Beware! This is what the vote will do to husbands. Four cards from a strange 1909 anti-suffrage series.
Today, we’re looking at four rare postcards from a twelve-card series published by the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York in 1909. The complete set buffoons the women’s suffrage movement through role-reversal cartoons depicting men holding babies and scrubbing on washboards. The popular message was that women would be turned masculine, greedy, uncaring, and unfaithful once given the vote. Our grouping includes card numbers 1, 3, 4, and 10. The most emblematic is Suffragette Madonna, which has been the focus of substantial scholarship.
Each card colorfully illustrates the presumed ill-effects of role reversal in a domestic or civic scene. Men feed infants, wash clothes, or otherwise occupy the era-assigned roles for women. Meanwhile, women take on masculine dress, public authority, and open flirtation.
In the first card, a father poses as a religious icon, complete with laurel leaves and halo, while nursing a baby with a bottle. Another card repeats the theme with a father annoyed by two crying infants. A tiny inset shows his wife commanding a political rally and calling for women to run government. The next card puts a young woman in coveralls under an enormous flopping hat, garments that speak to independence, work, and whimsy unbecoming of a lady. The last card shows a couple mid-embrace, with a headline suggesting sexual favors as an easy vote-getting behavior.
Across all four postcards, the palette includes saturated reds, blues, and golds, with exaggerated Edwardian dress rendered in the exacting art of lithographic printing. Though intentionally brusque, the cards were considered beautiful and humorous for obvious and covert reasons. Captions run along the bottom border in bold sans-serif type, and do as much comic work as the illustrations themselves.
All four cards are chromolithographs published by the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York, copyrighted 1909. Three of these cards carry a gold-toned outer border created with the bronzing technique described in Gilded Goods. The fourth uses a plain blue-ruled border with no metallic finish. Each card includes a series number, a title band, and a copyright line naming the publisher.
These cards are unused and uncancelled, double-matted and handsomely framed, with only minor softening of corners. Each card alone is considered rare and small sets in presentation format are uncommon in the marketplace. Several complete sets are held in public and private collections. Catherine Palczewski’s 2005 academic essay in Quarterly Journal of Speech increases demand and value for these items compared to similar postcards of the era.
Subject, scarcity, provenance, and condition are the top variables that govern the market value for vintage postcards, but serious academic attention changes the equation. Once Palczewski examined this set and published an article, they went from cultural detritus to a documented contribution to the historical record. Palczewski identified the visual tropes (a male Madonna and feminized Uncle Sam), connected them to the verbal rhetoric of the anti-suffrage movement, and lent theory and vocabulary for later researchers and collectors to better interpret the materials.
Provenance, in this instance, is not just about who created or owned an object. It is also about who has looked at it seriously and left notes. A card with a known scholarly citation carries a paper trail that an anonymous postcard never gets. It brings it out of obscurity and into a realm of the studied object. From there, new analysis has a footing and further creative work may be inspired, too.
None of this changes the material object, a piece of lithographed cardstock, printed and mailed for a penny in 1909. What scholarship changes is the frame around it and what we can make of it today. Out of the thousands of anti-suffrage postcards produced in that era, these ones are still worth examining more than a century later.
To Read More
Palczewski, Catherine H., “The Male Madonna And The Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards” (2005). https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facpub/2905
Catherine H. Palczewski Postcard Archive, at the University of Northern Iowa, includes a dedicated Dunston-Weiler section with most of the twelve cards digitized front and back.
Votes & Petticoats, at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University, features a curated exhibit of anti-suffrage postcard sets.
A Purrrrfect Political Storm, JSTOR Daily’s essay on the cat-and-dog symbolism running through related anti-suffrage postcards.
Today we’re looking at a group of twenty opulent floral postcards from the early 1900s. Botanical illustrations (roses, poppies, carnations, tulips, violets, cornflowers, hydrangeas, and gladiolus) are printed on rich metallic backgrounds.
Though these cards are not a matching set, they are of an era. At the time they were made, a rising middle class was creating new demand for affordable luxury items like fine papers, engraved calling cards, gilt-edged books, and gilded picture frames. Even a small amount of shiny detail on a penny postcard made it special.
Of the great many decorative and floral postcards, these ones do show their age. They were more common than their appearance suggest, and the luster that commanded so much attention a century ago has faded. The corners are softened or torn, and the writing is obscured. The background color itself is mottled, scratched, and often reveals an impression of the stamp or cancellation on the reverse. One card has developed a cloudy bloom across the front, just as verdigris slowly encroaches on the hue and texture of copper.
Meant to appear as gold, the metallic substance used was actually bronze powder, which tarnishes, rubs off, and browns with age. Printers were still experimenting with the best approach to reflective ink. As we’ll see, this wasn’t it.
Print shops called this process bronzing. A lithographer first ran the sheet through the press, using a sticky varnish where the shiny effect was wanted. While the varnish stayed tacky, a worker daubed the sheet with fine metal powder. The powder adhered to the wet varnish and fell away from the dry paper around it. A soft brush removed the excess. In the legendary 1880 trade manual, The Grammar of Lithography, bronzing is described among a series of finishing techniques done after the main color printing was complete. The process required a steady hand and a practiced eye. Too little powder left the image looking thin and patchy, and the loose metal dust was a known respiratory contaminant in the print shop.
Bronzing was a specialty trade but it wasn’t particularly rare. In the Heinrich Steinberg printing supply catalog, bronzing ink was offered to lithographers and letterpress printers as a stock item, sold as one option among many inks and materials a working print shop would order regularly. Bronzing was a routine commercial finish, sold as a fancy extra.
