Ich habe jetzt auch die Kette fertiggestellt.

I have now completed the chain.

A batch of twenty of these front entrance/exit Alexander bodied Scanias were new to London Buses during October and November 1991 for Docklands Express services to supplement the Docklands Light Railway, which was not coping well at the time. They were acquired from dealer stock. Some were delivered in London Buses standard red with grey skirt and white tape, some had a gold cantrail band and gold East London lettering. Some then received broad white wrap-round adverts for Docklands Express route D1 including this one. By the end of 1991 S10-S14 wore LBL livery, 12 and 13 with gold band and lettering, while S15-29 wore white bands with route details for the Docklands Express D1 (Waterloo - Isle of Dogs) and new D11(London Bridge - Canary Wharf). In 07/1992, nine of the Scanias (S11 and S13-20) were re-allocated to Holloway for use on the Red Express X43 route, which was a Monday to Friday route from North Finchley to the City and London Bridge, utilising the new no-stopping Red Route. New in 10/1991, Upton Park based S24 is seen here operating a D11 service, but with Waterloo Station as it's destination, at the now much changed junction, and background, of Lambeth Palace Road and Westminster Bridge Road, on a hot 04/08/1995. The building to the left of the photo is also much changed and is now the Park Plaza Hotel. The Scania was later transferred to Stagecoach Devon(Bayline)(924) from Stagecoach East London and was converted to convertible open-top in 06/2000. It was Re-numbered 15324 in the Stagecoach national re-numbering scheme. See www.countrybus.org/Scania/S_a.htm#fleet for more details.

 

The camera being a Praktica MTL3 with the film being a Boots Colourslide.

 

I would request, as with all my photos, that they are not copied or downloaded in any way, shape or form. © Peter Steel 1995.

Here is one last supplemental to my "Origin of the States" narrative, the fourth supplemental in a Civil War sequence and the seventh overall. We'll call it part 35.6 of 50 in a sporadic series

 

Editor's Note: I don't always identify the picture I use in this series, but this is a house displaying a Confederate battle flag in Franklin Grove, Illinois. Which didn't secede. The "Lost Cause" narrative is pervasive, even now. I had been hoping to have a relevant picture from South Carolina to use by now, but we didn't take that trip.

 

Hey! The Civil War's over! We came through Hell and survived! So we must have solved the problems of institutional racism and the destabilizing nature of "states' rights" philosophy, right? Right?

 

Oh.

 

Abraham Lincoln beat ex-General George "Cement Foot" McClellan in the presidential election of 1864 and won a second term as the 16th President of the United States. At his inauguration four months later -- barely a month before Bob Lee sat down at Appomattox with U.S. Grant -- Lincoln stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and gave a speech about forgiveness. Yes, the war was ending, Lincoln said, and the Union would endure, but this wasn't a time for some Northern victory dance filled with triumphant celebration. The nation had been torn apart and punished for the evils of slavery, and there was no glory here to celebrate. It was time for North and South to come together and reconcile their differences. The last line of this speech is perhaps the most enduring. "With malice toward none," Lincoln said, "with charity for all ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

 

Some historians suggest Lincoln's conciliatory tone was meant to foreshadow the gentle path he planned to take toward the reunification of the country, a process that came to be known as "Reconstruction." Lincoln had two big tasks to accomplish with Reconstruction. One, he needed to figure out how to bring the rebellious states back into the national fold, and two, he had to figure out how to integrate four million suddenly freed slaves into the larger society. There was plenty of debate over what this Reconstruction would look like. The victorious Union leaders started looking for pounds of flesh while the beaten Confederates worked to spin defeat into whatever kind of half-victory they could muster. Many in the North thought they should exact harsh retribution against the South, and some wanted Confederate leaders hanged as traitors. Some questioned whether the privileges of true statehood should be returned to the secessionist states at all. But Lincoln had seen enough of anger, and he meant to have the nation bind together in peace.

 

How or whether he would have managed that, we'll never know. A mere six days after Lee surrendered to Grant, a disgruntled actor with Southern sympathies crept into a theatre balcony and shot Lincoln in the back of the head, ending the planned reconciliation of Lincoln's imagination. Lincoln had held the nation together, but other people would have to figure out what that meant. Ultimately, it all turned into a big mess, and a lot of things we'd fought a war to settle were never really worked out at all. We're still working a lot of it out today.

