That was two generations ago. I wanted to bring to this column some images of a sweeter nature from the war to end all wars.

They come from the covers of cheap and cheerful silk postcards sent home by our boys to mothers, wives and sweethearts who were sitting at home praying for the safe return of their loved ones.

It has been estimated that 10 million of the cards were produced between 1914 and 1918. Amazingly, many survive and they remain among the most affordable miniature works of art often produced entirely by hand.

There was a time, perhaps five years ago, when a First World War silk postcard could be had for £1. Now they cost at least a fiver a piece and often dealers want to least double that.

But even at that price, they make a charming collection.

The postcards have several common features. Generally speaking, they were hand-embroidered, usually in silk, on strips of silk mesh and the resulting image sandwiched between two cream-coloured cards.

The face of the card had a cut-out window framing the image, which was usually embossed with decorative designs often in the Art Nouveau manner.

The reverse of the card was either blank or printed with spaces for address and message as you would expect on the back of any postcard.

Tradition has it that the cards were embroidered by Frenchwomen and children working in their homes to earn a living while the men were at war.

The workers were paid piece rate for their sewing and the strips of silk mesh were cut and mounted as postcards in the nearby factories which employed them.

Who am I to argue with the idea? However, given the fact that the cards were mass-produced and the embroidery is so perfectly executed on each of them, I suspect many of the cards that survive today were machine-made.

Certainly the quality of the embroidery began to decline after 1919 to be replaced by a simpler, plainer machined card after 1923 which never enjoyed the same popularity.

Hand-embroidered cards are not seen after that date and the silk postcard disappeared altogether after 1945.

Although they were meant to be posted home, it is interesting to note that few First World War silk postcards are found with stamps or postmarks.

The explanation is simple: Post was collected from troops periodically and sent by the sackful as military mail, post free.

Alternatively, the cards were purchased by soldiers and stuffed into the bottom of kitbags where they remained until they came home.

Messages scribbled on the backs of the cards are often poignant and sentimental.

Perhaps because they were expensive in relative terms, soldiers tended not to use the cards for general chitchat about day-to-day life or news.

Instead, and possibly because they were used to mark special occasions, hand-written inscriptions speak of undying love or best wishes for a birthday or other anniversary.

How many were sent by lads who never came home is as moving a thought as the answer is unfathomable.

The cards had no propaganda purposes but they must have been unsurpassed as a means of keeping spirits high.

The woven designs are in colours picked from the Allied flags and messages were often themed around victory. “United We Stand”, “Right Is Might” and “Glory To The Allies” are among the popular epithets, while probably every English regiment is represented by a card depicting its cap badge and flag, as is the Royal Flying Corps, founded in 1912 and still in its infancy.

Easily the most delightful are the cards intended for wives and sweethearts. They are invariably decorated in ravishing colours with bouquets or basket of flowers often held in the beaks of exotic birds.

Messages are sweetly sentimental. “Thinking of You”, “Your Soldier Boy”, “To My Dear Mother/Sister/Sweetheart”, “Not Absent in My Thoughts”, and so on are as commonplace today as they clearly were then.

Another interesting feature of the cards is a delicate woven pouch or envelope-like flap worked into the silk mesh which often still contains the small printed card they were meant to contain.

It’s a curious addition, given that the card is printed with a message not unlike that embroidered on the front of a postcard.

Its purpose is unclear other than perhaps the intention of the manufacturer that the card should be used by the sender on which to write a personal message.

Rarity, condition and subject matter governs prices. A dated card is always more valuable, particularly if the date is a distinctive feature of the woven design.

Cards woven with regimental badges are sought after by both postcard collectors and collectors of militaria, the double demand easily doubling value.

Cards decorated with a biplane or an airship or a battleship are among the most valuable, particularly if named and identified.

Cards with the flap or pouch are worth more if they still contain the printed card, and a card which is in mint condition and blank is more desirable than one which is grubby and written on.

Since they are still relatively common, cards which are damaged in any way should be avoided.

There are various ways of displaying a collection. Collectors’ clubs and good-quality stationers produce albums fitted with plastic sleeves designed specifically to hold postcards which are handy if you own a large number.