Chemists worked on a better recipe for decades. A 1922 German patent described a new formula for mixing metals into lacquer inks. When metallic elements (most often copper and zinc) are added, they lock into a harder, more water-resistant film that oxidize in the air and leaves a slick surface as the ink dries. However, the oxidation that stabilized the lacquer ink is the same process that tarnished the metallic additives. The finely ground metal flakes keep reacting with the oxygen, even over a century.
This cornflower card shows the die-stamped details that give the petals a sculpted, three-dimensional texture. Embossing is a mechanical process done by pressing the card stock between engraved metal plates. Print shops often combined bronzing and embossing for extra visual weight, further pushing a commercial mechanical process to produce an object appreciated for its artistry.
Victorian and Edwardian greetings commonly carried rhymed text, including references to well-known verses. Robert Herrick’s 1648 poem To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time begins with the line, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…” and “In the desert a fountain is springing…” is adapted from Lord Byron’s 1816 poem Stanzas to Augusta with one word changed. In that era, card publishers borrowed freely, rarely credited the poets, and also employed their own writers to produce the florid messages alongside each bouquet.
The Victorian language of flowers, or floriography, assigned a specific sentiment to each bloom. Violets stood for modesty. Roses meant love, more devoted as the color deepened. A sender might choose a card’s flower to express a tender sentiment, though mailing it as a postcard was no secret. Readers of the period were expected to recognize and decode those meanings inside a new middle-class code of conduct. Sending the right card with the right flower and verse reflected the rules of polite society.
Though bent and tarnished, these postcards are no less charming more than a hundred years later. Some of the shimmer is still there, but the smoky ochre slowly replacing it has its own sort of visual value.
To Read More
The Grammar of Lithography — W. D. Richmond’s 1880 trade manual for commercial lithographers, covering the era’s bronzing, gilding, and dusting techniques.
Bronze powder — A materials-science entry from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, explaining what bronze powder is and why it discolors over time.
Water-Soluble Oil and Lacquer Paints — A 1922 German patent describing how sulfur, phosphorus, or selenium additives were used to stabilize oil and lacquer paints through oxidation.
The Secret Life of Victorian Cards — The Ephemera Society of America on how greeting cards helped enforce middle-class codes of conduct in the Victorian era.
Nurse Aird moved from case to case, and was never one place very long. Her friends always managed to catch up.
Over several weeks, we have been learning about Elizabeth Rowen Aird, who worked as a private nurse in the Teeside region of England in the early part of the 20th century. Her distinctive handwriting boldly appeared among a collection of vintage English postcards from 1902 to 1916. Two cards charted a course back to Redcar and an earlier essay about an unusual seaside stroll. Another single card happened to be in the right place and time in regal roadworks.
This week, we examine the postcards Liz received from fellow nurses, faithful friends, and grateful patients. This view expands the territory, too. Her friends write from Glasgow and Isle of Wight, and from more familiar stations. The cards also follow her from case to case, often forwarded to a new address where she was working.
Nurse Aird was not attached to one hospital ward. She took private cases one at a time, perhaps through a nursing registry or through established relationships with convalescence homes. She picked up patient cases on a weekly or monthly basis, often staying in the family’s home and moving on when each case ended.
William Smart’s mother still in great pain, no hope of decreasing it. Am with very pleasant people. I am keeping very well but get well tired. Went to Unity on Sunday evening – hope you both keep well. Expect to be here till away case – it only came off a week ago. Bob Payhrs is not so well. Will get direct train when it comes out. Liz
Fellow nurses kept in touch, perhaps to ease the loneliness of a stay away in a family home that may have seemed unfamiliar.
So glad to receive your letter – will answer it later. Came here on Saturday; an old lady again. This is a very old town, but we are quite in the country & it is so lovely. Am quite well & hope you are Yours, B.E.W.
Or, simply to gossip!
Thanks for pretty P.P.C. Can’t think of how P. delaying so long. Probably could not forgive herself for the ‘ride’ not coming off, sort of penance. I am wondering if you have got any fresh storyettes about ‘nurses’ now don’t keep them all to yourself you know I enjoy them immensely. Weather lovely, no work of course. how can a mere student? Ta Ta you N.S.
We don’t know if Nurse Aird had formal training or even if she chose the nursing profession. Nurses in her era had to remain unmarried to be employable, and unmarried women often became nurses. Liz must have offered a kind word to a young woman thinking about her options.
Dear Nurse, Thank you very much for P.P.C I have not been through Darlington twice. Yes, I am still thinking of going in for nursing. I shall soon be old enough. They will take them at 22 at Aston. So I shall not have long to wait. I will write you a letter in a day or two and tell you all the news. Hope you are keeping well. When are you coming over to see us. Yes I think we are all pretty well. Harry is getting married soon. I will tell you when in my letter when I write. We are having a concert next Saturday. Shall be glad when it is over. Hoping to hear from you again, I remain your loving friend. S.
Nursing would not become a registered profession in Britain until the Nurses Registration Act of 1919. Liz worked steadily for at least two decades before that law existed. Though she moved within a firm social architecture, there were few legal protections, and no patient meant no pay.
Will stay here next week & then if nothing turns up will come over during race week. Nurses are all on holiday, as there is nothing doing. Glad the belt is alright. This weather is very relaxing – the country is lovely just now – went for a drive with Miss Lucas yesterday. Liz.
