Back with the White Lion and the Scala in 1960 with a message destined for the other side of the Iron Curtain

Now, you can wait for a postcard on Withington to appear and then two turn up at the same time.

So after yesterday’s picture of the Scala on Wilmslow Road here is almost the same scene shot from the other side.

And I rather think it will have been the same photographer who just walked the few yards and set up business all over again.

So there in the corner is the picture house with the White Lion beside it.

I knew both of them well but it will be a full decade before the dive bar was opened in the cellar, with the posters which aped politicians from the old Soviet Union and ere really only adverts for Watney’s Red Barrel.

The date on the collection is 1960 but our card was sent seven years later in April 1967.

And it  is a pointer to the longevity of the postcard which had begun in the late 19th century but was very much on a downward spiral by the time this one started on its journey to Czechoslovakia.

Once in the absence of the telephone and frequent deliveries and collections the picture postcard was the most effective way of sending a message.

So much so that one sent in the morning would arrive later in the day.

But of course by 1967 all that was changing for while there might still not be a phone in every home there would be a phone box pretty much everywhere.

I can still remember the long cold evenings spent phoning home from the kiosk on the corner of Wilmslow and Egerton Crescent, but that is beginning to offer up a little too much detail so I shall close with the observation that our card was gong behind the Iron Curtain and 1967 was a full year before the Prague Spring and many decades before the fall of the Wall.

And if that is not enough of a puzzle there is one more and that revolves around the film at the Scala which on that summer's day in 1960 was East of Java.

Now the only film I can track down was Krakatoa, East of Java, which came out in 1969 and is unlikely to have hit Withington until the early 70s.

Of course there will be an explanation and I guess some one with the knowledge to solve the mystery.

We shall see.

Picture; Wilmlsow Road and the White Lion 1960, from the set Withington Lillywhite, Tuck & Sons, courtesy of TuckDB http://tuckdb.org/history