Dan Snow's History Hit - The Curious History of Postcards

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

For many people sending a postcard is an enjoyable part of any seaside trip but rather than just being a novelty they were once a vital form of communication and often the quickest way to contact your friends and relatives. Dan is joined by Chris Taft and Georgina Tomlinson from the postal museum where a new exhibition marking 151 years of the British postcard is being launched (it was meant to be the 150th exhibition last year!). Chris and Georgina talk us through the surprising history of postcards from their inception and rise to prominence, to the coded messages sometimes contained on them and the link home they provided not just for holidaymakers but for soldiers on the frontlines as well.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's a heatwave here in the UK, people are heading to the beaches.

And from there, they may choose to send a postcard. Nowadays, sending a postcard is a sort of nostalgic act a kind of statement piece like buying some vinyl and just casually putting it on the record player guys it just sounds so much better such better quality of sound whatever you're sending a postcard you listen to vinyl it's a deliberate decision and i'm here for it i'm here for it i make my kids send postcards so they can say when they're 100 years old, living in a colony in Mars in 2110, nearly 200 years after the start of the First World War, they can say,

when I was a kid, I used to send postcards. They'll be so grateful. What an upbringing I'm giving them. Anyway, to talk about the strange history of postcards, which were once so ubiquitous that houses all over the world were decorated in them. I'm talking to two great friends at the Postal Museum, one of my favourite museums in London, Chris Taft and Georgina Tomlinson. I haven't seen Chris since I turned up at that museum a couple

years ago, having been in the back of an Uber with my son. And just as we arrived at the museum, my son threw up all over me. I walked into the museum completely covered in vomit and you know what the team there did they took it in their stride they were totally chilled about it and I think that's a measure of a good museum team when a guy turns up to film in your museum you know the welcoming committee there and he runs in looking stressed covered in vomit you don't lose your cool it's impressive so anyway great to have georgina and chris on this podcast we're talking about the history of postcards they are 150 years well actually 151 years old the anniversary was last year but we're celebrating it this year it's nice to be able to have a big anniversary episode this podcast when i can say celebrate not commemorate like we have to do with battles and warfare and political upheaval. This is a celebration.

151 years of the postcard. If you want to watch some of our other anniversary content, you've got to go to historyhit.tv. It's a digital history channel. It's like Netflix, but it's just for history. If you don't mind me saying, it's absolutely brilliant. It's award-nominated, and it is going places. So please go to historyhit.tv sign up and enjoy

a lifetime of viewing pleasure in the meantime folks here's chris taft and georgina tomlinson from the postal museum enjoy chris and georgina thank you very much for coming on the pod. No worries, nice to have you. It's one of my favourite museums, guys, so it's great to have you on. Tell me, I mean, my kids have to write postcards. It's like, I'm so old school, we still do a lot of it. But Georgina, where does the postcard... I've never thought about this, but like, was it a photography thing?

Is it about the picture itself? So the very first postcards didn't actually have any pictures on at all. So the very first postcard was introduced in Austria-Hungary back in 1869 with no images. And the British Post Office introduced their own card the following year in 1870. And again, didn't include an image, but instead had a pre-printed stamp, which was already on the card. So that covered the cost of postage. And it was half the price of a letter at the time. So it was really introduced as a quick,

cheap means of communication. We don't start to see images until 1894 and these were produced by commercial publishers rather than the post office. On that quick, cheap method of communication, Georgina or Chris, we think we're very exciting now with all our digital communications, but these postcards could whiz around cities with extraordinary speed, right? You could have a reply within, well, almost minutes, couldn't you? Not quite minutes, but certainly very quickly. I mean, you have to remember in the early days of the postal service, it was far fewer items being sent than there are today. But yeah, collections were more frequent and post was distributed and delivered more quickly than perhaps it is today, but in a

different system and a different time. Just give me a sense, though. If I sent one of these postcards in the 1870s across Manchester or London, how quickly might I expect to get a response, if everyone's writing as quickly as they can? Usually a couple of days, to be honest. It was rare for them to get there the same day and to be able to write back the same day. It wasn't quite instant communication in that way.