 

President Johnson

 

One of the weird things about the Civil War is that when it ended, a man from the losing side became President.

 

During Lincoln's first term, the vice president had been a man from Maine named Hannibal Hamlin. But though Hamlin spent his vice presidency working hard to help push Lincoln's legislative agenda through Congress, he and Lincoln had never been all that close. Hamlin was one of those guys who wanted to take a hard line that forced the Southern states to accept the reality of freed slaves as true citizens, but he was a little too extreme for Lincoln's agenda of gentle reconciliation. So Lincoln -- who I'll remind you was a Republican -- decided to replace Hamlin with Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat. Which, yeah, is kind of absurd.

 

Andrew Johnson had been a U.S. senator from Tennessee when the war kicked off, and he was the only one of the 22 Southern senators who didn't quit as soon as his home state seceded. He'd loudly voiced his opposition to secession in the days leading up to the war, and after Nashville fell to Union forces in 1862, he served as Tennessee's Union-appointed military governor. The way Lincoln saw it, having a guy like Andrew Johnson as his vice president would be a big step toward showing that "malice toward none" was more than just a sound bite.

 

The obvious risk with that scheme was that somebody might shoot Lincoln in the back of the head, leaving a Southern Democrat who had until just recently owned a bunch of slaves to handle Reconstruction.

 

That's the thing about Johnson. Sure, he'd been opposed to secession, and he worked hard trying to keep Tennessee in the Union, but he was a BIG fan of slavery and an even bigger fan of states' rights. He was the classic Southern racist, and he saw little reason for some minor disagreement like the Civil Freakin' War to motivate Southerners to change their ways. I mean, yeah, Southerners couldn't keep slaves any more (probably), but that didn't mean they had to treat black people like they were human or something.

 

Basically, Johnson's plan for Reconstruction was to have the former Confederate states welcomed back into the fold like nothing had ever happened, and he kicked things off by telling all the rebel states to go ahead and elect whatever state legislators and governors and U.S. congressmen and senators they wanted. Predictably, the Southern states were big fans of this approach, and they all elected a bunch of the same old people who'd held these offices before the war, some of whom had been actively shooting at Union soldiers only a few months earlier.

 

These new-old legislatures immediately started coming up with all sorts of ways to effectively keep slavery going while calling it something else. States across the South spent 1865 and 1866 inventing "Black Codes," which differed from state to state -- states' rights, you know -- but all had the goal of keeping freed slaves subservient to white society. Black people couldn't buy, sell, or own property in most Southern states, and their movement was heavily restricted. The Southern states focused heavily on laws against "vagrancy" among freed slaves, which the law defined as simply not having a job recognized by white folk. Black people who didn't work enough could be arrested. Those convicted of vagrancy -- which was pretty much everybody arrested -- would then be sentenced to forced labor and doled out by counties or municipalities to private landowners still dependent on free labor to work as unpaid field hands. Which is a nicer way of saying, "slave."

 

The Northern reaction to this was also predictable, and Northerners in congress railed against President Johnson's so-called plan. "I mean, come on, people," they said. "We just fought a big ass war over this." They set about passing bills to force a harder line on the South, things like the Civil Rights Act of 1865 and the Second Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which allowed a wartime agency designed to integrate freed slaves into society to continue operating after the war's end. But Andrew Johnson vetoed all these bills, and Southern whites grew more angry and more bold. White folks rioted against freed blacks in places like Memphis and New Orleans. The first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan appeared and started burning their first crosses and holding their first lynchings. (I guess the President figured there were good people on both sides.)

 

Radical Republicans

 

Things flipped in late 1866, when the November midterm elections filled Congress with an unbreakable majority of Radical Republicans. These were people more in line with Hamlin than Lincoln, people who had always believed the South would only accept the Civil War's outcome when forced. Andrew Johnson's attempt at easy Reconstruction had only proven the point, so now it was time for Reconstruction to turn radical.

