Tag: seaside holidays

First Day on Kingsway

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.

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