Ottoman History Podcast - A British Burlesque Artist in Belle Époque Cairo

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

featuring Gwendolyn Collaço with Andras Riedlmayer and Paul Drummond | While killing time at the Booksellers' Row in Westminster, historian and curator Gwendolyn Collaço stumbled on a collection of postcards from early 20th-century Egypt, some featuring the British burlesque artist Miss Kitty Lord. When she realized that the postcards were a set belonging to a single person — none other than Kitty Lord herself — the chance discovery became a research quest that culminated in an exhibition at Harvard Fine Arts Library, presenting a visual time capsule of Belle Époque Cairo that mapped the social and romantic life of a fascinating and little-known figure. In this episode from the Ottoman History Podcast vault, Collaço discusses what she uncovered about Kitty Lord through collaborations with the historian and bibliographer András Riedlmayer and memorobilia shop owner Paul Drummond, who appear in the podcast to share their side of the story.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton. Over the years, I've produced hundreds of episodes for this podcast, but not everything we record gets released. There are all sorts of ways for tape to end up in the Ottoman History Podcast vault, and in this episode, we're opening the time capsule to feature some material from an idea that got a little too big. This is a journey back almost a decade to 2016 when I was a postdoc at Harvard University. Here I am in a cafe near Harvard Square with then PhD student, Gwendolyn Colosso, who is now a curator at Brown University Library. What I have in mind, but actually I just got the idea.

And I've developed it more. We are, this is just from my notes. Oh, okay, cool. Okay. Because what I'm trying to do is develop a new, like, try out a new format. Oh my, all right. Well, I hope it works. which is a podcast with an investigative narrative art instead of interview or whatever.

Yeah. So, put notes on this. It looks so neat. Anyway, sorry. I'm like... Got to get one of these. Like, I'm just kind of astounded because this is different than the one of course you showed us during the... No, no, no, this is what I had.

It was. Okay. We were using external mics. Right. Okay. This has up to six mics it can take. Gwen and I were meeting to discuss a concept for a new type of Ottoman history podcast episode. Rather than a simple author interview, it was going to be a big production that we've together different voices and stories into a slick narrative.

This one was going to be about three unconventional love stories from Belle Epoch Cairo. We've made other episodes with that format since, but this idea was just too grandiose, and I never finished it. My recording with Gwendolyn Colossosso was about an exhibition she curated at the Harvard University Fine Arts Library, dedicated to a British burlesque performer, Miss Kitty Lord, and her extensive travels in Egypt. Kitty Lord was known for her bawdy performances and sensational costumes, and as it turns out, she was the subject, author, and recipient of numerous postcards that Colossos stumbled upon in her research. The exhibition offered a micro-historical view of Cairo on the eve of the First World War, as well as a window onto the relationships and romantic affairs Kitty Lord sustained on her trips to Egypt.

My colleague Shireen Hamza, who had just started working on the Ottoman History podcast, had the idea of recording an interview about Kitty Lord and the lost world captured within her postcards. Here's our conversation with Gwen Colosso. Gwen, this is a really fascinating and large collection of postcards. Tell us about how you found these. Well, this past summer I was doing dissertation research in London, and I decided to take a break one evening and get rushed tickets to a show, Book of Mormon. And so I had some time to kill in between. And right in the middle of the theater district is a little street called Cecil Court.

And it's a street completely filled with antique bookshops, books of maps and ephemera, usually from the 19th century. and a little earlier and a little later. And so I decided to just take a stroll. And I walked into one shop that specialized in ephemera and publications concerning the history of theater. And I was just looking through a whole bunch of boxes. I mean, you have to imagine shelves of cardboard boxes just filled with every type of pamphlet and book, music score, etc.

