Other than in the names of restaurants and pubs, it is little seen now, but was once common in Ireland on street signs and fingerposts, as well as being used in the pre-decimal currency as in the Percy Metcalfe designed half penny

where it is used to give the value in Gaelic.

While I was looking for something else entirely (actually the use of ancient Greek to obfuscate the messages on postcards) I came across this item

from the National Library of Ireland.

It’s a postcard from 1901 between two well known Irish intellectuals of the time (the author is Padraig O’Seaghdha, a noted writer and Irish langauge campaigner) listing terms in Gaelic for various diseases horses were prone to – you will need to click on the link to see the reverse of the postcard on the NLI’s site, but the Irish language term is given in Gaelic script, and the definition in English. (There’s also some introductory text written using Gaelic script that prefaces the definitions).

However, what struck me was the way that the address combined both scripts, the name of the addressee given in Irish script, and the rest in normal English handwriting of the time, as the writer of the card perhaps did not expect the post office staff to be able to read Gaelic script…

An interesting example this, neatly showing a fusing of technologies – a late nineteenth century postcard, dated 25 November 1899, addressed to W H Scott, Engineer, Casterton VIC.

As you would expect form the period the postcard is hand addressed in what looks to be iron gall ink.

Flip it over and you see something else

The message is in typescript and looks to have been typed using an indelible ink ribbon, or at least one that used an aniline based ink rather than the more usual carbon based inks used at the time.

Hicks Atkinson and Sons was an upmarket department store in Melbourne (I first came across Hicks Atkinson while documenting the contents of Dow’s Pharmacy in Chiltern for the National Trust where I found an advertising flyer among the ephemera in a drawer in the pharmacy.)

1940s Hicks Atkinson advertising flyer

William Henry Scott was the shire engineer for Glenelg shire. Originally from Scotland, he lived for a time in Omaru in New Zealand before moving to Victoria in 1890. Voter registration records show him as living in Casterton at the time this postcard was sent.

One of his sons, also William Henry Scott, served with the Light Horse in what was then Palestine and eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier.

Casterton is a small town in the far west of the wheat growing area of Victoria, almost on the border of South Australia, and is notable for the number of women that signed the suffrage petition in 1891, as well as claiming to be where the kelpie breed of Australian working dog originated.

Last Friday at the Athenaeum (Friday’s my cataloguing day) one of the items I catalogued was this

a copy of ‘Psalms and Hymns’ published by James Nesbit and Co.

James Nesbit never seem to have put publication dates on the religious material they published, but as this is an Australian edition printed and published by arrangement with George Robertson in Melbourne, we can tentatively date it to the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The book has obviously had a hard life, the spine is detaching and it has been scribbled on in pencil. Devotional items such as this are quite common and their real value is in the names (and sometimes the date) that the owner wrote on them, as it shows that they were in the area.

In this case Edina House, which is potentially interesting.

Edina House is a large Victoria mansion in Sydney, built in the nineteenth century by Ebenezer Vickery who made a fortune manufacturing boots for goldminers and others.

Vickery donated the house to the Methodist curch in 1919 and it became an obstetrics hospital, so the first question is, was the hymn book property of Edina House, or was it owned by a person called Edina House. Edina isn’t a very common first name in English for women, so we could quite plausibly argue for the name of the hospital than for a person.

There’s no way of telling, but as the book is graffitied by different hands it’s not impossible it originally belonged to the hospital chapel.

The left hand page, the fly leaf, is also a puzzle. It has an inscription in short hand, in fact it has the same inscription, first written in  a confident hand and then repeated in a less confident hand

Shorthand is of course a dead skill, but in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century it was a valuable skill to take notes at speed, used by secretaries, journalists, and for transcripts of parliamentary debates and court sessions.

However, it didn’t look quite right – just looking at the image and comparing it to Pitman and Gregg shorthand (the two most common shorthand systems in Australia in the early twentieth century) it simply looked different.

In fact, of the various examples of shorthand systems I could find online it looked more like Yiddish shorthand than anything else.

I did post a query to Mastodon to see if anyone recognised it, something which attracted quite a bit of attention, but despite a general consensus it was shorthand, no one could identify it definitively.

One respondent did suggest that it might be Teeline, a system popular with journalists. Unfortunately, Teeline only came on the scene in the late sixties, which was possibly a bit too late.

I was talking to J about the problem, and she immediately said that it looked like Dacomb, a system that she had learned in school.

Dacomb was an alternative shorthand system developed by Beatrice and Clara Dacomb in Melbourne in the 1930s. Dacomb, a phonetic based system like both Gregg and Pitman became very popular in Australia, but is little known outside of Australia.

All the graffiti in the hymnbook is in pencil.

This is quite significant.

Before the advent of cheap ball point pens in the nineteen fifties, a lot of the impromptu writing one sees is in pencil.

Writing in ink was hard. With a dip pen it was a laborious business. When fountain pens came on the scene at the end of the nineteenth century,  things became easier, although the early models were cumbersome to refill and tended to leak spoiling clothing and bags, meaning that pencils were still used for most run of the mill writing.

Search any listing of nineteenth century postcards for sale on ebay, especially non pictorial ones, you’ll come across examples written in pencil, usually with fairly mundane messages, confirming the size of a cabinet, or ordering a bucket of nails for use on the farm.

Pencil was the go to tool for spontaneous writing, be it scribbled notes, graffiti in books or simple messages.

So, given that the shorthand is written using the Dacomb system and is written in pencil we can probably argue for a date in the 1940s or there abouts, which if nothing else shows the longevity of hymn books.

And I did ask J if she could read the message, but she said no, she’d forgotten it all once she went to Art School …