Over the last two months I have been looking at some of the cards from David Harrop’s collection and it occurred to me that none of them have focused on that rich vein of comic cards.*
They range from the little boy sheltering under the huge stomach of a policeman with the caption “I’m taking cover from Zeppelins” to ones which I guess just got past the postman.
Not that this one strictly fits that bill but it is lighter and less sentimental than some and has a message which cuts to the heart of what was going on.
For on the reverse young Alice is told the address, service number and company of what must have been her boyfriend.
She was just fifteen when she received her card and she was still living at home with her parents.
Mr William Davis was a cab driver. He had married Ellen in 1896 and they had two sons and two daughters.
In 1930 she married Ernest James Downton and if I have got this right she died in 1969, a full eleven years before her husband.
Sadly at present there is no record of the young bugler who was so keen on Alice knowing where he was stationed.
But I am confident that something of E Blyde, number 376053, of A Company POR’s will turn up, even if I have to go looking for the Alma Barracks, Blackdown Camp in Hampshire.
So it is a fitting card to finish on carrying as it does the knowledge of separation and a hint of something darker. Of course at present we don’t know what happened to him. He may have come through and like so many people did not or could not pick up where he left off.
And that I think is an appropriate note to close on except to say that there are two exhibitions of David’s collections later in the summer.
Picture; from the collection of David Harrop
*David Harrop, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/David%20Harrop
**The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport from July 28 and Oldham Archives, Union Street, Oldham, from August 4
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