You know, out of curiosity, I decided to look at the ones underneath the cashier counter. It was entirely filled with postcards. And so I asked around, I was like, do you have any from the Middle East just, you know, by chance? And the owner, Paul Drummond, said, sure, sure, just look at the very, very bottom. So it's actually, you know, quite hidden amongst this entire collection. And I pulled them out and I started looking through and I saw all these great postcards that actually had writing on them and that were stamped still. And this is actually quite interesting because sometimes when people collect postcards,

they want the pristine ones that don't have any kind of writing or if there were stamps on them. Sometimes people like to steam them off in order to collect them for themselves. But these had both their stamps and their writing, so I decided to take a closer look. Not only were they colorful and wonderful, most of them had subject matter concerning Cairo or Alexandria, but also I noticed that they were mostly being sent to the same person. And that was Miss Kitty Lord, of course. And I began to look through and I was like, wow, there's actually probably almost 100 of these. At the time, I didn't have enough money to purchase the entire collection.

But I did decide to purchase a few because it semi-related to my research in terms of just a later genre concerning ethnography and city figures. But I kept it in the back of my mind after I did buy the. And so I brought them back to the U.S., and I showed them to Andres Riedelmeyer, our bibliographer. And he said, how many are these again? How many are there? And when I told him there were about 100, he said, that's really unusual to have a collection

belonging to a single person or sent to a single person that were stamped, written upon, and all in one place. And so he's like, we should probably just purchase them because, I mean, if we don't, people will continue to just pick at them, you know, from the store, just buying them one off because they're beautiful images. But at least if we could keep them together as a single collection, someone could potentially use them as a research source at the Fine Arts Library.

And so, you know, I facilitated that. And it just kind of snowballed into a bigger event where we wanted to have an exhibition. We wanted to do the online component. And the more I started talking about it to people, I realized, well, people are very interested in this unusual burlesque actress who just happens to gallivant around the world and perform her review shows. And so here we are. So Gwen, you have this collection of postcards that you realize are all a contiguous kind of set belonging to one person. and they contain these postcards with images of this burlesque artist, Miss Kitty Lord. When did you realize that the woman in the pictures was actually the woman to whom most of the postcards belong?

Was this something immediately apparent to you? Oh, no. It was not apparent to me at all at first. And in fact, if it hadn't been for the vendor, Paul Drummond, I would have never known about them. because these images we have of Miss Kitty Lord herself were kept in a different area. All the postcards were arranged by geographical subject matter. And so when I said I was interested in these postcards,

he was like, oh, okay, so that belonged to an actress, an English actress from the early 20th century. Let me grab those photos of her. And so he grabs these. And of course, once I see them, I'm like, oh, my goodness, these are fantastic because, first of all, we see her in costume. And this is really quite unusual because we have a woman in what at the time was a very risque costume where you see her entire thighs.

And at the same time, it's like some pseudo historic costume that looks like it's probably trying to imitate like Henry VIII's time. And she's carrying this little staff, which after I did some research into her, she was actually known for. She had this thing called a widow stick in many of her. acts and we don't entirely know how she used it, but presumably she used it with her audience members, predominantly males. And so we have this woman who was not only dressing up in these absolutely ridiculous costumes, but also she was having photographs taken of her at a studio in London and then using these as a type of advertisement for her own shows. So she's this self-styled, Was she a big deal in her time?

Well, she's mentioned all over the place. And one of the things we had to do for this exhibit was just look a bit more into this character. And she pops up in English newspapers and French newspapers, newspapers in South America. Usually it's no more than a couple of lines saying, Kitty Lord is performing tonight at the casino at such and such a time. But then you have some more colorful references to her. her in the news usually, usually concerning ways she has broken the law. Yeah, she's gotten speeding tickets. And so we know that her husband also got in trouble because of her speeding.

Likewise, she ended up testifying in court. And this was all documented in the English theatrical publication called The Stage. And she's testified. on behalf of an Argentinian theater that hosted a traveling artist like herself. And apparently it had gained a very bad reputation. Another actress had decided to sue them or something saying, oh, you know, they promised me one thing, but then they offered me these very terrible lodgings. And so Kitty ends up going on the record saying,

no, it is quite an upstanding. Hall and you know it is a place where an artist can truly practice her work and this is how I found out that she considered herself a burlesque artist because that is how she calls herself in this article and so she's a reputable person at least within her own field of burlesque well at least she considers herself that well on the postcards it's labeled as it's the postcards are in front they have French captions exactly and the description of her profession or you know her being her the thing that is kitty Lord is an eccentric, eccentric. Right. Were you able to figure out what this label means, what this identifier is supposed to... Right. Is this a...