Rest and relaxation came through friendships, church, and a seaside social calendar. Alice A. Lucas belonged to Liz’s own circle in Darlington, built around the Unity Society there. Her December 1906 card included good news of her mother’s health, and also her evening plans.
It was kind of you to send such a pretty P.C. to Mother. She is not quite ready yet to need you to nurse her, but has only just escaped that fate!! We have had her in her room since Friday, by Sunny Jim’s orders (a slight internal bother) We hope to have her down tomorrow. How are you, dear? We shall be glad to see you back. I am going down to the singing practice now. Mr Side is doing very well. We are arranging for a “Unity Church Society” for study of social & other questions. Goodbye – with our united love, affectly yrs, Alice A. Lucas.
This congregation met in Darlington from 1873 to 1922, part of the Unitarian church in England. It was a big part of Liz’s social world during her time there, from 1906 to 1915. Over the years, she attended concerts and lectures, walked in the park, and traveled to see friends connected through church.
6 South Ter Harrogate, Thanks for card. We wondered how you had got on. Rev S.S. Brettell comes 14 Sun Oct – fear you may not get here – we do not record.
Her mother attended a separate Unity congregation back home in South Shields. Through their correspondence, we see the bond between mother and daughter, and also the goings-on of a socially progressive faith community. A 1912 card confirms a standing weekly commitment in South Shields.
Dear Mrs Aird The U.S. meeting will be at the above adress tomorrow night. The N.E. Cafe is let for the whole of the winter for Thurs. if it suits the members I hope you will be able to be there.
Mother and daughter each had their own circles, engagements, and schedules, which sometimes overlapped.
Going up to Tyne Dock to see Harmonium to-night. Come down as soon as you can to-night. I may go to park. Liz
Despite the typical brevity and levity of postcards, they do sometimes deliver devasting news. Liz’s cases were not always easy.
Hope you are keeping better! Last Sunday I had blue baby at church in the afternoon. She had a convulsion at 11 at night & died Monday morning. It was very unexpected. The patient is alright but her mother is ill and not expected to recover – I miss the baby more than anyone she was such a sweet little thing. How cold here the weather is, a great change, you must be careful not to get cold. Much love to both, Liz.
The postcard she sent from Sedgefield Asylum comes with an ominous chill. Also known as Durham County Lunatic Asylum, it was built in 1858 and expanded in the 1880s until it held 700 patients under one roof, with its own chapel, stables, and water supply. That same building was absorbed into the newly formed National Health Service in 1948, renamed Winterton Hospital in 1949, and continued treating patients into the mid-1990s.
Bark House, Sedgefield. Hope you are all well. Have been very busy – patient still in bed. Have you read the failure of Mr Stopkus. I was with them a year ago – regular fraud – I expect to go thro the asylum next week. Hope they wont keep me in. Send me a few lines this week, not sure if I can get next week. Much love to both. Liz
Other patients wrote to Liz with the encouraging and frustrating details of getting better. Given the number of these messages, we have to assume she stayed in touch with some patients and families long after the case was over and she had moved on.
“Have been here five weeks. Am feeling much better & stronger & staying a little longer. Kindest regards. E Beaumont”
Maud, recovering in Nottinghamshire in August 1907, wrote with wry humor.
“Thanks for card – Am improving everyday – Can walk splendidly! Plenty of fresh air of course – unfortunately can’t get away from nurses – there is one visiting here just now – Are you not sorry for me? Yours”
A few messages indicate that Liz was generous, too. Gifts and parcels were exchanged regularly, including some little bonnets that seem to have been for sale. Messages nearly always offered a health update and wishes for her own wellbeing, and her parents.
My dear Nurse, Thank you very much for your nice parcel. The little bonnets are lovely. They will sell I am sure. Hope you are feeling better. Father has been ill but is better. Love from all. E.S.
Dear Miss Aird, I received your letter thanking you very very much for the present it was quite a surprise. I am enjoying myself very much and having beautiful weather. Hope you are keeping better and also your mother. Gertie.
Dear Miss Aird, Thank you very much for the biscuits. we are sorry your father & you are so ill. Mother on the improve but not able to go about yet. She will write to you as soon as she can. With love from all, Rachael
A few cards taken together trace a long friendship. Rennie, writing from Whitley Bay in July 1910:
15 Park Parade, Whitley Bay. We arrived here yesterday. Hope you will be over to see us. We are here for 10 days with Yeoman Eli. Love from Rennie.
A missed meeting the same month:
Very sorry I can-not meet you tomorrow, hope you will have a nice day at Whitby. Love from Rennie
An invitation the following September:
Cherryburn Gardens Fenham, Thanks for your invitation, shall be pleased to come on Monday leaving here 2.0 but must return 5.30. Hope your Mother is keeping better. With love from Rennie.
And a week at Langholm in 1913, with her own mother:
Mother & I have been here a week. Leaving Monday. We are enjoying the rest, a change. The weather is good, rain this afternoon for the first time. How is your father keeping? I hope better. Love from us both, from, Rennie
These cards we first approached as places—Alnwick, Nottingham, Newcastle-on-Tyne—were not scenery chosen at random. They were where Liz and her circle actually spent the free time that their arduous work allowed them. The seaside villas, the castles, and parks were the landscapes for their lives.