 

The most immediate consequence of the election of 1866 was that the Radical Republicans had a large enough numerical majority to negate any Presidential veto, so they just overturned all the vetoes Johnson had issued the previous year. They refused to seat any elected representative from the South who had fought for the Confederate army, and they demanded that former Confederate states pass laws to guarantee the civil rights and safety of freed slaves as a condition of readmittance to the Union. They passed the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution granting freed slaves all the rights of full citizenship and prohibiting states from denying the right to vote based on race, then forced the Confederate states to ratify the amendments. They passed the four Reconstruction Acts, which set down a whole slew of requirements for the Southern states to follow before they were readmitted, and divided the South into five administrative districts controlled by military occupation forces until the process was complete. This left 40,000 troops scattered across the Southern states to quell riots and protect black people from the Klan. And when Andrew Johnson tried to weaken this military occupation by firing the Secretary of War, the Radical Republican congress impeached him. Johnson came within one senate vote of being the first and (still) only President to get fired by Congress.

 

The South could only stew in impotent rage as the Radical Republican roll continued through the election of 1868, which brought none other than former Union General U.S. Grant, killer of the Confederate cause, to the Presidency. And that wasn't even the worst of what democracy was bringing to the former Confederates in those days. The South's heavy dependenc on slavery had left many Southern congressional districts with large black majorities, and black men who'd once been slaves started getting elected to national office. Mississippi even elected a black man to the United States senate in 1870, and then another in 1875.

 

Reconstructed

 

Grant started out strong in the view of the Radical Republicans, creating the Justice Department to root out and prosecute Klan members and enforcing harsh military law on states (like South Carolina, of course) that refused to enfranchise blacks. But while the racism of Southern whites seemed to know no bounds, the altruistic urge of Northern whites to push for something resembling equality would only sustain itself for so long before the subtler racism hiding underneath turned it all to apathy. It didn't help that U.S. Grant turned out to be a far better general than a president, and his second term devolved into the kind of scandal-plagued, corruption-coated turmoil that puts people at the bottom of "Top 18 Presidents" lists. Reconstruction in the Grant era turned into a battle of attrition, as Southerners sustained themselves on hatred, determined to outlast Northern attention spans.

 

The end of Reconstruction came suddenly, thanks to another presidential election.

 

The election of 1876 pitted a New York Democrat named Samuel Tilden against a Republican from Ohio named Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden had a long history of opposing slavery, but he also kind of bought into the states' rights rhetoric and had also opposed using force against the South to prevent secession. With the end of the war now a decade past, Tilden felt it was time for the federal government to put Reconstruction to bed and focus on other issues. Southern whites loved that idea, so they swarmed to Tilden's side and tried violence and intimidation and whatever shenanigans they could come up with to keep black people from voting. The final result of their efforts was that four states had their electoral votes disqualified. This left Tilden with a clear advantage in both the popular and electoral vote, but without an electoral vote majority. And when that happens, the Constitution says the Congress gets to decide the election. But Congress was split; Republicans controlled the senate, while Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. Somebody somewhere was going to have to work out a deal.

 

The deal became the Compromise of 1877. Democrats wanted Reconstruction to end. Republicans wanted Rutherford Hayes to be President. So the Democrats agreed to give the race to Hayes as long as Hayes and the Republicans gave up on Reconstruction. The Republicans were bored with Reconstruction by this time. The deal was a no-brainer.

 

What Did It All Mean?

 

With the official era of Reconstruction finally over in 1877, the final scars of the Civil War could finally be healed. But that sort of thing never heals completely. Government can move on and dance into the Gilded Age if it wants, but there's still going to be bitter white folks in the South seething over Yankee aggression fueled by an out-of-control federal government, and those folks will pass that bitterness down to their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren four generations removed. And there will still be poor black folks trying desperately to overcome the emotional and economic trauma of 10 generations of enslavement and the racism that persists once enslavement ends, unable to do much but bear the oppression those angry white folks impose on them.

 

It should be one of the most obvious observations in the world that the Civil War didn't end racism, though I've known plenty of Southerners in my day who like to pretend otherwise. The end of Reconstruction allowed the rise of a different kind of racism, institutionalized this time by Southern states once more determined to assert their rights. The Radical Republicans had forced the states to abandon their Black Codes, but that didn't mean they couldn't just come up with different versions of the same codes called something else. Like maybe Jim Crow. Because when it comes to race, some states always want to assert their rights. The Constitution wouldn't let them permit slavery and it wouldn't let them deny anybody the right to vote based on race. But they could certainly make it damned hard for black people to exercise that right. They could certainly keep black people isolated, separate and not at all equal. The fight for racial equality, which should have been won in 1865, would have to be fought continuously for the next hundred and fifty years. It's still being fought today.

 

But this is a series about states. So what about all these states and their rights? What happened there?