I don't know. Is this a translation for burlesque? That's one possibility. It could, if you want to go literal, it could be eccentric, but then it also could refer to her own travels as this foreign fascination that came to all these different cities

and performed in front of all these diverse audiences. And so she was kind of this representative of the English music hall theater. And also these postcards as a mini representation of her were just as mobile as Kitty Lord herself, who traveled around the world. In this case, anyone who saw her would have been able to spread the word about this particular actress and just send off these little note cards to friends or maybe other theaters who might be interested in employing her. It's almost as if she's the exotic export of Britain here. And it's very interesting in this imperial context when Britain is the world power, consuming the exotic images of all over the world.

Here you have somebody who's the inverse of that. Right. She herself has commodified into a tiny postcard that reaches just as many audiences as her songs. Miss Kitty Lord performed all around the world, as we've been saying. But one place she spent a lot of time is Cairo. Right. What were you able to reconstruct about her life in Cairo using these postcards? Well, most of the postcards date from the years, 1908 to 1912, with a couple of outliers.

But for the most part, that's when they're from. We decided to track the locations in these postcards. So, for instance, most of them are addressed to Miss Kitty Lords. residents in Cairo at the time. And we found that this address was actually in the neighborhood of Esbekiah, which is a happening theater district during the period. It's been called the Covent Garden of Cairo. And what we've been able to find out is that, you know, this transformation of this

area occurred long before she got there, probably, you know, at least during the mid-19th century. But by this period, we have a number. of little theaters and musicals in addition to say the Cairo Opera House, which we know of from many major studies. But here we can see how we have an artist who's living in the area where she's working. The theater that she worked at, the Teatro de Neuvite, is actually just around the corner from where she worked, so it was very convenient. And the more we find out about this area, the more I realize that it's really quite dynamic. And the audiences were incredible. incredibly diverse. So she's not just performing for, say, Europeans touring in the area.

She's likely also performing for local Egyptians, also Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, people who are also in this area and also visiting the city. And so we can't discount those audiences either. And who did she correspond with? Were you able to figure it out? Yes. Yes. So there are two major figures that she corresponds with. The first of which is a fellow named Jack Kaluci. And as we later discovered, this is a Latinized form of Jakub Chalusibe, who is actually an architect in Egypt. And he pops up in some major trade journals.

And this is how we were able to track him to this time period and know that he was an actual figure running around Cairo. And it appears that they had some kind of romantic affair, just based off of the little messages they're sending to each other. For instance, Jack always gives her fair warning when he's coming to town saying, I'm coming tomorrow, baby. Or he'll say other messages about their memories in Cairo together saying, never forget.

And the postcard on which that message is related is a postcard of the fish market, and specifically women in the fish market. And Kitty actually scrolls her own note about this at the top. that says public women in the Cairo fish market. And this actually refers to prostitutes. Right. Because the fish market at the time was where all the prostitutes would hang out and also solicit customers.

So maybe she had a, maybe Jack knows that she has a fascination with these women in the market. Somehow related to inspiration for her act, I don't know. Perhaps, perhaps. I mean, we can only guess as to what that note means, never forget. Did they have some kind of trist in the fish market? Who knows? But at any rate, it opens this little window into city life in Cairo that I don't think we get a very good image of in many other sources.

And especially the personality of an Egyptian architect who, you know, we might not know that much about the personality from the sources, the conventional sources, but here we have this guy who's going around calling himself Jack. Right. He's adopted this English name. But at the same time, sometimes he initials his postcards as YK. And so you're like, okay, so he calls himself Jack, but then obviously he still conceives of himself also as Jakub.

