Category Archives: Popular culture

Advertisements: looking around the map

From the late nineteenth century many commercially produced maps featured advertisements  for products completely unrelated to the map. The advertisements can be fascinating in their own right, and a few examples are shown here.

An earlier blog post features a map of the Manchester Ship Canal from 1889, and it’s worth taking a closer look at a few of the advertisements on and around it. This one, for Sanitary Rose Powder, features a graceful woman in a rather classical dress holding the product aloft; it appears to be endorsed by the Queen, but this probably refers to the magazine of that title rather than to Her Majesty.

The target market for this map seems to be fairly comprehensive; it promotes a great variety of items besides soap powder: security locks, toothpaste, local hostelries, furniture, marquees and two different kinds of sewing machine. The inclusion of an advertisement for Musgrave’s patent stable fittings, “adopted by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales and supplied to the best stables in the United Kingdom”, with an illustration of a glossy horse pawing the ground, adds a touch of class.

Advertisements on maps are often an interesting source of social history. A road map of Great Britain produced by the popular weekly magazine “Tit-Bits” around 1920 has a particularly egregious example of advertising on the back panel: it features a health drink called Wincarnis (which is evidently wine with a few additions). It is presented as a solution to “Why married women lose their looks” (the implication is that this will encourage husbands to stray). A few glasses of Wincarnis, starting at 11:30 am and continuing through the day, will help the frazzled wife to regain her equanimity and “within a few days your looks will begin to come back.” There is so much wrong with this to the modern reader that it’s hard to know where to begin, but we can at least say that it would be unlikely to work. Interestingly, the many other advertisements on the map (bike lamps, radio valves, car batteries) appear to be aimed at a masculine market.

There are also examples of maps and atlases produced specifically to promote a product. The Mazawattee Tea Company (established in 1887 and still in business) produced a small paperback atlas of the world around 1900. The maps are general and make no attempt to highlight tea growing areas, but every page has a slogan urging the reader to drink Mazawattee teas (apart from one which urges them to try a brand of cocoa made by the same company). They also published a dictionary, a gazetteer and a guide to the language of flowers, amongst other things.

Sunlight Soap, another company founded in the 1880s and still in business (now a subsidiary) made a innovative promotional map, the Sunlight Quick-Find Map, in the 1930s. An attached ruler and gazetteer could be used to locate “300 important places in the United Kingdom,” including of course Port Sunlight, the model village on the Wirral established by the company for its workers.


Sometimes the advertisements do have a connection with the map. The Italian map below of excursions around Lake Garda, from the 1930s, features many advertisements for local services. An advertisement for Esso fuel portrays Esso as a mythological character, perhaps a Roman god.

The map itself is detailed and practical, and clearly aimed at international tourists; the cover text is in English, French and German as well as Italian. The cover image makes travel to the area look both stylish and desirable. It could easily provoke a wish to visit Lake Garda, ideally in the 1930s and while wearing a cloche hat.

 

Manchester ship canal – general plan of canal and district. Revised. [Manchester] : J. Heywood, 1885. C17:3 (13)

“Tit-Bits” road map of England and Scotland.  [Edinburgh] : Edinburgh Geographical Institute, [1920s]. C16 (737)

Mazawattee atlas of the World  London : Mazawattee Tea Co., Ltd., [ca 1900]. B1 c.484

Sunlight quick-find map.  [1935] C15 d.200

Gardone Riviera : Lago di Garda (Italia). Gardone Riviera : Agenzia Viaggi Fratelli Molinari, 1932. C25:17 (59)

 

Brrr

During the Little Ice Age of the sixteenth to the nineteen centuries the River Thames occasionally froze right from bank to bank. Never ones to pass up a commercial opportunity the good folk of London decamped onto the ice to sledge, skate, roast oxen, play nine pins or drink coffee.  The whole of London life was there and obviously maps and keepsakes were produced to mark the occasion. Mementos were even printed on the ice.

The maps produced at this time show quite an organised affair with rows of stalls and marked footpaths.

The first frost fair was in 1608, then 1683-84, 1715–16, 1739–40, and 1789 then the final one in 1814. The maps we hold date from the earlier fairs in the seventeenth century. This one is illustrative rather that truly accurate but encapsulate the holiday-like feel of the time.

 

 

We may never see the Thames frozen in London again so these are not only historical documents but images unlikely to be repeated.Gough Maps 21 (f.45a)

Broxb. 95.89

On the last day of September

This panorama of the Manchester Ship Canal was created to mark its opening by Queen Victoria in 1894; the culmination of more than 12 years of campaigning and construction work. This section at the bottom of the map shows the docks and the canal itself which runs almost into the heart of the city of Manchester.

For much of its length the canal is a straight, wide channel; this section from the middle of the panorama shows it cutting out the loops of the River Mersey between Manchester and Runcorn. Beyond this point the canal runs alongside the river, before joining it on the estuary past Liverpool to the sea. The title makes clear that this was a local production, designed, lithographed (printed) and published by J. Galloway & Son of Manchester. Undoubtedly the finished canal, allowing direct access to the city for large cargo ships, was a source of civic pride.

The plan to create a shipping canal linking Manchester to the sea had first been proposed in the early 1880s, in an attempt to reduce costs for traders in Manchester.  This simpler, uncoloured panorama was published in 1883 as part of the campaign, surrounded by quotes from local dignitaries (such as the MPs Jacob Bright and William Agnew, and the Mayor of Salford) and from supportive newspapers.  It argues that “the general industries in this region have to bear excessive taxation in carriage of their merchandise to and from the sea,” referring to the charges imposed by the port of Liverpool and cost of railway transport. It was allegedly cheaper to transport cotton from Liverpool to Glasgow than from Liverpool to Manchester, for example. The proposed route is represented clearly but the campaigners have cunningly foreshortened the straightest part of the canal, perhaps to make it look shorter and easier to achieve. However, as one of the notes on the map points out, the much larger Suez Canal had recently been constructed, to great admiration. So the Manchester Ship Canal was a viable proposition. The plan above was made in the late 1880s, probably once the canal was under construction. The section here shows the relative shallows of the Mersey estuary bypassed by the canal. It is surrounded by advertisements for huge a variety of products, including toothpaste and medicines, and domestic items such as sewing machines and locks; a detailed inset plan of the Manchester and Salford Docks promotes both furniture and ale.

What of the connection with September? The well known nursery rhyme and singing game, “The big ship sails on the Alley Alley-Oh” is popularly believed to refer to the Manchester Ship Canal. The song refers to a ship setting out “on the last day of September,” which comes to grief and sinks “to the bottom of the sea”. Various interpretations of the song have been suggested: one is that a ship that was contracted to set out in September might be under financial pressure to do so even the weather was unfavourable or the ship not seaworthy; it may also have been a reference to the last date a ship could expect to set out and reach Canada before the St Lawrence River began to be blocked by ice. Whatever the explanation, the unhappy ending of the ship does not seem to have deterred generations of children from singing the song.

Panoramic map of the Manchester Ship Canal / designed, lithographed and published by J. Galloway and Son, Manchester, 1894. C17:3 (14)

Bird’s eye view of the Manchester Ship Canal, 1883. C17:3 (49)

Manchester ship canal – general plan of canal and district. Revised. [1889?]  C17:3 (13)