Read together, these cards describe a social system built almost entirely on goodwill and improvisation. The National Health Service, founded in 1948, was built to respond exactly these gaps: free care for all, a regulated nursing profession, hospitals and asylums brought under one public system. Liz’s world and her own work preceded what we think of as healthcare now. What came after was far from perfect, and it is worth appreciating what it replaced.
If you wanted to know the first thing about Nurse Aird, it could be found in her handwriting.
Research efforts for the past several weeks have been to disambiguate an album of 200+ English postcards from the early 20th century. Having organized them alphabetically, we took a quick trip back in Redcar Revisited and mapped out a single important intersection between our collection and the King & Queen themselves.
To explore the collection further it was necessary to shuffle the neatly organized cards, scattering them out again to look for different attributes. Knowing that this would happen a number of times, I paused to carefully catalogue and transcribe each one. For two days, I took comfort in the tedium, resting my eyes on each address, all the postmark dates, and the easy-to-miss cancellation details with clues to rail stations and delivery lines.
Sorting the cards by handwriting was the break I needed. A run of cards in a bold, loose, inky script with a distinctive salutation turned out to be Nurse Aird herself. Easy to pick out once I had seen it a few times, this is Liz writing to her own parents, over a period of about eight years. Read in sequence, her letters cover work, friends, faith, and small pleasures in the Teeside region.
The 1891 census places Elizabeth R. Aird, age 22, born 1869, in a South Shields household with her parents, John and Mary Aird, and two younger brothers, John, 18, and William, 10. We’ll learn more about them as we go, but today let’s get the story from Liz in her own words. She is 34 years old when this series of postcards begins.
September 22, 1903.Mrs Nightingale wants me to stay till Monday – but I want a few days at home before going on outing – so will come on Saturday – the weather is lovely. We have been to the Braid Hills to-day. I would like to see the Forth Bridge. I think I will walk part of the way. It comes so expensive taking cars. Hope you are better. With love to both, your affectionate daughter, Liz.
September 22, 1903. We have been to Roslin to-day it is beautiful – have you ever been? It has been a lovely day – hope you are feeling better! Sorry to hear that Mr is no better. Did Jack get his musical cards? With love, Liz.
October 13, 1903. Hope you are keeping better. I am much better, thank you. I will be coming in on Friday. May get the night but am not sure. With love from Liz.
April 4, 1905.William Smart’s mother still in great pain, no hope of decreasing it. Am with very pleasant people. I am keeping very well but get well tired. Went to Unity on Sunday evening – hope you both keep well. Expect to be here till away case – it only came off a week ago. Bob Payhrs is not so well. Will get direct train when it comes out. Liz.
October 20, 1906.Hope you are keeping better! Last Sunday I had blue baby at church in the afternoon. She had a convulsion at 11 at night & died Monday morning. It was very unexpected. The patient is alright but her mother is ill and not expected to recover – I miss the baby more than anyone she was such a sweet little thing. How cold here the weather is, a great change, you must be careful not to get cold. Much love to both, Liz.
October 27, 1906.Bark House, Sedgefield. Hope you are all well. Have been very busy – patient still in bed. Have you read the failure of Mr Stopkus. I was with them a year ago – regular fraud – I expect to go thro the asylum next week. Hope they wont keep me in. Send me a few lines this week, not sure if I can get next week. Much love to both. Liz.
November 18, 1906.Very wet in town today. Wish November was out then we might have some sunshine. Liz, everyone sends their love to both.
May 30, 1907.Hurworth-on-Tees. Hope you are both well. Weather makes one feel melancholy. Am still on holiday. It is raining here, been pouring down all day, expect we’ll get hot weather all at once. Will run over in a fortnight time if I’m still at liberty. Much love, Liz.
June 15, 1907. Will stay here next week & then if nothing turns up will come over during race week. Nurses are all on holiday, as there is nothing doing. Glad the belt is alright. This weather is very relaxing – the country is lovely just now – went for a drive with Miss Lucas yesterday. Liz.
January 11, 1908. Just going to station to see if there is a decent excursion next week. Will let you know what day – Trust you are well – love to both. Liz.
January 27, 1908.33 Ocean Road, Monday morning. Mr Robinson going up to Tyne Dock to see Harmonium to-night. Come down as soon as you can to-night. I may go to park. Liz.
November 6, 1908.Many thanks for paper & letter – glad to hear all news. Have not much time for writing – expect to finish next Thursday. Glad you have a private circle. I felt the other was no good, no sympathy – write again – want to know when you go off. Much love, Liz.
December 7, 1908.Expect I’ll be over in time to go to meeting. Leaving here early to-morrow. Love to all. Liz.
December 29, 1908.Thanks for letter. Expect baby to-morrow and money to assurance Wednesday – snow very deep here just came last night, bitter wind. Glad you got to concert. Am just going out before dark. Much love, Liz.
March 20, 1909. Trust you are well, we are having better weather. Having a quiet time, will write to Will Sunday. Does poppy still come to you? Liz.
August 22, 1909.Expect to be here another week – am very busy don’t get any time to myself – may have more time next week. Hope you are well, getting ready for the wedding, I suppose, you will be very quiet when he goes – very cold here – lots of rain – church closed – have you been to any meetings lately? With love, Liz.
May 13, 1910. Friday morning, just got in, been up all night with a patient – am taking night duty till the crisis is over, a few nights or a week perhaps – so am all right this week – don’t do too much – love to both, Liz.
November 12, 1910. Nursing Home, Langholm Crescent, Darlington. Glad to hear from you. When the Hygiana is done let me know and I’ll get you some more. Hope things will soon be settled one way or the other. I’m still busy, very cold and wet to-night. This is a photo of the home, my lodgings are opposite. Much love to both, Liz.