And we know that he ends up going to music hall theater, which is not something I think we necessarily have considered a great deal in scholarship about these local audiences going to, say, Western shows. I'm struck by the notes that you're doing. describing here, sometimes just a sentence, sometimes it sounds like they were scrawled even on top of the picture itself. How were people using the postcard? Right. Well, that's a great question because it's pretty different from how we conceive of postcards being used as something sent across seas and oceans when people are on vacation. Here, we have people writing directly on images,

even when you have space for some kind of message on the back of the postcard. But this is also pretty reflective of the changing forms of postcards during the period because previously you would just have a few lines on the back of the postcard where you could just put the address. And so you really didn't have a place to write a message or really anything. And so the front was the only option. But now it seems that even when they do have a correspondence box, it's completely ignored. And instead, the image itself becomes a very integral part of the message, as in the case of the fish market and many others. And so when you look at them, of course they're quite short in what they say.

But in many ways, I think that's also reflective of how they're using them. because it seems that both Jack and Kitty and also Alex, another person to whom she wrote, all these individuals were sending postcards the day of. And we know that they were also, they were being sent from Cairo to other locations within Cairo. So it's not so much like a long-distance message, but rather it's something that you would almost think is akin to a modern text message or message courier service. during this period where they want to send these little thinking of you type notes and also they're letting people know okay i'm going to be there tomorrow or i will see you tomorrow and then they're also just very pithy statements and the way they are engaging uh with the images i think

is quite interesting because i don't i don't believe we do that as often in modern postcards surely sometimes we talk about, you know, our trips and such, but do we write on the images themselves? Less often. And I don't think that it's something that we necessarily use for this type of short notice communication. Right. Well, Gwen, our listeners won't know it, but for those who do know you, they know you're interested in costumes and sort of historicist fashion, both in history and in the present. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what you used. see when you look at Kitty Lord's outfit, her really unique outfit that she herself has kind of

cultivated over the years, the costume she employs in her performances and her public persona. Kitty's costume certainly tells us a lot about her act, her personality, but also it shows how she was really able to push the envelope of, I guess, respectability and acceptability of women's costumes during this period. You can look at how much thigh she's able to show and it's been posited that perhaps she's wearing a type of stocking that enhanced the plumpness of the thighs to give someone that really ideal hourglass figure. And of course you have the absolutely lavish capes and caps which are pseudo-tudor style. And if anyone is interested in seeing pieces of her costume that are still extant, you can go to the Museum of

London or the website to see some boots and stage shoes that are still still on display there. Wow, that looks very painful. I mean, they look as extravagant as her act probably was. And so these are satin boots that are the jeweled. And of course, you have a pretty decent heel on them. And you also have a set of stage shoes as well that are yellow satin. and embroidered. And so I think it's important to look at these types of objects

because it really makes the person and also potentially the act come alive a bit more in a way that we can't really get at through photographs or even through audio since we have very few recordings from this period, especially of music hall performers. So it also lets us know how much detail went into the costumes that these performers were performed. putting on, I mean, these do not look like cheap items.

And as you can tell, they've fared pretty well for about, you know, 100 years. And so they are well constructed. And yes, I hope that people take a closer look at them because they're great pieces in terms of source material for the early 20th century stage. Gwen, tell us about the exhibition of Miss Kitty Lord's life in postcards. Well, the exhibition is currently at the Fine Arts Library in the Litower Center of Harvard University's campus. And if you go into the reading room, you'll see a lovely display case. And we decided to divide it into several themes seen throughout her postcards. The first theme, of course, being Kitty Lord herself.

We have a few postcards of her in costume and some of the cheekier costumes where she's wearing like a night dress and holding a little. little dog. But then we also have a set of images that are dedicated to Cairo's street scenes and also Belapok architecture of the period, kind of showing this interaction of different trends. And then in the center of the display, we have a number of different postcards that deal with the historical sites that are captured within them. And these are sites that are both ancient Egyptian, Greco-Roman and also medieval Islamic onward. And it's great because many of the sites that are displayed here have either been altered or no longer exist.

And so they're a great resource if anyone's interested in looking at, I guess, the transformation of these sites or their overall life stories. And then finally, we have a last section that deals with ethnography and portraits of people in the city. And those are quite fun because some of them are far more unusual. For instance, there's one of a couple with a woman on the mule. It almost looks like an Egyptian rendering of the flight from Egypt, the biblical story.