Similarly, it is possible to find vintage postcard albums which are perfect for displaying a smaller collection.

However, given their intrinsic beauty and striking colours First World War silk postcards look stunning when they are mounted together, framed and hung on the wall.

If you choose this latter course, be sure to hang the cards out of direct sunlight. The colours will become bleached and faded in the space of a few weeks and once the damage is done, the cards are rendered worthless.

While I mention the C word reluctantly, a silk postcard inscribed “Merry Christmas” and decorated with a suitable festive image — see the one above of the Robin standing on the Yuletide log — makes a charming alternative to the modern commercial nonsense which pass as Christmas cards today.

Who knows, it might set the recipient off on a new collecting venture.

Antiques@Chris-Proudlove.co.uk

Pictures show a selection of cards with values between £10-25. Notice particularly the Christmas robin and the Buffs with the Welsh dragon

Blushing Tommy (with arm around shapely redhead) to spluttering general: “I got her with a parcel of soldiers’ comforts, sir!”

Fairground fortune teller (gazing into crystal ball) to irate soldier: “Ah, I see your wife!” “Oh, do yer — And is the coal man with her?” “I can’t say — but his horse and cart’s outside!”

Young boy to startled sweet shop owner: “A pennorth o’ jelly babies — and all boys, please!”

Okay, not funny by today’s standards but a wonderful snapshot of an era when double entendres were smutty enough to raise a smile but not too vulgar to fall foul of the censor’s blue pencil.

The postcards come for a cache of 500 or so discovered in an attic in Llandudno, North Wales. Auctioneer David Rogers Jones, who will sell them in his Colwyn Bay rooms next Tuesday (July 27) believes they are unsold stock from one of the region’s many novelty gift shops that in the 1940s did a roaring trade from holidaymakers and day trippers seeking a brief respite in troubled times.

Each of the cards — and there are duplicates — is in mint condition and bids of £200 to 300 are expected. If two or three to determined postcard collectors — or deltiologists, as they are called — get stuck in, they could fetch much more.

Their attraction is as much the fact that they were published by Bamforth and Company, a business founded in 1870 by James Bamforth in Holmfirth, near Huddersfield, the history of which is as fascinating as the cards.

Today, the town is known best as the location for the BBC TV comedy programme Last of the Summer Wine. What is less well known is that James Bamforth was one of Britain’s earliest pioneers of motion pictures for the blossoming cinematic industry.

Bamforth started in business in 1870 as a studio photographer and began the production of magic lantern slides on an industrial scale in around 1883. At first he made sequences of slides which told moral or religious stories often with a temperance theme and these were later developed to accompany popular songs and hymns.

It was a natural development to move into film making, which he did shortly after the first commercial films were produced by the Lumiere brothers in France.

The films were shot in and around Holmfirth and with the lack of professional actors, Bamforth used local people who were expected to step in at a moment’s notice. An early star was the music hall comedian Reginald Switz, whose stage name was “Winky”, but his career was short lived.

After appearing in such epics as Winky’s Weekend and the bizarrely titled Winky Causes a Smallpox Panic, both in 1914, the company was hit by the outbreak of the First World War.

Materials used in the manufacture of film were required for making explosives and by the end of the war, Hollywood’s dominance of the industry meant there was no place for a small company like Bamforth’s.

Undaunted, Bamforth realised that his photographic studio could be put to good use to design and publish postcards, which ironically enough started life as a means of military communication, invented by the German statesman Dr Heinrich von Stephan.

The first commercial use of postcards was in 1869 and America started sending postcards following their introduction at the Chicago World Fair of 1893. Britain followed a year later, but the home industry blossomed once the Post Office relaxed rules governing the size of postcards and granted licenses to private publishers on September 1 that year.

The first quarter of the 20th century emerged as the golden age of postcards and sending them became something of a national craze.

Every subject imaginable was covered, giving today’s collectors massive scope. Every actor and actress, politician, sportsman, hero and villain was immortalised on a postcard, while views that record the development of villages, towns and cities make them invaluable to the social historian. Most can be picked up for small change.