August 8, 1911. Will be with you as soon as I can get things ready here, just left case, so have not much time – love to both, Liz.
Next week, we’ll look at correspondence to Liz from other nurses and the working conditions of private care in that era. Miss Lucas appears again, going to singing practice, concerts, and Unity Society meetings. The cards ahead also reveal the recreation and respite available in these seaside villas more than a century ago.
One day, a long time ago, we saw the King & Queen on a famous road. It was certainly something to write home about.
Cataloging a postcard album doesn’t happen in one pass. I might yearn for an efficient process that handles each card only minimally, but in the beginning even the most obvious information is so dense it can only be processed in stages. When it comes to the narratives on the reverse, the details are even more subtle. Look closely. Look again. Slowly build a theory, and an alternate. Be prepared when evidence says otherwise.
I have made three passes so far on the English album I mentioned last week. First, we sorted them alphabetically by place, then grouped by handwriting, then ordered by date. Each pass asks a different question: Where are we? Who is writing? What happens? And, for this set especially, when is the train?
This card collection was first assembled by Elizabeth Rowan Aird. Called Lizzie by her family and close friends and known professionally as Nurse Aird, she signed most of her own messages simply, Liz. Her postcards span nearly a decade, from 1903 into 1912. They have the rare benefit of including both sides of the correspondence.
Liz and her colleagues wrote to one another from nursing posts in the region. Liz organized her work scheduled by postcard and wrote home to her parents regularly. Luckily, she kept all of those cards many years on. They trace her friendships, her patients, and her long devotion to family back home in South Shields. The essays ahead will follow her travels closely: the places she stayed, the people she nursed, her life between shifts.
Some of her stops include Darlington, Middlesbrough, and West Hartlepool, which sit inside the Teesside region, built around the River Tees. Iron drove the area’s growth during the nineteenth century. Bridge building, railway manufacture, shipbuilding, and engineering all grew mightily from the local pride that ran deep in each trade in that era.
The roots of rail travel began in Darlington in 1825, when Edward Pease founded the Stockton and Darlington Railway. By the time Nurse Aird traveled regularly for work, the North Eastern Railway had knit these towns into a dense network. A nurse could move from patient to patient along the same rail lines built to move coal and iron.
These same railways also carried visitors to the coast. Holidays became easy fare for middle-class families as the railway network opened the seaside to them. The Stockton and Darlington Railway reached Saltburn from Redcar in 1861, and day trippers and holiday travelers followed almost immediately. Cheap excursion trains ran regularly. Whitley Bay, further north on the Tyneside coast, developed the same way.
Nurse Aird’s family and friends enjoyed the view from these places, too. The postcards tell of short trips to the coast, days off between assignments, a postcard sent home to signal a railway return. There is so much territory to explore in Nurse Aird’s travels more than a century ago. We’ll get there.
For now, we start on one very special day for the country as a whole. Nurse Aird’s younger brother John Aird and his companion were visiting London on holiday when they witnessed King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra open “The New Road.”
Seen King & Queen opening The New Road today. This is the 3rd time we have saw them since our arrival.
The London County Council first published its plans for Kingsway in 1898, though talk of a new route between Holborn and the Strand had circulated for years before that. The project became the largest road-building scheme in London since Regent Street in 1820. Building it through one of the most crowded corners of Victorian London meant that 3,500 residents lost their homes. One-hundred feet wide, it was one of the broadest streets in central London with a rail tunnel running under it. The road took the name Kingsway, honoring the reigning monarch.
The formal opening came on 18 October 1905, six years almost to the month after the LCC first laid out its plans. A royal procession led by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra moved through the street. A souvenir program printed on a decorative napkin laid out the day’s schedule and doubled as a keepsake. Alongside the pageantry, a petition from the Poplar Borough Council on behalf of the area’s unemployed.
John Aird and his companion stood somewhere in the crowd watching the procession go by. We know they were on holiday, having just visited Westminster and Big Ben. It was the third time they had seen the King and Queen on their short trip. Could that be true?
The Court Circular could settle the question. This daily official log of the sovereign’s engagements has run in The Times since 1803. If the King and Queen appeared twice more that week, the Circular would name the place and hour. Bound volumes covering this period sit in the Royal Collection Trust’s archive. The daily printed record itself lives in the Times Digital Archive.
It’s easy enough to believe John’s claim, though. The King kept a famously full public calendar. A visitor spending real time in London that October had a genuine chance of crossing paths with the royal couple more than once.
There’s another small clue in the postmark that reads: LONDON NW OCT 18 05 No. 19. Before modern postal codes, there were local office units. So John mailed this notable card home on a date and from a location that fits his story.
We will get one or two more glimpses of John Aird in this collection. Expect two or three more passes through the postcards at least, too, as we ride the rails in this river region. All thanks to Nurse Aird, who so often sent word ahead.
On any given day, a postcard can emerge from the collection that takes you back unexpectedly. Let’s return to Redcar.
My aim this week was to alphabetize an album of vintage English postcards, shuffling and sorting a large stack with an ally at my side who knows the geography infinitely better than me. English place names always elicit a story. Only a properly-schooled person can place Norton-on-Tees without at least a few context questions.
These two real photo postcards depict Coatham Road and the seaside pier, both of which are described in the previous article. Shortly, I’ll go back and add these to the original. There’s an even more interesting quest to learn more about Nurse Aird, her charges, and her surrounds.