Of course, you have a number of scenes too where you just have tradesmen or trades at work. So you have sort of barbers or you have, let's see, you have craftsmen. that are working on weaving, things like that. And so you get a pretty good spread of the different themes and also the different agents involved. So we have postcards sent from Jack. We have postcards sent from Alex. Yeah.

We assume that he's also another romantic interest, but he is nowhere near as prolific a writer as Jack was. But at the very least, he sent her a great many postcards. And interestingly enough, the two men both sent Kitty. the same postcard from the same hotel. And so we're wondering if that's a type of rendezvous point for them. But anyway, so you get a number of these, you get a taste of these different areas of the collection.

And of course, if anyone's interested in seeing the rest of it, they can always request it be pulled, and they can view it in the special collections reading room. Yeah, and you have this, through the lens of Miss Kitty and her lovers, you have this great multi-layered exploration of both material history, the history of Cairo, both in the early 20th century, but also in the long deray through these images.

It's really fantastic. Well, it's funny because we actually had to, if you talk about three-dimensional or multidimensional images, one of the challenges of the display was to make these two-dimensional postcards seem a bit more multidimensional. And so we had to actually construct little stands for each and every one.

So we had one layer where we could. could lay them down on the base. And then we had to have stands to make them stand up and probably a quarter of the way. And then another set behind them for halfway. And then another stand of sets that, or set of stands, where they're fully upright along the back. And so you kind of see this multi-level display of postcards. And so hopefully it will also be multidimensional to view as much as it is to interpret. Well, it also kind of shows. It also kind of shows. one of the advantages of writing the notes on the front of the postcard that you get to see the letter in the picture at the same time. For people who won't be able to check out the exhibit at Harvard, you're also creating an online exhibition.

Right. And so that will be hosted on ArcNet and will be coming out fairly soon. And it will have all of the postcards from the collection online, both front and back, if people are interested in it. And it'll include additional text and a full bibliobligibility. for anyone who's planning on undertaking a research project related to Miss Kitty or any of the topics captured within her postcards. It would be a great project for a seminar, a history seminar in any of America's fine institutions of higher education. And for instructors or students who do take on such research, we do encourage them to get in

touch with us and let us know if they find out more. There's much more to learn about the story of Miss Kitty Lord. Well, thank you for giving us the opportunity to get it out there. Thanks for talking to us, Gwen. In addition to that interview, Gwen and Shireen met to record with Andrash Riedelmeyer, director of the Documentation Center for Islamic Architecture of the Aga Khan program at Harvard University's Fine Arts Library. Riedelmeyer is most known for his work on the destruction of cultural heritage in Bosnia,

Herzegovina, and Kosovo during the 1990s. We published an episode with him about that topic. in 2017. Here's a snippet from that bonus conversation with Gwen Colosso and Shereen Hamza about the Kitty Lord postcards. Hi, I'm Shereen Hamza here with Gwen and Colosso. We are interviewing Andrash Riedelmeyer, the bibliographer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Aga Khan program at Harvard's Fine Arts Library. We would like to ask you, Androsh, about how you came to connect the dots that the person signing the postcards to Kitty, who signed with his initials, or sometimes full name, or sometimes full name, was actually an Egyptian architect named

Jacob Chalusi or Chalusi Bay. It's not easy because, as you know, things are spelled one way in Arabic, but can be rendered in many different ways in Latin script. It's also made more difficult by the fact that very often he just wrote his initials. And if you look at the postcards, you can see that his J looks like a Y. It took us the longest time just to get that far. What made things easier is that as a fan of kiddies, he was of a certain class who could afford to go to music halls to engage in correspondence and to flirt with visiting foreign artists.

And to make a long story short, when I first saw Colussi had no idea how that word was supposed to be pronounced, the way it was spelled, and even the nationality. I thought it may be Greek, no, not Greek. Then I started looking in databases. Given the French connection, I looked in Gallica and turned up a whole bunch of people with the name Hulusi very clearly who shared this strange spelling. Okay, so now I had a fairly good fix on, you know, what the name was. And to identify which chulusi this might be, we needed a chalusi who was active in Cairo at this point.