The Great War was responsible for a massive number of postcards sent to loved ones on either side of the Channel. Bamforth responded with a range of song and hymns cards which were beautifully printed and steeped in sentiment.

They were produced in sets of three or four and were sent in their hundreds by wives and sweethearts to soldiers serving in the trenches. Approximately 2,000 sets were issued and they are still relatively common, with the result that a set of three can be had for around £10-£15.

In return, the troops sent back cards of their own, embroidered by French and Belgian women in silk in patriotic colours with designs incorporating dates, regimental mottoes and sentimental messages such as: “To My Dear Mother/Wife/Sweetheart”; “I’m Thinking of You”; “I’m Lonely without You”; “From Your Soldier Boy” and many more.

Some even had tiny silken pouches, inside which was a printed card for a more personal message. Still easily found, they cost around £10 to £15 today.

By the time of the Second World War, the saucy comic postcard was firmly established and Bamforth’s was this country’s leading producer. Large ladies, henpecked husbands, ferocious mothers-in-law, red-nosed drunks, randy squaddies, big-busted blondes and doe-eyed children inhabited a land where optimism ruled.

As much a part of the seaside holiday as sticks of rock and sandcastles, the postcards also played a part in the propaganda war. Adolf Hitler was depicted as a cartoon parody with his hand up as if wanting to leave the room (“Why the heck doesn’t he want to leave Europe and please everybody?”), while Our Boys continue to smile through all adversity (“We’ve been on manoeuvres all day luv!”).

One secret of their success is that over the years Bamforth employed only four staff artists: Douglas Tempest (the first, who started in 1912), Arnold Taylor, Philip Taylor and Brian Fitzpatrick. This made it easier to maintain a distinctive house style with bright colours and exaggerated characters.

Many deltiologists specialise in collecting Bamforth’s comic cards and the work of these four in particular. At the height of their popularity, more than 18 million cards were being sold a year. The joy is that they can be picked up today for less than the price of a stick of rock.

Rogers Jones and Co., are at 33 Abergele Road, Colwyn Bay (tel: 01492 532176). The cache of comic cards found in Llandudno can be viewed from today (Sunday, July 25) from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

antiques@chris-proudlove.co.uk

These are tumultuous times. In the space of a few days we have buried a Pope, Brtitain’s future King (and Queen?) have married, thousands of car workers face losing their jobs and we are in the midst of a general election campaign which has all the acrimony of a chimpanzees’ tea party.

We know all this because of the speed with which news travels around the globe. Time was, before telephones, radio and television were not as common as they are today, when the humble postcard played an important role in recording memorable events for the least expense.

I say all this as a preamble. The alternative might have been to reduce this column to the realms of soft porn and glamour photos, which is not my intention.

However, given the pictures illustrated here, that’s going to be difficult! But I’ll force on.

Old picture postcards remain today as one of the most accessible, fascinating, inexpensive and easily cared for and stored collectables there are.

The fact that so many millions of the things remain in existence goes a long way in explaining their popularity in their heyday.

Time was, following some memorable event like a crowning, or a funeral or a disaster, that within hours of it occurring, picture postcards recording the scenes were on sale and being posted by the masses to the masses.

The Royal family, in the space of a couple of generations, has provided enough material to fuel the postcard industry. Queen Victoria‘s death in 1901 probably started the ball rolling when “in memoriam” cards bearing her likeness were apparently being printed and sold by postcard manufacturer C. W. Faulkner less than the day after her demise.

Thereafter, every Royal birth, wedding, Coronation, and funeral spawned millions of cards now eagerly collected by both lovers of royal memorabilia and postcard collectors worldwide.

There are, of course, thousands of other subjects all immortalised by photographers both professional and otherwise in illustrations on the fronts of the little cards and as such each is important as a record of social history.

Collecting postcards illustrated with images that are, if you like, the Victorian and Edwardian equivalent of the Page 3 stunner, had not occurred to me until I had a chance conversation with a stallholder at a recent collectors’ fair.

His display consisted entirely of pictures he had framed himself, all charming lithographs and prints all ready to hang and bring stylish cheer to the dullest of rooms.

