A message from the R.M.S. Mauretania …..

 Picture postcards have been a popular way of messaging friends, sweethearts and family for over 150 years.

And they have come in many different guises, from street scenes and famous landmarks, to the comic, and rude, and still even in the age of the mobile camera and social messaging cling on as a way of sharing a holiday with people back home.

Of all the picture postcards that have been issued my favourite has to the “silk cards”.

These were popular in the early decades of the last century and consist of fabric image.

I first came across them during research for a book on Manchester and the Great War when the silks and popular with troops who often chose a silk incorporating the badge of their regiment.*

But the cards predate the war and lingered on into the 1920s.

All of which is an introduction to this one of the R.M.S Mauretania, which was sent on July 1st 1908, just two years after the ship took to the waves.  

At this point I could launch into its history but that has been done already and I am not one to lift the work of others. So, its story is there if you follow the link.*

Instead, I am more interested in the card, which has been less than forth coming.

I don’t know who sent it and only have the name of the woman who received the card.

I had a momentary flutter when my old friend David “posty” Harrop told me he has just acquired the card and there was an address in the USA.

The potential for a visit to the address via google maps seemed an exciting prospect, but alas the sender just addressed it to Miss. Aileen Roberts, Gary, Indiana, USA.

And that was a long shot given that in 1910 the population of the town was 16,000 and growing owing to the expansion of the steel industry which is how the place came about just 4 years earlier when U.S. Steel chose the site for its new plant.

The works were named Gary Works after the lawyer Elbert Henry Gary, who was the founding chairman of the United States Steel Corporation who generously donated his name to the newly emerging city.*

Now, that’s a long way from a postcard sent form the SS Mauretania, but until I find out more that is it.

Pictures; silk post card,1908, from the collection of David Harrop 

*A new book on Manchester and the Great War, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/A%20new%20book%20on%20Manchester%20and%20the%20Great%20War

** R.M.S. Mauretania, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Mauretania_(1906)

***Gary, Indiana, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary,_Indiana