And luckily, as an architect, he was using the new building technology, which was reinforced concrete. And the French inventor, who had refined the technique of reinforced concrete in the late 1880s, and pretty much dominated the market until World War I, had agents in all of these countries that would collect data on who built reinforced concrete buildings. And this was published in an international magazine called Le Beton Armée, Reinforce Concrete. And so lo and behold, Mr. Choulouse,

an architect in Cairo built buildings in at least two of the years that this magazine appeared. And so we had Monsieur

Chulusi. And the conjecture from Jack to Yaquoub is simply if he is Chalusi he must have

an English name and Unless the Jack was just a nickname, it's probably the English version of his Arabic name. Yeah, it was so fascinating. And I still remember when you sent me the email late at night, I was like, oh, wait, what is this? Oh, okay. No, it's a wonderful discovery to see that people are kind of identifying themselves in these different ways with these different languages. And I think it says so much about this very cosmopolitan atmosphere that Kitty was a part of.

and the audiences that she was catering towards. Cool. Oh, and I wanted to know if you could elaborate a bit more on the process of acquiring this collection. Why is it significant for a library like ours? And also, what's unusual about it? In the introduction, you mentioned that this is the Aga Khan program for Islamic architecture. And originally our role here was to support the teaching and study of great art, you know, the fine arts library.

But the fact is that the field has been changing rapidly. One of the things the Agha Khan program does, it publishes an annual called Mukarnas, and its subtitle used to be an annual of Islamic Art and Architecture. And around 2000, they changed the subtitle. It's now an annual of the visual cultures of the Islamic world. And visual cultures is not only high art, it's every visual expression of culture, politics, whatever. And so that has affected our collecting as well. We have a million and a half or so photographs, many of them of the Middle East, and they are much used.

It used to be that the focus was on the great monuments. Now people are looking for things, how are women portrayed? Somebody did a dissertation on tobacco and the modern Egyptian. Egyptian identity, looking at tobacco advertising with stereotypical Egyptian images. Right. Oh, that's fascinating. And so we collect these ephemeral looking things, and scholars appreciated because most libraries didn't actually pay much attention to things like this.

This was something for matchbox collectors. Right, exactly. Exactly. And now we also have a PhD candidate who's working on the history of postcards and Gwen's project on the history of costume. Oh, yeah. It's related. Certainly a later iteration of the genre I'm working on. But I think that what's really interesting, though, is that, yes, you can look at it as this type of ephemeral art, but then it's also, or ephemeral commercial product. But then you can also look at it as a type of source for buildings from this early 20th. the century period, and so it works both ways. Yeah. If you look at the exhibition, you'll see that roughly a third of what Gwen has

shown, and I think that's pretty much representative of what we acquired, deals with modernizing Cairo of the decades just before World War I. You know, a lot of the districts, like the district where this music hall was, were newly developed neighborhoods. Before they were developed by the Gadivs in the mid-19th century. They were lagoons and gardens. Exactly. Although then they were turned into very different types of gardens. Great.

Should we stop here? Sure. Sure. And then we'll get on to far more interesting things. Andros Ritalmeyer retired from his position at Harvard University at the end of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Coincidentally, I had been back at Harvard as a postdoc that year when the university shut down, and the tape you just heard remained trapped in a rich layer of sonic sediment, consisting of incomplete projects from that period.