 

Well, that fight continues on today, too. The pendulum of power continues to swing between the nation and state. Wars and Depressions have occassionally pushed things Washington's way; free market economics in quieter times have pushed it back toward the states. Sometimes that push may strengthen some (but never all) of the states, but like the impotent Confederacy, it leaves the nation weaker and unable to respond in times of crisis. That may mean people go hungry. It may mean people suffer disease they didn't need to suffer. It may mean that states are forced to fight against each other for resources they need to meet the threat.

 

But I risk getting current here. This is a history series.

 

So next time I come back to this series, we'll go back to history. There's still fifteen more states to explore, and one of them doesn't even wait for the Civil War to finish before popping onto the scene ... though the war didn't have much to do with it. That one was all about money. And money more than anything is going to be the driver of the origins of all these states from now on.

ARRIVA Buses Wales VDL Commander 2509 - CX05 AAE sets off from Rhyl on a Sunday journey on route 51 to Denbigh.

 

The Flickr Lounge-Finding Circles

 

I needed a new pill box so got a round one with nice big compartments.

January 28, 2014 - The FDA is advising consumers not to purchase or use Tiger King, a product promoted and sold as a dietary supplement for sexual enhancement. The product was found to contain undeclared sildenafil. For more information, go to www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/BuyingUsingMe...

 

And read these FDA Consumer Updates:

 

Beware of Fraudulent ‘Dietary Supplements’

 

"All Natural" Alternatives for Erectile Dysfunction: A Risky Proposition

Volenteer law enforcement and first responders on duty at a temporary U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-SNAP) processing centers such as this one in the North Charleston Coliseum where county residents recovering from severe flooding have come to, in North Charleston, SC, on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2015.In times of emergency, FNS coordinates with state and federal partners, as well as local volunteer organizations, such as the American Red Cross and Salvation Army, to provide USDA Foods to shelters and other mass feeding sites and, in limited cases, distribute food packages directly to households in need. USDA Foods are 100% domestically produced, processed and procured agricultural commodities that are made available to schools, tribes, and low-income individuals through FNS Nutrition Assistance Programs. Once retail food stores reopen, if survivors still need nutrition assistance and the area has received a ‘Presidential Disaster Declaration with Individual Assistance,’ State agencies may request to operate D-SNAP. People who may not normally qualify for nutrition assistance benefits may be eligible for D-SNAP if they had disaster-related expenses, such as loss of income, damage to property, relocation expenses, and, in some cases, loss of food due to power outages. Those already participating in the SNAP may be eligible for supplemental benefits under D-SNAP. For more information please visit this web site: www.fns.usda.gov/disaster. USDA photos by Lance Cheung.

Osprey with prey (bird)? We were on Wolf Rd. south of 159th st when we saw a bird sitting in the corn field. Not sure what it was I did a U turn & realized it was an Osprey. At 1st we thought it might be injured. I grabbed the camera & crossed the street to avoid traffic. All of a sudden it took off with what I think is a bird in it's talon. Believing Osprey only ate fish I went on line & found out that 99% of their diet is fish but sometimes they will eat frogs,small animals & birds .

  

IMG_3657-1

The original version of this image generated considerable interest when it was first appeared on fotopic. There are two possible scenarios. Less likely is the proposition that Deutsche Bahn (DB) supplemented its family of diesel-hydraulic locomotives with some former BR examples and this example survived long enough to pass into preservation. More probable is that it is a temporary repaint of a preserved locomotive, perhaps sponsored by DB Schenker to publicise its arrival on the UK rail scene.

 

The source image is actually the National Railway Museums' D1023 Western Fusilier photographed at Shildon in 2009, although perhaps the West Somerset Railway-based Diesel Traction Group might be more inclined to make one of its two Class 52s available for this kind of commercial work. It did in fact repaint Warship D821 Greyhound into an almost identical 'mock' DB livery for a short period in the 1980s (22-Jun-10).

 

See my complete set of Worldwide Railways here:

www.flickr.com/photos/northernblue109/sets/72157626267826...

 

Strictly Copyright: You are encouraged to provide links to this image but it would be an offence to post it elsewhere (or to publish or distribute it by any other means) without the express permission of the copyright owner

 

Incorporating herbal supplements into your diet can unlock a world of health benefits! 🌱 Boost your immune system, reduce inflammation, improve digestion, manage stress, and sleep better with these natural wonders. 🌙💪 CLICK LINK IN BIO to discover the power of herbal supplements.