That's what the telegraph service was for, really. But you would, generally speaking, get there the next day or the day after. It could get there the same day it wasn't quite instant communication in that way that's what the telegraph service was for really but you would generally speaking get there the next day or the day after it could get there the same day it didn't tend to happen that often but it wasn't impossible listen man the way I reply to emails it's a lot slower than that I'll tell you that much Georgina when did it become associated with holidays travel it was like Instagram you'd show off about where your friends and family had been somehow that reflected well on you it was very early so we do see with the expansion of the victorian rail network that more and more people were able to get to the british coast and then we see many seaside postcards from the edwardian era as well where people were able to kind of enjoy that experience and then later with the holiday pay act more and more

people could take the time off work to go on holidays it's interesting that you talk about kind of postcards being like the instagram we kind of see them very much as like a precursor to direct messaging sites kind of like whatsapp because they did allow you to have that message and an image and you could send that to someone together because both sides of the postcard are extremely important because the sender has chosen both for you so I always think it's quite interesting that it was a quick means of communication but the image and the message are just as important when you're sending it across to somebody. Also there's a looseness there's an informality to postcards do you see

that from the beginning you write sideways you're upside down you draw a little sketch in a way that a letter felt very different yes yes i think as well because you don't have as much space your messages do have to be much shorter people did keep them very short we do see during the first world war that because soldiers were given free postage and they were encouraged to correspond we see postcards which simply say okay love dot dot dot or still going strong just very short kind of quick messages back and forth but because the postcard was an open form of communication unlike a letter we do have examples in the collection where people have coded the message either used

morse code or come up with their own code as a way of just keeping it a little bit more secret especially if you're living with family anyone anyone could read it, or the postal worker that was delivering it. So yeah, we do see people kind of coding it just to keep that little bit of kind of secrecy to their messages. When do they become very closely aligned to holidays and travel? We see quite a lot after the Second World War, which focus on the saucy seaside postcards, where people like McGill and Bamford were producing these kind of caricature images. So we do see kind of an awful lot of those kind of postcards around that period.

But I would say that the height of postcard sending and collecting kind of was the early part of the 1900s. We do see the postcards dropping off after the First World War. Really? I'm surprised. When I was a kid the postcards I loved particularly were just black and it said you know Delhi at night or Brighton at night and I collected those when I was about five. I thought they were the funniest things I'd ever seen in my life. I will donate my collection to you guys one day. Yeah you should yeah. I remember those as well. My grandparents lived in Ramsgate so we used to spend a lot of

summers down there and yeah I exactly remember those the plain black ones with Ramsgate by night. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just so funny. Chris, what about the First World War? Yes, a postal communication. The First World War was absolutely essential. It was important for morale, both for those at home knowing that their loved ones fighting around the world were safe. And also, you know, for those fighting around the world to be in touch with friends and family at home so it was essential and postcards were a good way of doing that you didn't have to bother with envelopes they were getting sort of free postage for the soldiers as well and because it was really important during the first world war to control information for censorship was that it tied to that point and then they were controlling what

people were saying what people were writing and wanted to make sure they weren't revealing sort of secret military information or even just details of battle plans and things. So field service postcards were introduced, and these were kind of a multiple-choice card, basically, a postcard, which on one side had a series of pre-printed statements, and you crossed out those statements which didn't apply to allow you to relay quick, simple messages. You didn't have to write a lot

you just said I am well or I am in hospital and I will write soon and I received your letter or parcel dated and you just inserted basic bits of information you wouldn't write more than about 10 words on the whole thing and you'd be able to send it quickly to get quick messages back to those at home to say that you were okay. When I came to your brilliant museum, you told me some astonishing facts about the Postal Service during the First World War. Give me some of the highlights. During the First World War, the Postal Service was so important. I think the most significant things about it to appreciate is that obviously postal communication was the main means of communication at the time, really. Telephone was in its infancy, telegraph was reserved for

short messages and reserved for kind of government or military communications in the main. So postal service was really important but at the same time the post office had a huge supply of manpower for the war effort and something between 75 and 80,000 postal workers went off to join the armed forces and the postal service was losing their skilled operators, their skilled postmen at the time, as well as having to deal with a huge increase in the volume of mail. And if you look at the sort of peak of the First World War in around 1917, you were having something like 12 million letters and a million parcels being sent a week through the Postal Service, which is a phenomenal amount.