To finish this one off, we have one more short clip that attest to the grandiose vision I had for this episode. In pursuit of more tape, we dispatched our UK-based contributor, Michael Talbot, to pleasures of past times, the memorabilia and ephemera shop in Westminster, where Gwendolyn Coloso first stumbled upon Miss Kitty Lord. Here's his interview with the owner, Paul Drummond. Hello, I'm Michael Talbot, and today I'm in the heart of London West End with Paul Drummond. Paul, thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Good, glad to be here. So, Paul, we're in your fantastic shop. pleasures of past times. And you have a wonderful set of collections. Where do you find all this material? Well, the shop has been here for 50 years, so it is accumulated over 50 years. And there's a wealth of theatrical material, and I've been adding to that in the last five years, sort of bring it more up to date. And amongst that was this Kitty Lord collection of postcards that I believe is some interest. There's very little known about Kitty. She was a sort of lower end comic singer basically and I always knew her because there's these Victorian screens that I grew up with

which had postcards of performers and she always was hilarious because of her costume she was known for her costumes if nothing else is remembered about her and there's a pair of her boots on display in the London Museum currently fantastic so how did you come across the postcards of Kitty Lord I mean where did you find them well she had a lot of she's considering this little known about her There are a large volume of postcards. There are certain performers like that. And so there were sort of multiples of them. And yeah, the costumes are really quite over the top.

So I'd put those in an album with all the other sort of musical performers. And then this sort of chat came in who was interested in Egypt. And he was going through the Egypt box. And he happened to be in a wheelchair. And he was zooming around the shop in the wheelchair. And he sort of flipped the box round. And he started reading the backs of them, which really really. normally irritates the hell out of me.

And he said, do you realise these are all from or two the same person? And I obviously never looked at the back of them. And so we kind of became quite good friends over this. Yeah, so he went through the whole box and became sort of intrigued, entertained buying them himself. And I think when one of your people came in, she remarked on the same thing. And that's how you acquired them. So is it unusual then to find post-class? Extremely, yeah. The only other story I found like that was with a load of First World War postcards,

which I was getting rather irritated that all the place names had been scratched out before I realized that they've been sent from the front. And it was literally a postcard home every day to say I'm still alive. And it became a bit of a mission to try and get to the end of the story. But I put them all in Day Orvidor and clearly the guy didn't make it, which is quite a sad story. But occasionally you do get these threads from the past where boxes, have been in the basement 50 years. No one's been through them. A message for our listeners, perhaps, to take care

what they have hidden away in their houses? You never know, you never know. So what about Kitty's story? How does that end up? So she's got these fantastic costumes. She's all over the world. She performs. What happens to her when she's back in London? Well, nothing's really known, apart from I had a couple in the shop, and they asked for Kitty Lord.

And because it's quite an unusual name, I stopped on my tracks and said, well, how do you know that name? I just know them from these miscellaneous postcards. They said, oh, we knew her. She was a rather elderly woman. She'd become rather obese and was living in this, what sounded like a really miserable, dank, kind of rather squalid conditions with some mould on the wall,

but very, very jolly. They sort of befriended her and sort of did up her house and looked after her. I did ask them for any stories, but they didn't seem to know anything about her or care, but other than she was just their neighbour and they were looking after her. But they were certainly aware that that's why they were asking in this shop. They thought they might find something about her. Yeah, what a shame that.

And they found a postcard. That was it. It was all I could tell them, really. That's pretty much. But it was quite strange, yeah, because I've been sort of fascinated with this sort of character. Why does she interest you so much? It's costumes. I mean, she just looks hilarious.

There are certain performers that you go through all these postcards and you sort them into a performer. And there's certain people who just the silly roles they played, they start intriguing you, and then you find their names on programs. And you do build up a picture, but particularly with the musical people, they are incredibly hard because they did literally travel the world as these Egyptian series of postcards. So it's not like they were doing one act probably for the whole of their career or two acts that they were tour for maybe 30, 40 years,

never changing because there was no television, there was no need for new material. they just went to new audiences and there was no, you know, there's no sort of limit of, you know, these variety acts that just toured, literally did tour the world, you know, right out to Egypt is quite surprising. Indeed, absolutely. Well, Paulison, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us today. Pleasures of past times moved to exclusively online sales during the COVID-19 pandemic,

and Paul Drummond never returned to a brick-and-mortar setting. But you can still browse his collections online at pleasures of pastimes.com. Visit our website for an easy link and to check out Gwendolyn Colossos' online exhibition about Miss Kitty Lord and the visuals referenced in this episode. That's all for now. I'm Chris Grayton. Thanks for listening.