The 75 cards from Alfred to Alice …….

It began with a picture postcard of the German Fountain outside The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.*

Unknown and undated

And that was going to be the story which looked interesting given that the fountain was gifted to the Ottoman Empire by the German Emperor in 1898 and the picture postcard of the scene was sent by a British soldier to his wife in 1918.

German Fountain, no date

The soldier was Edward Gaynor, who was 43, had been married to Alice for 20 years and came from Paddington in London.

All of which is a nice twisty story involving a British soldier who selected and sent a picture of a German fountain in a country Britain was fighting.

Long before I had thought it through, I pondered on just what Mr. Gaynor would have made of the fountain, The Hagia Sophia or Istanbul.

Of course, that scenario could not have happened and instead we are dealing with a card he picked up somewhere and sent from somewhere in the Middle East.  This I know because on one postcard he writes to Alice that he had “managed to get hold of a series of postcards which I will send to you”. **

Unknown soldiers, no date

Many of these are of Salonika and to maintain the irony were published by a German company based in Cologne.

Just where he was stationed is unclear, but there are 75 cards in the collection dating from November 1917 through to January 1918.

So far, I haven’t been able to track his service record, which may well be on one of the huge numbers which were damaged by enemy action during the Second World War.

I know that he did survive and returned to Alice and the family home in Paddington, resuming his job as a ware houseman. 

Unknown and undated

But at the age of 25 in 1901 he had given his occupation as “a groom” which may help explain why some of the pictures from the 75 show groups of men with horses.

And there is a suggestion that at least one of the images may be of men from the Royal Artillery while another shows three mounted soldiers one of whom might be Edward.

There is a degree of speculation here but the soldier in question is older that his comrades and we know that in 1914 Edward would have been 43.

The rest as they say is down to the experts to interrogate the cap badges and trawl the military records for the Middle East.

The cards do offer up one simple fact that Edward lived all of his civilian life in west London, and we can track Mr. and Mrs Gaynor at several addresses all close to each other, and  at least two are still there.

And the collection is a remarkable find, both because of the number of cards, and what they tell us about the life of Edward and Alice during a challenging time, but above all that the collection has survived.

I know that Alice died in 1933 and Edward in the late 1940s which then raises those tantalizing questions of who saved the collection, who finally chose to dispense with it and how many collectors have held the 75 cards in the 105 years since the last arrived at 50 Alfred Road, Acton in 1918?

How young

Leaving just one last observation which is just how young many of these men appear, which of course was the case.

Location; the Middle East and west London

Pictures; Edward Gaynor writes home, November 1917-December 1918, courtesy of David Harrop

*Formerly a Christian church, it is now a mosque and a major cultural and historical site in Istanbul, Turkey. 

The building was erected three times by the Eastern Roman Empire. 

The present Hagia Sophia is the third, built in 537 AD. 

It was an Orthodox church until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, then a mosque until 1935, then a museum and then from 2020 a mosque again, as well as being a Roman Catholic cathedral for some decades after the Fourth Crusade of 1204". The Hagia Sophia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia

**November 30th, 1917