Among them, however, was a large number of picture postcards which, when framed, lifted them beyond the bounds of the £2-£3 price range that they would otherwise command to something far more significant.

“Oh look,” said the Business Manager (Mrs P) “I’m sure we’ve got some postcards like that at home.” And of course she was right (she usually is) whereupon we learned that we were the unwitting owners of something much more significant — in postcard terms that is.

The artist responsible for them is called Angelo Asti (1847-1903) who some think was responsible for introducing the glamour postcard to an already burgeoning market.

Clearly Angelo had an eye for the ladies, but then he did have Italian parents and spent most his life in Paris. Until the collectors’ fair conversation, I had never heard of him but a quick search through the online catalogues of a few auction houses soon located ” Angelo Asti: Head and shoulders of a maiden, crystoleum, copyright 1902, framed, 29cm x 23cm” in a sale in Tunbridge Wells.

Guide price

The guide price was £100-150. It sold for £30 and I wish I’d been there, although the picture was a crystoleum – basically a print pasted face down to the inside curve of a piece of concave glass.

Asti’s postcards, beautifully detailed and coloured and a tribute to the skills of Edwardian printers, are valued at £8 apiece in the current Picture Postcard Values price guide.

In my view, that is a serious undervaluation, but Asti‘s stunners are not to everyone’s liking. Some refer to them as “nasty Astis” while others have referred to them as “luscious, Rembrandtesque, full-breasted beauties”. I’ll leave you to decide!

In fact, Asti was a serious artist, exhibiting a range of works at the Paris Salon. He was also renowned for the beautiful women’s portraits he painted in a traditional Italian style on silk.

In 1904, some of the portraits were chosen to decorate a calendar and at the height of the Art Nouveau movement, it was a huge success. More than 1.5 million copies were sold, some would argue marking the beginning of the pin-up and glamour calendars that we know today.

The success was spotted by the French postcard publisher known today only by the initials K. F. and later by the famous specialist printer Raphael Tuck. In all, Asti had around 60 of his works published as postcards which today are highly sought after by specialist collectors.

Interestingly, Asti was also asked to provide designs for JOB, the French cigarette paper company, showing “les fumeuses” and since I have been looking, I’ve also found an extremely smart, early 20th century circular tin tray, intended for a bar or cafe, decorated in the centre with an image of a décolleté Asti lady.

In an online auction, the biding had reached $80 with three days to go.

Over the years, Asti‘s style has been copied by countless other artists. However, in my view no one has come close to matching his prowess at capturing the hairstyles, poses, fashion and style of a lost era.

Readers remember ‘forgotten’ Frances

My blog last week appealing for information about the “forgotten” artist Wallasey-born Frances Macdonald, whose monumental work “The Welsh Singer” was commissioned for a Festival of Britain exhibition in 1951 has drawn a response.

In an email, Mrs KR from Crosby tells me that like Frances, she also attended Wallasey High School and remembers the painting being displayed at morning assembly when it was donated to the school.

“It was presented to the school during the autumn term – 1957 – as ‘an

anonymous gift’” she writes. “The artist is described as a pupil of the school from 1924 to 1930, and later a student at the Wallasey School of Art. She was also an official war artist.”

I think it is fairly safe to assume that Frances herself was the donor of the painting, but there will be no sign of such generosity when it is sold by Colwyn Bay auctioneer David Rogers Jones next Saturday, (April 23).

The remarkable painting entitled depicts the vast Penrhyn slate quarry in North Wales and takes its title from a central figure, a miner who sits head tilted heavenward, singing at the top of his voice while the cacophony of mining goes on all about him.

I’ll let readers know what it fetches in a subsequent blog.

Pictures show:
Top –
Angelo’s beauties – we picked up the Art Nouveau mounts years ago at a fleamarket for little money and they are just right for these Raphael Tuck postcards

Below, left to right -
A card from Tuck’s Connoisseur series

Look out for the distinctive Asti signature. Note also the Tuck trademark to the right. It is a tiny artist’s easel and palette with brushes with the initials RTS and it appears on all their products

This Asti postcard was published by Birn Brothers, but they did not credit the artist

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