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A Star Series postcard that was published by G. D. & D. of London. The card was posted in Fulham using a ½d. stamp on Saturday the 6th. April 1907. It was sent to:

Miss G. Brown,

62, Compayne Gardens,

West Hampstead,

London N.W.

The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:

"Dear Auntie,

We have been to

Chalgrove and found

all well.

We enjoyed our holiday.

Hope you are well.

Love from all,

Walter."

Kew Gardens

The adult fee for admission to Kew Gardens used to be one pre-decimalisation penny. It now costs £15.50. As there were 240 old pennies to the £, it is now 3,720 times more expensive to get in than it used to be. How's that for inflation?

Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world.

Founded in 1840 from the exotic garden at Kew Park in Middlesex, its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the Herbarium, which is one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens.

The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London's top tourist attractions, and is a World Heritage Site.

The Kew site, which has been dated as formally starting in 1759, though it can be traced back to the exotic garden at Kew Park, formed by Henry, Lord Capell of Tewkesbury, consists of 132 hectares (330 acres) of gardens and botanical glasshouses, four Grade I listed buildings, and 36 Grade II listed structures, all set in an internationally significant landscape. It is listed Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

Kew Gardens has its own police force, Kew Constabulary, which has been in operation since 1847.

Frank Barlow Osborn

So what else happened on the day that Walter posted the card to his aunt?

Well, the 6th. April 1907 was not a good day for Frank Osborn, because he died on that day.

Frank Barlow Osborn FRIBA, who was born in June 1840, was an English architect based in Birmingham.

He was articled to Charles Edge, and then transferred to Samuel Sanders Teulon. He started his own practice in 1864, and was in partnership with Alfred Reading from 1876. This partnership was dissolved in 1891. At this date, Frank was based at 13 Bennett’s Hill, Birmingham.

Frank mentored Thomas Walter Francis Newton, who went into practice with Alfred Edward Cheatle and built many arts and crafts style buildings in Birmingham.

Frank was appointed Fellow of the Royal British Institute of Architects in 1872, and was President of the Birmingham Institute of Architects.

Richard Murdoch

The 6th. April 1907 also marked the birth of the English actor and entertainer Richard Bernard Murdoch.

After early professional experience in the chorus in musical comedy, Murdoch quickly moved on to increasingly prominent roles in musical comedy and revue in the West End and on tour.

He made his first radio broadcast for the BBC in 1932, and in 1937 and 1938 he featured in early television broadcasts.

Richard came to national fame when cast with the comedian Arthur Askey in the radio show Band Waggon in 1938.

Their contrasting styles appealed to the public, and they took a version of the show on tour to theatres around the country and made a film adaptation of it.

Serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Murdoch met a fellow officer, Kenneth Horne, and together they conceived, wrote and starred in the radio series Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, which ran from 1944 to 1954.

Murdoch's last long-running radio programmes were The Men from the Ministry (1962–1977) in which he played a well-meaning but disaster-prone civil servant, and Many a Slip, a panel game in which he appeared from 1964 to 1973.

Murdoch appeared on air and on stage in Australia, Canada and South Africa, and continued acting and broadcasting into his eighties.

-- Richard Murdoch - The Early Years

Richard Murdoch was born at his family's home in Keston, Kent, the only son of Bernard Murdoch, a tea merchant, and his wife, Amy Florence, daughter of the Ven. Avison Scott, archdeacon of Tonbridge.

He was educated at Charterhouse School in Surrey, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, which he left without taking a degree. His biographer Barry Took comments that:

"Murdoch's appetite for a career

in show business was whetted

by success with the Cambridge

Footlights".

Murdoch made his professional stage debut in March 1927 at the Kings Theatre, Southsea, in the chorus of The Blue Train, a musical comedy starring Lily Elsie and directed by Jack Hulbert.

He remained in the show when it opened in the West End in May of that year.

Richard graduated from the chorus to a supporting role in a tour of Oh! Letty, a musical farce in which he was praised by Neville Cardus for:

"A stretch of distinguished dancing".

In 1932 he married Peggy, daughter of William Rawlings, solicitor. They had one son and two daughters.

During the 1930's Richard gained increasingly prominent roles in musicals and revues, including the secondary romantic lead to Jack Buchanan's star, in Stand up and Sing (1932).

