Continuing Workshop Series: Postcard Journeys: Image, Text, Media

Saturday 18 May 2019, 10:00 – 18:00 SOAS, University of London, 10 Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, WC1X 0XG

Room: B103 (Brunei Gallery)

Over the last 25 years there has been a slowly emerging and disparate field of scholarship that has tried to take picture postcards as something more than a fading ephemeral trace of holiday travels. Postcards have increasing been theorized as a kind of social media that mobilize a complex set of relations amongst objects, producers, senders, recipients and viewers within larger fields of social history and visual culture. This workshop is the 3rd in a series that has tried to explore and consolidate this fledging field of postcard studies. We are pleased to welcome a broad range of scholars who are part of an interdisciplinary rethink of what has, since the late 19th century, been a massive transcultural phenomenon that has linked places and people, images and text on a global scale. 10:00 – 10:30 Stephen Hughes and Emily Stevenson (SOAS)

Introduction and Welcome

10:30 – 11:15 Julia Gillen (Lancaster University) Writing Edwardian Postcards: a tale of three Londoners

11:15 – 12:00 Tom Jackson (Author and Curator of Postcard From the Past) White City: Dreams and Illusions 12:00 – 12.45 Graham W. Shaw (School of Advanced Study, University of London) Collecting and researching postcards of South Asia: from

the general to the particular

12:45 – 13:45 Lunch Break 13.45 – 14:30 Rebecca Preston (Royal Holloway) Not Just a Pretty Picture: Messages, Marks and Meanings in

Edwardian Postcard Culture

14:30 – 15:15 Geoffrey Crossick (School of Advanced Study, University of London) ‘Tell me what you think of our little shop’: postcards of shopkeepers in early 20th-century Britain and France

15:15 – 16:00 Gilles Teulié (Aix-Marseille University) British Imperial Troops in Marseilles: First World War Postcards and the First Circle of Memory

16:00 – 16.30 Tea and Coffee Break 16.30 – 17.15 Charles Gore (SOAS) Fire and Contestation: Subaltern voices in postcards of Lagos

colony, Nigeria, 1890-1910

17:15 – 18:00 Konstantinos Andriotis (Middlesex University) Exploring past experiences of a lost culture through postcards

Paper Abstracts

2

Writing Edwardian Postcards: a tale of three Londoners

Julia Gillen The postcard was very quickly adopted across Europe after its invention in 1869. In cities there were several deliveries a day, so that cards could be experienced as virtually synchronous. As the possibilities of using images increased and at least half of one side could be used for a message, the picture postcard became extremely popular after 1902. We have calculated from the Postmaster General’s reports that between 1902 and 1910 almost six billion cards were send in Great Britain. Released from the etiquette and obligations of formal letter writing, people took to exchanging brief, rapid, multimodal messages with a verve not to be seen again until the digital revolution. In this paper I explore postcard writing and reading from a Literacy Studies perspective (Barton & Hall, 1999; Gillen, 2018). Our research questions include: What were the demographic characteristics of those who wrote picture postcards? What did they write about and how did they make use of the multimodality of the postcard? What were the standards of literacy across the social classes as evidenced by picture postcard use? In this paper I draw on postcards to three Londoners to illustrate some our findings. I combine textual and material analyses with an investigation of historical sources, including census records, to investigate how the postcard was used in London in the early twentieth century. Barton, D., & Hall, N. (Eds.). (1999). Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Gillen, J. (2018). “I should have wrote a letter tonight:” a Literacy Studies perspective on the Edwardian postcard. In M. I. Matthews-Schlinzig & C. Socha (Eds.), What is a letter? an interdisciplinary approach„Was ist ein Brief? — Eine interdisziplinäre Annäherung“ (pp. 123–140). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Julia Gillen is Reader in Digital Literacies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language and Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre. She is also a member of the Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning and the Centre for Mobilities Research. She is Co-Investigator in the ESRC/DFID project Transforming deaf learners’ multiliteracies into sustainable educational approaches and is director of the Edwardian Postcard Project.

