Skip to main content

London 1977: Gentlemen, Photographers and Queens

MJ Malleck//

I love the message in today’s postcard, it is addressed to “Betty & Kay,” and it feels a bit like a boast to one’s girlfriends, who you know will be delighted for your good fortune.

September 29, 1977

Dear Girls:

Two weeks in London! A gentleman friend to dine and go to the theatre with! (We do share the costs of dinners and most theatres) But it has been fun. To Norway on Sunday.
Love Dorothy L.

The phrase gentleman friend means suitor, or beau, or male lover.

There is a short story by the Anton Chekhov called A Gentleman Friend which you can read here….

https://americanliterature.com/author/anton-chekhov/short-story/a-gentleman-friend

Perhaps Dorothy and her “gentleman friend” went to see Jesus Christ Superstar at the Palace Theatre. While many religious groups spoke against the play, especially as like Godspell it did not depict the crucifixion, it seems that Dorothy was a thoroughly modern girl. She pays her own way! So, she may have wanted to see JCS. The show ran in London between 1972 and 1980 and was the longest-running West End musical before Cats came along in 1989.

The postcard was mailed on September 30 from Paddington Station.

On the front is a photograph of a ceremonial occasion at Windsor Castle, taken and published by John Wilfrid Hinde (1916-1997) who had been a documentary, war, and advertising photographer during WWII. Hinde’s images are lauded by the photographer Martin Parr as “some of the strongest images of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s”. Hinde, Parr said, was: “fastidious about the colour, the saturation, the technique, and that paid off.” Hinde is known as a photographer who helped make colour photography technically and commercially viable during the Second World War. He authored an article in 1939 about the practice.

Hinde did indeed become best known for his colourful postcards, seen as an artform today. You can buy a book called Nothing to Write Home About by Michelle Abadie and Sue Beale (2007) which displays his images with intense colour postcards. In 2010 original transparencies of his postcard images were scanned and digitally restored, from which a series of limited-edition archival prints were made. Some of these prints were exhibited in London in 2011 and then internationally.

1977 was the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, which included a chain of 102 beacon bonfires across the country, the first lit by the Queen at Windsor Castle in June. By September most of the official celebrating would be over. The rock band Queen had also ended their successful tour A Day at the Races in London in June. This was the first time they played the full-length version of Bohemian Rhapsody. They would go out on tour again in November for the tour News of the World.

I’m glad that Dorothy and the gentleman got out of London on Sunday, October 2nd as one day later the undertakers in that city went on strike and left more than eight hundred corpses unburied.

Here is a short film of a day in Oslo, Norway in 1977 so you can see what Dorothy may have seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SyPI9kOiQU

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Netflix Castle, Averting Disaster and Spider Plants

Today’s postcard is a dusk photograph of a castle in Sinaia, a small town that is a short train ride from Bucharest. Bucharest May 10 th (1975) Dear Charlotte and Phil, This isn’t in the same class as a Doug Gore tour, but we certainly are seeing some beautiful country castles and churches. Sorry you and Phil aren’t here to go to the opera tomorrow night. It begins at 7 PM a little better than the 11 PM concert in Madrid. Eleanor and I are having a good time but I sure miss Les. Love Jo PS The plant needs very little water. Hope it isn’t raising your Hydro bill. You, dear reader, have maybe seen this castle, Peles, in some holiday movies on Netflix (A Christmas Prince and its two sequels). It is not as old as you’d expect, begun in 1873 to be a summer residence for King Carol I. The King was not easily satisfied, rejecting the first three plans he saw, and then, continually adding and renovating until he died in 1914. After King Michael I’s forced abdication in 1947, the Communist reg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ehrwald, Austria: Hats Off to Pensions, Borders in the Air

Today’s postcard is from Ehrwald, Austria. February 19, 1958. It says: “ Dear Phil & Charlotte, Enjoying a skiing and sight-seeing holiday in Western Austria. The kids are enjoying the snow, we had so little of it in France. Our Pension is called Daheim, and it is like a ski lodge and much cheaper than staying at a hotel. Expect to go up to the top of Germany’s highest mountain on a cable car soon and intend to go to Innsbruck tomorrow. Took some ski lessons from a read Austrian ski champ but I still get stiff & sore. Must be getting old! Best Regards from Austria, Ted & Mildred.” Hard to know who wrote it and who is stiff, Ted or Mildred, as in 1958 women might have written correspondence but signed husband’s name first. (As it is also addressed to a couple, man’s name first.) This is pre-Air BnB era, so I am interested in the idea of a Pension being cheaper than a hotel. Apparently, from Fodor’s Travel, I learn that a pensione (spelt correctly with an e on the end i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Two Innovators in Lucerne: Eduard and Franz

by MJ Malleck// Today I’ve pulled a blank souvenir postcard depicting the town of Lucerne and Mount Pilatus in the distance. The town of Lucerne sits on the fourth largest lake in Switzerland, near to Mt. Pilatus, where legend says a dragon once lived. Perhaps the visitors took the 4,618-meter-long cogwheel railway from Alpnachstad (a village close to Lucerne by train) to the mountain peak. With a gradient of 48% (meaning it gains 48 feet in elevation for every 100 feet forward, disregarding the incline) it is the steepest cogwheel railway in the world. When engineer Eduard Locher suggested putting a railway on Mount Pilatus he was mocked, but his masterpiece was exhibited at the 1889 World Fair in Paris and is still in use today. He cleverly devised his system using two horizontally rotating cogwheels. Most of these systems (also called rack railway, or rack-and-pinion) put the toothed rail underneath the train, between the running rails. On flat surfaces, friction is enough.   ...
Post a Comment
Read more