And this was at a time where, as I said, the Postal Service were losing their skilled workers, their skilled operators, and having a lot of temporary staff. They set up a special home depot, it was called, a special sorting office in the Regent's Park in London, in order to handle these huge volumes of post. And that was largely staffed by women working on temporary contracts for the post office at the time. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about the history of postcards which were 151 years old this year. More after this. Catastrophic warfare,

bloody revolutions, and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers, and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying yeah tell me something I don't know.

The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Georgina let's come back to postcards which were a huge part of that first world war traffic as we've heard but what are some highlights from your exhibition so I've seen the video and there's some really good ones in there oh great well I think what we really try to show is the different themes that appear on postcards as we've touched on during the first world war we also see a lot of pictorial postcards which depict the soldiers at the front and

different aspects of life for them but also we've got seaside postcards which is slightly more humorous and we do take it through to kind of contemporary postcards so looking at how postcards have not just been used as a form of communication but also can inspire art so we've got some beautiful postcards on display by an artist called Francesca Calusi Kramer and she actually embroiders directly into old postcards and it's really nice to see kind of colour be given to these black and white designs but also kind of like texture and abstract shapes so she kind of really changes the whole function of the postcard it's no longer a means of communication. She's taken this old postcard

and given it a new life as a piece of artwork, really. It's interesting because my memory of postcards as a kid was that they were quite integral to how you did decorate your kitchen in particular, your house. Kids were allowed to collect postcards when we went to museums or the beach or anything. So they've always been,

well, certainly in the last few decades, they have had a decorative aspect to them. Yeah, definitely. And I think we try and cover the different uses of the postcard and as you were saying they're purchasing them from museums and attractions is a really important point so postcards can be collected there's still a hobby of postcard collecting where you can look at maybe collecting Edwardian actresses or if you're interested a certain period we've got some amazing examples that look at the suffragette movement which is beautiful but as you said it's a great memento to take with you and you

can put them up in your house you don't have to use them as a form of communication personally for me they go on the fridge or i've got a couple behind my computer desk at work so it's those things where you love the image so when you're going to a museum or a gallery and you fall in love with a piece of artwork there you are probably not going to be able to afford that piece of artwork however you can take home usually a postcard of that reproduction and it's lovely to be able to kind of have your own masterpiece at home if you can't have the real thing there's a lot of van gogh sunflowers knocking about on postcards and the original little bit outside the budget you mentioned direct messaging do you see any of the same sort of societal nervousness around postcards, communication, instant communication in the 19th century that

you do now where older generations go, oh God, kids, they're just instant. They're not living in the moment. They're just communicating all the time. Is there any equivalent there? I don't think we've necessarily seen that, but within the exhibition, we're kind of looking at what the future of the postcard might be and that idea around kind of colder forms of digital communication in comparison to this more classic emotive form of communication it'll be interesting to see whether going forward people do maybe shun that kind of instant kind of not thinking about it form of communication where you quickly send

off a text message or a whatsapp whereas people take more time when they're thinking about postcard they contemplate the image they contemplate the message and there's definitely more of a personal connection with those so I think going forward it would be interesting to see whether people do move towards that form of communication as we saw people did in the very early stages in 1870 through and the early 1900s. When I'm away filming I have an app that does the best of both worlds because I can take pictures on my phone it will turn it into a postcard with a note on the back and deliver it like an actual piece of card to my kids so they love that. Chris what about when you've studied the history of post through the centuries is there any angst that accompanies this incredibly

modern idea of being able to communicate oh i think so yeah i mean anything that's new there's always kind of some distrust or sort of opposition to and we've seen that throughout history with just about everything that's new you think about the railways and motor cars and airplanes the postal service has always been at the heart of innovation because the postal service has been so important for communications right back to the year dot there's always been at the heart of innovation because the postal service has been so important for communications right back to the year dot there's always been that need to communicate over distance and the postal service has been at the heart of that the British postal service therefore was always at the heart of much of this innovation so developing new things new vehicles

