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Ship matchbooks go back to an era when most people were smokers. Providing books of matches – or small boxes of matches – was looked upon as a necessity rather than as a luxury.

Matchbooks are a commodity that had a short life – when the matches were used up, the empty book was discarded. Many of those used on the ship ended up in the ship’s garbage. A few came ashore, either because there were a few matches remaining in the book, or because they were being kept as a souvenir.

Matchbooks belong in a defined time period. With the advent of smoking bans, there are no more matchbooks being produced for dissemination aboard ships, or for most other venues. What is ‘out there’ is the quantum of what there is or ever will be. At this stage, there is a stigma about smoking, and that stigma reflects upon the collection of smoking artifacts, including matchbooks. And the legion of matchbook collectors has further withered in the reality of no new collectibles.

When the subject of smoking moves from the despised to the purely historical, these prime examples of ‘ephemera’ should move into the realm of research and ‘respectability’. Their significance – beyond that of a social ‘grace’ – is relevant to design, advertising, and promotion. The French Line examples are a fine example of product advertising, with each ship in the fleet as a ‘product’ and marketed separately. In the 1930s, the Normandie was their high-end product, and was marketed on its own stature and perceived elegance. However, inside the cover, other ships of the fleet are also mentioned, and the examples in the Collection show how the loss of one of the ships in the fleet (the Lafayette) in 1938 led to its deletion from the fleet list.

The only other line that appears to have actively focused on each ship as a product was the Norwegian America Line, where the various ‘fjord’ vessels had their own matchbooks. At Cunard, apparently the only vessel to have had its own distinctive matchbooks was the Queen Mary. An example is elsewhere in the Collection.

So for the French Line the premise appears to be that the Line was defined by its ships. For the other lines, the assumption was that the ships were defined by the line itself. As ‘Superliners’ the Normandie and the Queen Mary had their own distinct mantles which may explain Cunard’s efforts to define the Queen Mary’s individuality as it faced its primary competitor, the Normandie, for the most elegant and prestigious travel across the North Atlantic in the fiercely competitive 1930s.

Note that the collector should remove the matches, because of the risk of them being a fire hazard, although I understand that some matchbook collector purists prefer to have the matches intact. This Cunard example shows why!

Where the matchbooks define the line’s own broader self-image, I leave it to future students of graphics and design to use them to interpret those images!

 

The Sayers Collection at the Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, includes these matchbook examples, as part of a group of some 50 Ocean Liner matchbooks. The match tips have been removed!

 

 

 

 

 

Late 18th and early 19th century trade cards give us fascinating insights into undertaking. While there were dedicated undertakers, a startling number of tradesman undertook this role as a sideline to their main trades. Often these had an obvious relation to one of the multiple tasks of preparing a body for the grave (trunk makers, carpenters, drapers), administrating the wordly goods of the deceased (house appraisers, auctioneers), or equipping the mourners (drapers, hatters).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are some curious juxtapositions, however: Venetian blind makers, for example and brush manufacturers.

 

 

 

 

 

More than one tradesman omits to mention undertaker on his trade card and adds it by hand.

 

 

 

Trade cards reveal much about funeral practices in the 18th and 19th century, not least through their imagery. Depictions of funeral processions, hearses, the apparel of horses and carriages, mutes, and coffins differ from other sources in that they do not record an actual event but rather encapsulate in the restrained medium of a small-format engraving the correct appartenances of a funeral.

 

 

Funerals, even of the less afluent, were elaborate in 18th and 19th century England and codes of mourning dress and etiquette were to be strictly observed.  Charles Dickens notably decried the pomp and circumstance (and attendant expense) of even humble funerals and the employment of paid mourners, notably in the form of ‘mutes’, who kept vigil outside the house of the deceased and then accompanied the coffin.   Oliver Twist is perhaps literature’s best-known mutes, during his apprenticeship to Mr Sowerberry.