This week these two cards provide a sweet reminder to keep going though we often don’t know what is ahead or around the corner. I am happy to make a short trip back to Redcar to remember the seaside, the donkeys, and how we keep up these traditions for everybody who comes after.
Who do you tell when disaster strikes? Despite their cheery reputation, postcards delivered the bad news, too.
One of seven tornados cut a swath through Omaha at 5:30pm on Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913. More than a hundred people perished with many more injured and the city’s infrastructure in ruin. A century later, scars of the event are still palpable in the story, architecture, and photographic memory of the city.
Devil Clouds is worth the watch. This hour-long documentary made around the 100th anniversary explores the event and its aftermath. I found it while researching the two stray postcards here. Digging through the Nebraska State Historical Society Archives, I got the tragic news more than a century late.
Disaster images fill in what words can’t describe. In the immediate response, their visual details and captions become coordinates for streets that no longer have familiar signs and recognizable landmarks. Soon, commercial postcards are for sale and news gets out to concerned family and friends. In Omaha, before-and-after pictures of restored homes and businesses appeared in less than a year. Even today, the moral story of the town is built on that rubble and their can-do recovery effort.
The vintage images help us contextualize world events then and now. Their lore of community resilience gives us clues about what to do when fortune fails us. We pool resources, stay connected, and get crafty. In Omaha, the ‘Hello Girls’ kept the few working telephone lines staffed right through the storm, then turned their building into a hospital in the days after.
Disaster postcards are a substantial niche in the much larger scene of collecting postcards that document historic events. As we discovered last year, the birth of a volcano in Mexico was global news in 1943. For a small village it was pure tragedy. For collectors, these images are rare finds.
June 1908 Kansas City – Santa Fe StreetJune Flood 1908 Kansas City
Though the timing is coincidental, comparing nature’s wrath with man-made disaster is also telling. Omaha was in a moment of rebirth as the fog of WWI descended on Europe. The Parícutin volcano plumes briefly stole the newsreel spotlight from wartime food-rationing in March 1943.
Why do we cause each other such suffering, knowing what life already has in store? The evidence is brutal, shouldn’t it also be obvious? It is best to prepare for tornado season, and avoid war.
Remember that you will die, but your vacation photos live on.
Looking back takes a measure of imagination. Even if it was you back then, time and distance change the story. The past isn’t exactly what we remember, especially when the memories aren’t even ours.
What happens when the evidence is all that is left?
Today’s time travel includes names, exact dates, even a Greyhound itinerary. In the collection, we’ll see images of two women with young children who may be grandparents now. If you’re familiar with California and its famous redwoods, this might look like a photo album of your own. Travel ephemera include maps, tickets and brochures, the lunch menu from Camp Curry, and a tiny recipe book from Fisherman’s Wharf.
This isn’t a family vacation, at least not ours. The genealogy is discoverable, but that’s not our aim. The arms-length context gives us another way to look back, a wander through the American West by bus in late summer 1955.
If you know these two, send me a note!
These photos were carefully fixed into a well-organized keepsake album documenting the fun-filled vacation, a roundtrip bus ride from Phoenix to San Francisco with a stayover at Camp Curry in Yosemite and a tour of Chinatown nightlife in the city.
Miss Betty, maybe.
Betty and Margaret with the kids.
Cute kids.
Love each other.
Stick together.
Even through this.
Even through this.
Also an adventure.
Yosemite!
Outdoor dining at Camp Curry.
Arriving home, but to the same place?
We’re not sure.
Here’s to old familiar furniture.
A meticulous hand-penciled numbering system helped me put the trip timeline together and the photo locations in order. Zooming in added more connections, including two images by Moulin, the famous photographer of San Francisco and its surrounds.
No doubt this collection came to us because of the postcards, which provides a lovely windows-down cruise up the West Coast with all the scenic stops.
Days of California Dreaming.
Signal Hill, Long Beach
Bixby Park, Long Beach
Redondo, Hermosa, and Manhattan beaches from Palos Verdes Estates view.
Union Station in Los Angeles
Los Angeles International Airport, circa 1955.
Los Angeles freeway interchange, circa 1955.
Merced, CA, looking west on Seventh Street.
Lake Yosemite, near Merced, California.
Arch Rock at Yosemite National Park
Yosemite national Park Entrance Gates and Ranger Station on Highway 140
Yosemite national Park, Half Dome and Sentinel Bridge over Merced River.
Yosemite National Park, panorama view from Wawona Tunnel.
El Capitan, Yosemite National Park.
Yosemite National Park, the Four Falls: Nevada, Yosemite, Vernal, and Bridal Veil.
Yosemite National Park, Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls.
Sequoia in the Mariposa Grove in the south entrance, Yosemite National Park.
Yosemite National Park, Big Trees Lodge.
Yosemite National Park, Wawona Tunnel Tree.
Nevada Fall with rainbow.
Yosemite National Park, Yosemite Lodge.
Yosemite National Park, the beautiful Ahwanee Hotel.
The Firefall that flares from light hitting Glacier Point.
Oakland Bay Bridge opened in 1936.
San Francisco City Hall, modeled after the US Capitol.
Mission Dolores in San Francisco, founded in 1776.
Panorama of San Francisco from Twin Peaks.
Golden Gate Park Conservatory, San Francisco
Portals of the Past, a relic from the great fire of 1906.
Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park
Steinhart Aquarium, circa 1955.