Paper Abstracts

3

White City: Dreams and Illusions

Tom Jackson Tom Jackson presents some his postcards from the 1908 Franco British Exhibition and uses them to take a whistle-stop tour round the West London exhibition ground, and to reflect on some of the illusions, fabrications and contradictions in both the postcards and in the exhibition itself. Tom Jackson is the curator of the popular Twitter account Postcard from the Past (@pastpostcard) which has been running since 2016. He has shared thousands of postcards from his collection and now has more than70,000 followers. He is also author of the book ‘Postcard from the Past’ and host of ‘Podcast from the Past’.

Paper Abstracts

4

Collecting and researching postcards of South Asia: from the general to the particular

Graham W. Shaw The presentation will begin with some overall reflections on building a collection of 12,000 postcards of South Asia, ethnographical as well as topographical, produced between the 1890s and the 1940s. Their range, themes and audiences will be briefly explored. Since disposing of that collection, my collecting and research in postcards has narrowed down to supporting my wider interest in the history of print culture in the Indian sub-continent, mainly through the acquisition of ‘bazaar’ advertising cards and cards relating to the phenomenon of Christian missionary publishing in the region. Graham W. Shaw is Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, having retired from the British Library as Head of Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections at the British Library at the end of 2010.

Paper Abstracts

5

Not Just a Pretty Picture: Messages, Marks and Meanings in Edwardian Postcard Culture

Rebecca Preston

Edwardian Britain was struck by a postcard craze. Postcard views were produced of almost every conceivable subject and place and sent for all manner of reasons. While this was certainly a new visual phenomenon, the handwritten word played a large part in its popularity and endurance.

Postcards were cheap to buy and send. Those posted within Britain travelled at speed: with four posts a day, they could be received on the day they were sent. Many travelled further afield. Messages were usually brief and many requested ‘PCs’ by return, emphasising their sense of immediacy. Despite their ephemeral nature, the combination of word and image often gave postcards a second life as keepsakes within the home. They were stuck in books and pinned on walls. Others were held in special albums that displayed both sides of the card, underlining the dual significance of word and image.

Drawing on a range of approaches to photographs as visual, textual and material objects, this paper focuses on British photographic postcards depicting home and family. It looks at how these already personal objects were further individualised with messages and marks, at hand-coloured and homemade examples, and how they were shared. It considers postcards sent for mundane reasons and those made and sent to mark special moments in the lifecycle and finishes by looking at their role in family history and how they helped connect people across space and time.

Rebecca Preston’s background is in the history of design and historical geography and she is currently a research associate in the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She also works freelance on historic building and landscape projects. Her interest in postcards developed from their uses as visual sources for this research to considering them as visual, written and material things in their own right.

Paper Abstracts

6

‘Tell me what you think of our little shop’: postcards of shopkeepers in early 20th-century Britain and France

Geoffrey Crossick

In the first decade of the 20th century shopkeepers in Britain and France started having photographs taken of themselves, family, employees, only rarely customers, in front of their shops. These real photos were printed and used as postcards to carry a variety of messages from the mundane to the significant. I became interested in them when working on the social history of the petite bourgeoisie in Britain and continental Europe. What started as merely buying photographs related to a topic I was working on became a realisation that reading these photographs might constitute another way of understanding the petite bourgeoisie. Their potential as a historical source means appreciating that these were not just photographs taken at a time when popular photography was expanding fast, indeed they were generally taken by professionals not amateurs, but were photographs explicitly produced and used as postcards. How they were used is one key part of analysing the images themselves. This presentation will consider the rapid rise of postcards as an artefact and means of communication in Britain and France, ask how they were produced and how they were used, and identify some preliminary conclusions about shopkeepers as a social group that I’d draw as a historian from the postcards and how they were used. Geoffrey Crossick is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, School of Advanced Study, University of London. His research specialises in the social history of Britain and continental Europe in the modern period, and he has published extensively on the social history of the petite bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and master artisans. He is also currently Chair of the Crafts Council and member of the Boards of the Horniman Museum, Guidhall School of Music & Drama, and the National Film & Television School and former Director of the AHRC.

