An Important Find

During the 'Great' War of 1914-18 your great grandmother, Eda, was engaged to a soldier called Wilfred Lovelady. While he was at the front at Christmastime 1914 he started an autograph book for her which he and his army colleagues filled with comments, poems, drawings and cartoons. When he was home on leave around Haslingden in Lancashire where they lived, a lot of friends also completed their individual pages of which there are around 100. Unfortunately Wilf was killed in action so they didn't marry. After the War she met your great Granddad, John, known as Jack, and married him; G'ma, me and you three are the subsequent and consecutive result. The words on the opening page must have been a great comfort to Eda when Wilf was killed:

To Miss Eda Parkinson.
Christmas 1914

I hope fair owner of this book
When in your darkest hour;
Should you inside its pages look,
Find sunshine follows shower.

G'ma gave me the book some years ago for safe keeping and, now I can 'fess up, I thought I'd lost it; I couldn't find it anywhere. I was pretty sure I'd put it somewhere really, really safe but when I couldn't find it I convinced myself I'd left it in the Bentley when I traded it in three years ago. I even went and checked the glove compartment, boot (trunk!) and under the seats as its still sitting patiently in the showroom waiting to be claimed.

At some point in the 94 years of its existence someone (I suspect Eda) has pasted a polythene sheet between each page to help preserve them. It has worked because the pages are in very good condition but it was an extreme solution.

Jack was insanely jealous of Eda's relationship with Wilf and went through the autograph book systematically deleting the Lovelady part of Wilf's signature from drawings and poems but has left the 'W' or 'Wilf' intact; read into that whatever psychological diagnosis you wish.



There are some superb cartoons and drawings demonstrating amazing pen- and brushmanship and giving an insightful glimpse into the minds and sense of humour during a bad time. This one is by Colin Atkin (not Tommy Atkins :) who gets his numbers mixed and dates it as 3/1/31

The pages were completed in random order; this one is a pencil portrait of Eda done by Jack on August 28 1919.








This poem by a corporal in the ASC from Glasgow appears to be original as Google doesn't recognise it and, as well you know, 'Nothing beats the G!' In the bottom, left-hand corner is the answer to a question from the previous page, 'What does a billiard ball do when it stops rolling.' Answer; 'Looks round.'

Many of the poems and messages are directed at Eda or at both Eda and Wilf as a couple. Many of the entries refer to Eda's beauty (she was) and some of them are deliberately ambiguous, such as this from 'W.R.P.' of Letchworth and dated 25/XI/XVI;

A fee simple and a simple fee
And all the fees in tail
Are nothing when compared with thee
Thou best of fees - Female.

... and there are a lot of quotations from the Classics; not something you would read nowadays I think.

This is one of my favourites, drawn by Geo. N. Preston (Sheffield) of the A.S.C. Band in December 1916 and showing beautiful writing style.



This was done in coloured pencil on Dec 30/14 and is of Brungerley Bridge Clitheroe. When you think of the conditions these pictures were produced in - under fire in the trenches in deep winter - they are remarkable.
























E Bracewell of Accrington wrote on New Year's Day 1917:

Prisoners of War
They fought for us, till they could fight no more
And overwhelmed, were captured by the foe
There they must stay, poor prisoners of war
Untill the power that claimed them is laid low.


These two are fascinating. The drawing on the right, titled When Love is Blind, is by Wilf on Christmas Day 1914 and shows him phoning Eda long distance - that's the 'blind' bit. However, Wilf is dressed in a white shirt and dress jacket so he wasn't depicting himself at the front. Maybe he hadn't actually left Blighty at that stage or maybe he was just fantasizing, who knows? The poem on the left is by Jack and done in January 1920 and he's also scratched out the Lovelady signature on the right-hand drawing but in what looks like ballpen so it must have been much, much later than even the poem.

This is by Jack (Jan 6/19) titled THE.ETERNAL.QUESTION and shows him in his Postman's uniform with his arm round Eda starting on the long walk of life so maybe that's the day he proposed.





This is a beaut! Its asking Eda to Forget-him-not and is by Evan Jones who was an Inspector of Nuisances, Explosives, Petroleum and Omnibuses with the Llandaff and Dinas Powis Rural District Council; awesome.














Eda's brother George was killed on 17 September 1916; this is a memorial drawing by someone who's name I don't recognise.







I've looked these pages oe'r and o'er,
To see what other's, have wrote before,
And in this lonely, spot.
I simply write, For-get-me-not.

That is by A. Bond on 11/1/20; it's Auntie Alice from Blackpool - Jack's sister.

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All in all, a very valuable find. I'll find an expert in these things and have it assessed for importance as a historical document.

Food for Thought

A A Gill is my fave ever restaurant critic. Hannah thinks it strange that anyone should have a fave restaurant critic but, hey, strange is OK.

Check out this in a review from Budapest:

What it did have was gypsy violinists. Ah, now I remember what Hungary’s famous for. The most stressful thing in the entire world is to be shut in a room with a questing gypsy violinist. In terms of naked anxiety, it’s way beyond your phone going off during Hamlet’s soliloquy, swimming with jellyfish, or getting dressed up in a Formula One bondage costume in the back of a cab between traffic lights. I watched the great white violinist and the midget accordionist saw their way through the tables of tourists. He circled a hapless Korean couple. They shrank in terror and numb incomprehension as his fat, malevolently bland face, with its slick black pate and golden grin, loomed over them. He winked a terrifyingly dull eye that rolled back in his head and with one fluid movement, too fast to decipher, he was among them with Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. It was horrible. Shrieking notes of psychotic dexterity, wringing screaming tremolos and pitiful vibratos from every riff. The air was filled with sentimental death. There is no known defence against an adult male gypsy violinist in an enclosed space: in a Hungarian restaurant, no one can hear you scream.

Now isn't that just sublimely, violently, incisively cruel? Beautiful.

... and then, when he eventually gets round to writing about the restaurant under review (the above one was an aside!):

I’m going to get the food out of the way as quickly as possible, because that was the only way to eat it, and I really don’t want to dwell on the liver tart, an offal brick. The artichoke and smoked salmon salad was plainly the result of a shoplifting sprint to an all-night supermarket; the lamb was a soggy brown muscle. Hopefully the monkfish will have kept its vow of celibacy and not produced any more like it. There was something with lavender ice cream on the top, the colour of melted Barbies, that tasted like a pensioner’s knicker drawer.

That is good writing indeed.

The top photo was taken at 10 am yesterday and the second one at 11 am yesterday!

The gate now has a sign so I guess that's final capitulation and Tom, Elliot and Hannah win the naming rights 'discussion.'

This handsome guy must have been looking for Billy the goat :)

Sunday.
Here's the opening scene from Macbeth:

ACT I
SCENE I. A desert place.

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

First Witch
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch
When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch
That will be ere the set of sun.

.... Exeunt. Which they did after drinking wine. Admittedly they brought their own and some lovely, smelly cheese and French bread.

Monday.
First day of freedom and an unexpected, uninvited and remarkably well-hung visitor. No idea where he wandered in from. I'm pretty sure the next door neighbours haven't any livestock but I'll ask them later. I guess he could have just wandered down off the hills, in which case he's very welcome to return. Rather cute but maybe that's a reflection that I've been out of contact with humans for too long.

Here's a random set of shots taken over the past few days. The very last one is taken from the north end of the lake. The house is right in the very centre. It was a little overcast and very windy so there's some camera shake and, even though the shutter speed was fast, the distance of the shot means the house is not absolutely sharp. I'll do another one on a really clear blue and still day.