Fishing Fleet, photo by Gabriel Moulin,
Alcatraz Island, photo by Gabriel Moulin.
Union Square, San Francisco, circa 1955.
Mission Santa Barbara founded in 1786
Coit Memorial Tower on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.
Included is a night in Chinatown, as the itinerary promised. These rare, real photo postcards signed front and back may require more research.
For the summer of 1955 (and for many years after, I hope) these mementos stood in for all the laughter, mystery, and adventure that two gals can gather in a lifetime. Though the photos and memories are not our own, the little joys of summer still shine through. After all these years, the collection still reminds us to get on the bus and go.
Imagine all the reasons a man might vanish. Illness, catastrophe, bad deeds. Did our man Navarro step into the volcano itself? The less we know, the more his story unfolds.
In the early 1940s, Frida Kahlo was painting in the blue house in Coyoacán, building a self-image out of indigenous dress, pre-Columbian imagery, and a dramatic interiority of devotion and suffering. A few miles from there, tourists floated around the Xochimilco canals, waiting to have their photos taken aboard the flower boats.
In 1943, on those same canals, Emilio Fernández was filming María Candelaria starring Dolores Del Rio with the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. The film would win the Palme d’Or that year and launch the golden age of Mexican cinema with a story that revered the nation’s indigenous origins.
André Breton had come and gone, calling Mexico the most surrealist country in the world. The Louvre bought a work by Kahlo, an unprecedented purchase for the artist and also for its political prowess. The exiled Trotsky was an honored guest, at Diego Rivera’s request. President Lázaro Cárdenas had nationalized the oil industries and redistributed land, putting the state in the middle of an global argument with communism on one side and capitalism on the other. Then Mexico and the United States became WWII allies, and the floes of attention and resources became even more complicated.
Despite the war, Paricutín’s spectacular smoke clouds commanded global coverage. Life sent photographers. Newsreels carried the footage everywhere. Pan American detoured its flights so passengers could see the new volcano from the air.
Navarro passed quietly through it all, camera in hand, one day taking pictures of modernist architecture rising in glass and concrete, and the next documenting the earth itself splitting open in a cornfield.
Navarro pointed his lens at the same indigenous Mexico in the same moment, with the same seriousness. Kahlo’s name and artwork is now symbolic of her culture and synonymous with her city. Navarro vanished entirely, except for one folder in someone else’s archive in Washington, DC.
I exited the Green Line at L’Enfant station, passed quickly through security screening, got a visitor’s badge, and was escorted to the third floor by everyone’s secret best friend, the staff archivist. My bag checked into a locker, and with only my phone, paper, and a pencil, I entered the glass-walled room. Two other researchers had their places set out. My cart of materials was waiting for me near a sunny window with a view onto the leafy street below.
The cart held five Smithsonian manuscript boxes from the William F. Foshag Papers. Careful preparation had led me to order several boxes before and after Box 9. Correspondence was alphabetical, so I asked for the N folders. I also wanted to look through a large sample of images from other photographers, including Bill Foshag and his Mexican collaborators, mostly fellow mineralogists.
To summarize, these guys were into rocks and attribution. Most of the letters contained precise language about the rock samples collected, observed, and lent out by the Smithsonian under Foshag’s direction. Also, who should get credit, and thus funding and the opportunity to travel for further study. Foshag was an administrator by title, but his personal photos and travels in the Southern Hemisphere tell the story of an adventurous life.
Regarding Paricutín, Ambassador George S. Messersmith wrote to the Secretary of State on March 10, 1943, with the story that would later become the official news report and the synopsis we know now. A Tarascan farmer plowing his field saw smoke coming from a furrow, then a wall of molten lava rose a hundred feet high. The Mexican government bought the land and charged spectators twenty-five centavos to fund a new highway, eventually issuing the commemorative stamp that is fortuitously fixed on the back on one of Navarro’s postcards. Quite a clue, and an indelible time marker.
In his memo, the ambassador notes that pictures, movies, and stills are being taken and will be transmitted in due course. Later, pages of Foshag correspondence lament the poor condition of the only moving images, a short film documentary was made of the volcanic eruption but had not survived the reproduction process at home.
In early March, the Office of Naval Intelligence sent an attaché to Uruapan, who drove the rough road out to the volcano and reported back in detail. A camp had sprung up at a distance from the cone, which had to be moved several times in the early weeks. Lava advanced sixteen meters per hour, he calculated. Then, this line that now sounds like an outright lie: no photographer was seen, either in the day or at night.
A Smithsonian paleontologist drove down with two colleagues in June. His field narrative is almost literary, describing lava of “the consistency of stiff molasses,” and “the birth agonies of a new flow.” In closing, he remarked that they had been one of the fortunate few to witness the travail and anguish of one night in Paricutín’s life. The sole, spare, irrefutable fact we know is that Navarro was there, too.
The United States Committee for the Study of Paricutin Volcano tracked every project and every dollar, in order to report in triplicate to their funders at the U.S. Geological Survey, the State Department, and the Geological Society of America. For example, Celedonio Gutiérrez, a local man, was paid sixty pesos a week, later raised to eighty-five, to maintain the camp and keep the record. How did Celedonio miss Navarro?
The committee’s annual reports name every paper published: Krauskopf on eruption mechanics, Barnes and Romberg on gravity determinations, the Foshag-González history of the first two years, and the photographic record being prepared for the National Archives. It is the very same meticulously catalogued photographic record I was thumbing through that day.
