On Stockport's Lower Hillgate in 1908 looking for a German band.

We are looking up Lower Hillgate in Stockport sometime in the summer of 1905 and with a bit of imagination it is not hard to reconstruct the scene, not least because some of the buildings have survived almost intact.

That said what interests me more is the message on the back from Clara to her friend Miss Carless of Guildford which she sent just three years after our picture was taken.

Clara is full of the news that she has “just bought four new songs this morning.” Now the four included Oh, Oh Antonio, and In the Twi Twi Twilight and Has anyone seen a German Band?

And new they were with Has anyone seen a German Band? having been published the year before in 1907.

We are of course in that time when people still bought sheet music and performed the songs themselves.

Sadly we will never know what Miss Carless thought of the songs or for that matter how good a singer was Clara.

Picture; Lower Hillgate, from the series Stockport, by Tuck & Sons, 1905 courtesy of Tuck DB, http://tuckdb.org/