He also took the lead in a 1936 tour of Gay Divorce in the part played in New York and London by Fred Astaire.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) transmitted a live radio relay of Stand up and Sing in April 1932, and Murdoch was in another such relay in 1934 in an entertainment called Bubbles.

Richard's first studio work for the corporation was in 1936 in a radio show called Tunes of the Town, and during 1937 and early 1938 he took part in five broadcasts by the fledgling BBC Television service, including an adaptation of Noël Coward's one-act comedy with music, Red Peppers in which he played the Coward role.

-- Band Waggon and Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh

In 1938 the BBC teamed Murdoch with Arthur Askey in the radio series Band Waggon, where they were soon billed as "Richard ('Stinker') Murdoch and "'Big-hearted' Arthur Askey".

The smooth West End style of Murdoch contrasted with the down-to-earth humour of Askey, whose background was in seaside concert parties.

Their main slot in the weekly show took up only about ten minutes, but it caught the public imagination. They were depicted as occupying a flat on top of Broadcasting House.

Barry Took comments that their humour was a forerunner of much radio comedy to come:

"The fantasy of their living in Broadcasting House,

and the creation of such mythical characters as

Mrs. Bagwash the charlady and her daughter

Nausea and their pet animals, a goat called Lewis,

and two pigeons Basil and Lucy, preceded ITMA

and Hancock's Half Hour, and was a strong

influence on many nascent comedy scriptwriters."

Towards the end of 1938, after two series with the BBC, Band Waggon became a stage show. The impresario Jack Hylton presented the two stars and a supporting cast in a show that toured the provincial music-halls and finished with a run at the London Palladium in 1939.

The stars featured in a film adaptation in 1940.

The Observer commented that:

"They work so well together because

they find the same things funny. Each

has a special line of humour that sets

the other going".

Richard Murdoch was conscripted into the Royal Air Force in 1941, serving as a pilot officer in the intelligence section of Bomber Command, before being posted to the Department of Allied Air Force and Foreign Liaison as a flight lieutenant.

In 1943 he joined the Directorate of Administrative Plans at the Air Ministry, where he shared an office with wing commander Kenneth Horne, being responsible for the supply of aircraft and air equipment to Russia. Richard finished the war with the rank of Squadron Leader.

Horne and Murdoch quickly became friends, and as both were regular broadcasters they invented a fictitious RAF station Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh for a programme of the same name.

It went on air in January 1944, and when peace came in 1945 it became a civilian airport. The show continued successfully, with the last programme being broadcast in March 1954.

-- Richard Murdoch - The Later Years

Murdoch's later career is described by Barry Took as "varied and interesting". In 1954 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented a series of variety programmes called Much Murdoch, in which he worked again with Horne, who took advantage of a three-week holiday to join him.

Murdoch worked again with Arthur Askey in 1958 in the television series Living It Up, running a pirate TV station from the roof of Television House.

Richard's next major broadcasting success was the BBC radio series The Men from the Ministry (1962–1977). His character, Richard Lamb, was a well-meaning but not conspicuously bright civil servant.

Together with his equally disaster-prone superior, Roland Hamilton-Jones (Wilfrid Hyde-White) and later Deryck Lennox-Brown (Deryck Guyler), continually found the wrong answers to the pressing problems of government.

Murdoch's last long-running radio show was Many a Slip, a panel game that combined humour and erudition, in which he appeared from 1964 to 1973.

Richard Murdoch appeared in two seasons at the Shaw Festival and on tour in North America, playing Aubrey in Tons of Money (1968) and William the Waiter in You Never Can Tell (1973).

Richard toured South Africa in a comedy called Not in the Book (1974), and toured Great Britain as Sir William Boothroyd, the role created by Ralph Richardson, in William Douglas-Home's Lloyd George Knew My Father.

From 1978 to 1990, Murdoch had a long-running regular role as "Uncle Tom", the briefless senior barrister of chambers, in Rumpole of the Bailey.

In 1981 he played the headmaster in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On. In 1989 he played Lord Caversham in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband on tour and at the Westminster Theatre; The Times commented that:

"Murdoch manages to make Caversham's

ghastly mixture of the sanctimonious, the

roguish and the bluff seem human."

-- Richard Murdoch's Death

Murdoch, a keen golfer, died at the age of 83 while playing golf at Walton Heath, Surrey, on the 9th. October 1990. He was survived by his wife and children.

Post Mortem by DramaTech Theatre