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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

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