Their dress was distinctive: dark clothes with a sash, top hat and a stave swathed in black crape, although white was used for the funeral of an infant.

Trade cards and bill headings which give prices for undertaking services are also invaluable to social historians. The example below gives extensive detail of the components of each of nine classes of funeral for adults and four for children (but alas is not dated).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trade cards (but not bill headings) in the John Johnson Collection are catalogued and digitised and can be accessed through our online catalogue. Undertakers as a primary trade are at shelfmark Trade Cards 28, but in order to find the multiplicity of cards which include undertaking, set the scrollbar to Subjects, Trades and Products in browse.

 

 

My thanks to Leea Stroia, graduate historian researching WW1, for writing a series of posts based on the John Fraser Collection of Propaganda Postcards, of which this is the first.

The John Fraser Collection of Propaganda Postcards includes many postcards of children engaged in various activities and filling various roles during the First World War. One common depiction of children on the postcards is in relation to adults, notably sons in relation to fathers. This relationship is revealed in three distinct ways.

First, boys are shown wishing to be like their fathers and go to war alongside them. While there are many postcards which encourage recruitment by using children, one way this is often done is through showing boys longing to be like their fathers, to join other men at the front and so to be men as well. This sends the message that manhood is achieved during the war by fighting. Masculinity is appealed to in the recruitment posters depicted on postcards by reminding men that their country asks for them to fight. There are many examples of boys looking at the posters with captions such as ‘England shall not ask in vain’.

While the postcards highlighted patriotism for its own sake by depicting boys longing to answer their country’s call, they also encouraged patriotism by showing that joining up would lead to recognition. Therefore, one major incentive to joining war according to the postcards was to gain the admiration of one’s sons. Patriotism and the war effort are advertised in the postcards by showing the zeal of boys who wish they could go to war alongside their fathers.

 

While most show fighting fathers as examples for their sons, there are also several postcards with girls wishing to imitate their father and join up as well. These girls either wish to join and wonder if they can or are simply depicted in uniform.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The use of girls longing  to fight highlights both the masculine example of soldier fathers but also manipulates men slightly by suggesting that girls may be more manly and so men should prove their masculinity through joining up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second, boys are shown attempting to fill the empty place that their fathers’ joining up has left. This depiction of absence is done both humorously and seriously. The humorous postcards often depict boys performing tedious tasks, such as buttoning their mother’s many buttons. They depict unattractive or unhappy women with tired boys. The serious ones on the other hand generally have attractive albeit sad women and sad but hopeful boys.

Many  postcards show little boys next to their grieving mothers trying to comfort them. The captions make very clear that the boys are trying to be men at home since all the adult, ‘real’ men have gone to fight. They commentate on the illustrations with sentences such as ‘Just as Daddy used to’.  Just as boys wished to be like their fathers and go to war, they also wished to fill the void their fathers have left behind and comfort their mothers.

 

Third, boys are shown missing their fathers. The masculinity of the men fighting is only emphasised  and solidified by the fact that they are missed by their wives and sons. Boys are seen longingly looking into the distance while writing a letter to their father, women and sons write together, and poems on the postcards articulate that the soldiers are remembered and missed.

 

 

Often these postcards use sentimental photographs rather than cartoons. Some postcards have no images at all and instead have a letter to the father on the front with a space for a personal note on the back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postcards depicting mothers and daughters are subtly different, emphasising the void left by fathers as girls write to them and wish they could kiss them goodnight. However, these examples also solidify the need for the father’s absence through photographs of soldiers at the Front placed  in the corners of the postcards.  These different depictions of absence serve to solidify that the soldier is missed and thought of by those at home.

All these various cards use the relationships between fathers and sons (and daughters) to highlight the model of masculinity and encourage it. Masculinity during  the First World War related to war in propaganda. The true man was also a soldier. The true man was a model for his sons and was missed. The postcards supported and encouraged this patriotic, fighting masculinity by showing soldiers as fathers who were missed, admired, imitated, and loved.