Thursday 21 May 2009

Grandma's album 1

Those who follow Non-stick may recall that, back in April, I posted (on the blog) some postcards that belonged to my grandmother. In the shoebox that contains the postcards is an old autograph album that my grandmother kept between the years 1908 and 1912. During that time she was attending Avery Hill Training College, a residential female teacher-training college established in 1906 at Eltham in South East London, now part of Greenwich University (there's a postcard of it here).
There are no famous autographs or anything like that in it; just poems, quotes and drawings added by her friends and fellow students - an early version of Facebook. As a change from posting work by the professionals (and me) I thought it would be interesting to show some drawings made by normal people, albeit from middle class Edwardian England just before the First World War.
This first image is the first image in the book, spelling out my grandmother’s name, Hilda, using the letters as an acrostic:
Happy thoughts and bright ideas,
In this little volume see;
Look on all that here appears,
Deem them friendship’s gifts to me,
And a page remains for thee.
Under it is a scratched-out name and the date 1908. I don’t know whether she drew this herself. The scratched out name begins with a D so it could have been done by her friend, Doris Speight, who has signed a similar typographic design on the last page. Also I don’t know whether it’s original or quoted from somewhere - such rhymes were fairly common at that time. Also I don't know anything else about it.

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