moving items around you know the post office was even responsible really for the first establishment of the standardization of time and things so innovation was key to what the postal service was about and with anything that was new there was always a little bit of sort of distrust I mean I was quite like referencing the introduction of the pillar box for example which you know in 1850s when they were first introduced there was a lot of people were quite distrustful of them you know the idea of placing your letters into these anonymous boxes that you didn't know what was going to happen. And the British Letterbox, it's kind of linked with Anthony Trollope, the novelist, who, it was his idea, he didn't invent them, but he suggested their introduction in Britain as a trial. So he's got accredited with inventing the postbox in a way, although he didn't really, he merely suggested

the idea of something that was already being used elsewhere. But he worked for the Post Office at the time, he was a surveyor's clerk. But in one of his later novels, he actually writes one of his characters, talks about the postbox and talks about how she distrusts these iron stumps in the ground, as she calls them, in a book called He Knew He Was Right. So it's a little kind of play with Trollope on the fact that he was the one that suggested these things. And really, I think that's evidence of that distrust of anything new that people had. Unless people listening to this think that the Post Office is an institution belonging in a bygone era. Just talk briefly, I mean, the Post Office was critical in Alan Turing's early work Breaking Enigma and Bletchley Park, and indeed

in the invention of the internet. Absolutely. The Postal Service was during the Second World War, in particular, Turing did, and sadly gets far less credit than Alan Turing. Alan Turing did some amazing and some wonderful work and deserves all of the credit that he gets. But so should Tommy Flowers. And Tommy Flowers was a GPO, a post office engineer, worked for the post office, and he worked on development of what became the world's first programmable computer, which we all rely on today, more so now than ever before, was really largely the responsibility of a postal employee who was seconded to work at Bletchley Park.

It was also, and again, this is something that isn't really recognised as much as it should be, it was postal workers, postal engineers who were maintaining the radar systems. It was the RAF and that who sort of monitored them, but the maintenance of a lot of that came down to GPO engineers it was a critical role just like we talked about the first world war and the critical role of postal communications that happened in the second world war but that was increased to a lot of the sort of technical sides of the engineering side because the post

office was responsible for all forms of communication in this country at the time. I was talking to someone the other day about how the British Post Office was integral to the first international packet switching, gave us the internet. Brilliant organisation. Georgina, on the 150th anniversary of the postcard, what's the future tell us about the brilliant postcard? Well, I think it's difficult.

We don't have a crystal ball, but we have definitely seen how through history the postcard has adapted. So it has been what the audience has needed at the time so when we've seen for the first world war we've had the field service postcard was introduced we've had images that depicted what was going on and we've now seen how postcards can be digitally produced as you were saying you can do it from your smartphone online and i think people love the ability to be able to incorporate their own images into the postcard so they're no longer dictated by what the publishers are producing so we have seen the postcard adapt but it is coming up against digital technology which is always going to be something it has to fight against but I think as we've seen in 2020 we've

all relied heavily on communication in a time when we weren't able to physically be together and I do think that kind of traditional means of communication has been very important during this period because it has so much more kind of an emotive and personal connection between people by using these forms of communication so I think there is a future for it I would love to see it continue but I do think we'll see it adapt we'll see it change and it will have to be what its audience needs but hopefully it will still be around for future generations you guys both send postcards right I certainly do I don't as much as I used to I have to confess but I do still send postcards yeah I'm more of a purchaser as a souvenir I've got too many in my house which are just put in frames or dotted about but I'm not

too great at sending them. Well that's acceptable. We're also on this brilliant exhibition. Chris and Jodie, tell me actually how can people engage with it? How can they go and see it? So the best thing to do is to come and visit us at the Postal Museum. Come and purchase a ticket online. All our tickets are available online at the moment to help us control numbers. Your ticket will be an annual ticket so it'll be valid for a year, so you can revisit the museum throughout the year as much as you like. And there's lots of information on our website, both about the exhibition and all of the topics we've talked about today,

and much more about the history of the Postal Service as well. The last time I came to your museum, my son threw up all over me in the car on the way there, and I had sick all over me, and you guys didn't bat an eyelid, so thank you for your generosity. You're very welcome. It's all part of the service. Georgina and Chris,

thank you very much for coming on the pod. No worries. Thank you. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

all were gone and finished. Hi everyone. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in

the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.