Next, I opened a leather-bound album of careful black-and-white prints entitled, Photographs of Paricutin Volcano taken during the first three years of its activity. Selected from the Collection of Ezequiel Ordóñez.
Ordóñez was the dean of Mexican geology. The album was assembled and presented through the official Mexican research-coordination commission. A named, curated, institutional photographic record of Mexican origin to match the Foshag record. The credited gaze of two nations, on two sides of a border, doing the same careful work of attribution.
Finally I opened Folder 7, still fairly crisp tan cardstock with a tab hand-lettered in pencil. Only a surname, a question mark, and the content label: Navarro, ? Photographs of Paricutín, 1943–1944.
Inside, a stack of black-and-white prints in clear archival sleeves. The top print was instantly recognizable as Navarro, though I hadn’t seen it before. A great dark eruption column rising over the cone, a small bare tree silhouetted in the foreground, and the tiny block letters NAVARRO FOT. just legible at the lower right. The stack included twenty photos altogether, only five overlapping with mine.
Navarro seems to have worked exclusively in Kodak Mexicana materials. All of his cards are stamped with the EKC indicia, which was standard professional postcard stock of the day. He was not a hobbyist with a box camera, but more likely a commercial photographer running a business. Most of the scientific images in other folders were printed on regular photo paper, probably by means of institutional production houses. Navarro was printing locally, the same inky contrasts of a real photo, but with the variable frames and exposures found onsite.
We know his territory was wider than the volcano by virtue of the Hotel Virrey de Mendoza in Morelia and the unidentified sanatorium presumed to be in Uruapan. Draw lines between Morelia, Uruapan, and the volcano and you get the tight triangle of a working photographer’s range, anchored east in the state capital and west in the lava.
The most critical contrast between Navarro’s images and the scientific record are the visual content of the images themselves. Bless them, the scientists pointed the camera at the ground, caught the low refractions of an entirely static rock, and labeled it. Navarro captured a nation’s indigenous and religious history being consumed back into the earth.
The Fototeca Nacional del INAH holds regional negatives and studio collections that have never been digitized. The municipal archives in Morelia might have kept studio registrations and business permits from the 1940s. There are other archives to visit like Biblioteca Michoacana, and a few private collections now held at university libraries like Princeton. Occasionally, there are still Navarro cards for sale on eBay. Kodak has extensive business archives that could shed light on the places and people involved in the burgeoning photo film industry far south of Rochester, NY.
The glass-walled sanatorium may belong to the wave of modernist health architecture built under Mexico’s 1942 National Hospital Plan, all the transparency, light, and air needed for the treatment of tuberculosis. Tracing his actual footsteps to that building might place Navarro on a specific hillside or with a known client. Or, it might lead to a pile of rubble.
Some answers are not in any archive. Perhaps they are with a family in Morelia who remember a grandfather with a camera and a tall tale of a fire-breathing dragon emerging from the earth. His picture-proofs held an the old leather bound album that gets passed around at a kitchen table alongside stories that were never written down.
In one of the boxes, I found a small black-and-white photograph of a Purépecha family, four women and three men, seated and standing on a wooden porch in San Juan Parangaricutiro. Pressed above the photograph on an onionskin slip was a handwritten caption from Jenaro González.
A typical Tarascan family, photographed at their home. Aurora Cuaro, lower left. One of the few people in history who have attended the birth of a volcano. A very intelligent woman, one of our best and most reliable sources of information.
A second photograph in the folder showed Aurora alone, standing in front of a wooden building in a white blouse and a long embroidered skirt, smiling straight at the camera. My photo of the photo is terrible, but you can still see her. Clear-eyed. At ease.
Aurora Cuaro lived inside the eruption. It happened in her cornfield, her parish, her sky. Foshag and González knew this and credited her, in writing, by name.
What the archive does not hold is what she knew. The Purépecha had lived in this volcanic landscape for centuries, and they had ways of reading the ground that did not begin in February 1943 and did not end when Paricutín went dormant in 1952. Aurora and her neighbors brought a lived intelligence of their own to the encounter with the era. This is the deeper kind of absence. Undoubtedly, the Cuaro family knew Navarro.
We will probably never know his first name or see his face. I once thought I had a photograph of him, and it turned out to be a man with surveying equipment, not a camera. Was he born in Michoacán or came from somewhere else? Was he twenty-five or fifty in 1943? What did he know of Frida Kahlo, and what did he think about war? After all this time, where is Navarro now?
Dionicio Pulido, the farmer whose cornfield erupted, and whose face will never be forgotten.
With special thanks to the staff of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
In 1943, director Emilio Fernández was filming a scene much like this one on the flower canals of Xochimilco in Mexico City. His film, María Candelaria, would win the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year and launch the golden age of Mexican cinema, introducing a spare and stylized visual landscape that rested in reverence for the country’s Purépecha past.
This flower boat image is another to emerge from an album of old black and white photographs from mid-century in the Michoacán region of Mexico. The photos may or may not belong to the same set. Only a few spare clues suggest any connection at all.
Tomorrow, I head down to the National Archives Reading Room at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC, to finally open Folder 7 in Box 9, the trove of Navarro materials that I hope may reveal more about our enigmatic photographer.
I’ve order an additional five boxes of materials from the Foshag archives, correspondence and comparative images that may give us more context for the post-war decade that brought intense global attention to an otherwise quiet region of the world.
Political foment, modern artistic aspirations, scientific discovery, and the earth itself churning below. Let’s follow where Navarro goes next.