Paper Abstracts

7

British Imperial Troops in Marseilles: First World War Postcards and the First Circle of Memory

Gilles Teulié

Immediate history and memory are intertwined in a postcard, and even before an event was over (for example, when the British troops left Marseilles to travel to the Western Front), the memory process had already begun. Postcard editing – the commercial choice of which images to make and reproduce - was just as concerned as written messages with preserving the moments that a person had witnessed or experienced. In this presentation, I would like to conceptualize photographic postcards as comprising a ‘first circle of memory’, constructed during wartime that continues to influence how we understand and remember the First World War after its centenary. I will argue that it is within the very commercialization of postcards (the processes of editing and selling) that we find this first circle of memory, or what is recorded in order to satisfy the customer who wishes to preserve the memory of the event they have witnessed. The questions I raise here are what is preserved, how this is achieved, and what the implications of these choices for future processes of memory are. In order to do so, I will endeavour to show the mechanisms that will lead to the making of a postcard, from the stage when the photographer takes a picture to when the postcard is preserved in an album, thereby enabling us to understand the social and mental process that lead to the publication of a picture postcard in the first years of the 20th century.

Gilles Teulié is Professor of British and Commonwealth Studies at Aix-Marseille University. His research center is the LERMA (acronym in French for research center for anglophone studies). He has written extensively on South African history and the Victorian period for examplee; Afrikaners and the Anglo-Boer War: Les Afrikaners et la guerre anglo-Boer 1899-1902. Etude des cultures populaires et des mentalités en presence, Montpellier University Press, 2000). He is currently working on war memories, as well as the mediatisation of European Empires through early picture postcards.

Paper Abstracts

8

Fire and Contestation: Subaltern voices in postcards of Lagos colony, Nigeria, 1890-1910

Charles Gore

This presentation will consider research objectives and outcomes in relation to postcards produced depicting a range of contexts in Lagos colony and beyond between 1890 and 1910. This is a period in which the tension between interests of British commerce and a coastal enclave administration become subsumed within the wider projects of empire with ensuing enclosures of the hinterlands in competition with other European nations, most notably France. The focus of the presentation is on African photographers and in particular Neils Walwin Hom and his making of a postcard archive for public consumption which offer positionings on the wider changes taking place. Charles Gore is Senior Lecturer in the History of African Art at SOAS, University of London. He has carried out extensive research in southern Nigeria for 20 years at Benin City in Edo state working with practitioners of the local indigenous religion and with brasscasters; and also carried out research in Anambra and Ondo states; and in the Niger delta. Along with doing research as an art historian and anthropologist, he works as an artist (figurative, expressionist) in various media (oil, watercolour, pastel, mixed media, etching, monotypes, photography).

Paper Abstracts

9

Exploring past experiences of a lost culture through postcards

Konstantinos Andriotis

From the time picture postcards were first introduced, more than a century ago, writing on postcards has been a popular means of sharing impressions and experiences. Despite the significance of postcards for revealing the meaning that specific places represent to travellers, postcards have remained underutilized and unappreciated as a means of transcribing “reality” and research interest has been devoted mainly on the critical analysis of photographic representations on the fronts of postcards. This study uses as a sample 501 postcards with images from Smyrne, now Izmir, a city with a very long and rich cultural past, which disappeared following the destruction of the city on 13th of September 1922 and the massacre and scattering of its inhabitants. Smyrne was selected because in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth it was one of the principal ports and commercial centres, combining the industriousness of the West with the excitement and pleasures of the East, comprising what somebody calls today a Western enclave. The findings prove that not only the images on the front of postcards can reveal a considerable amount of information about early travelling, but also that the messages on their back, but also the postmarks, names and addresses of the recipient as well as captions printed to accompany the image can offer a valuable glimpse into travelling experiences and into constructing and reconstructing the understanding of the society and culture of the city at the time of the textual production of postcards. Kostantinos Andriotis is Professor in Tourism at Middlesex Univerisity. He is Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Tourism Policy (IJTP), Book Series Editor for the CABI Regional Tourism Series and Associate Editor for Annals of Tourism Research.