The birds of Australia, supplement /.

London :Printed by Taylor and Francis ... published by the author ...,[1851]-1869..

biodiversitylibrary.org/page/48517504

Allegriana as a Steampunk Princess Jasmine.

 

Lighting: Natural light supplemented by a 430ex II with 1/4 CTO gel in a 43-inch octabox, with only the internal baffle and a grid left, and another 430ex II with a 1/2 CTO gel in a 5-inch Honl snoot, at about 1 o'clock. I used a 3 stop ND filter to knock the light level down to where I could shoot at f/1.4 .

ARRIVA Buses Wales Optare Solo 696 - CX09 BGZ sets off from Rhyl on a Sunday journey on route 36 Circular via Rhuddlan, Dyserth & Prestatyn.

 

Some fresh produce initially to supplement my sandwich meal; however, when I opened the kitchen cupboard, to my surprise, the onion have managed to find its way out into this world.

 

I found it looking nice; and so before I slice them in thinly pieces, I used it first as my models which, ended up here at my lighting test setup.

 

After several flashing here and there, I was able to nail down this one. A hand-made recycled paper was placed on tabletop to further observe the light's direction.

 

For larger view, click here: www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1972555798&size=o

 

Nikon DSLR D200 / Nikkor Lens VR 70-300mm F/4.5-5.6G • Strobe: Built in, commander mode / one SB-800 camera right remote, Group A Mx1/4, on soft-box / one SB-800 camera left remote, Group A Mx1/4, on soft-box / one SB-800 camera above snoot hand-held pointing at the center of tomato, Group B Mx1/4, with diffuser • ISO 100 • November 2007.

 

Seen in Explore, 13 November 2007 – Highest Position #345.

Photographic supplement to the medical superintendent's annual report

1935

Countess of Chester Hospital records

 

Cheshire Archives and Local Studies ZHW/516

Closeup of kushutara motif from HGB workshop with Wendy Garrity, October 2015.

Just getting ready for a big upload/restock of the store. Purses primed and ready for action? *wink

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today however we are not at Cavendish Mews. Instead, we are just a short distance away in London’s busy shopping precinct on Oxford Street, where amidst the throng of London’s middle-class housewives and upper-class ladies shopping for amusement, two maids – Edith who is Lettice’s maid and her best friend Hilda who is the maid for Lettice’s friends Margot and Dickie Channon - are enjoying the pleasures of window shopping under the wide canvas awnings of Selfridges on their day off. The usually busy footpath outside the enormous department store with London’s biggest plate glass windows seems even busier today as the noisily chattering crowds are swelled by visitors who have come in from the outer suburbs of London and the surrounding counties which are slowly being enveloped into the heaving, expanding metropolis to do a little bit of early Christmas shopping. However the two maids don’t mind, as the noisy burbling crowds around them and the awnings above them help protect them from the wintery wind as it blows down Oxford Street, wending its way around chugging auto busses, noisy belching automobiles and horse drawn carts that choke the busy thoroughfare. Already Edith is noticing that the shops are busier than usual, and even though Christmas is still a good few weeks away, there are signs of Christmas cheer with bright and gaudy tinsel garlands and stars cut from metallic paper hanging in shop windows and gracing shop counters. Around them, the vociferous collective chatter of shoppers mixes with the sound of noisy automobiles and chugging double decker busses as they trundle along Oxford Street.

 

The pair meander in front of a window which is crowded with clusters of small children with their noses pressed to the glass, their harried mothers or frustrated nannies trying desperately to get them to come away. Peering over the top of the children’s heads, they see it is a window full of wonderful toys: teddy bears*, tin soldiers, brightly painted wooden castles and forts, games, blocks and books.

 

“I’ve just thought of something! Come on, Hilda!” Edith says to her friend. “Let’s go inside.”

 

“Oh no!” Hilda bemoans. “Not to the Selfridges toy department again, Edith! Remember the last time we went in there in the lead up to Christmas? It will bedlam!”

 

As if on cue, a little girl in a cream knitted pixie bonnet** and matching cardigan releases a piercing shriek of protest as she is drawn away from Selfridges toy filled window by her rangy black clad nanny who mutters something about no nonsense as she does.

 

“No, silly!” Edith replies. “The book department. I think they will have a wider range of children’s books in the book department.”

 

“Well, only if it isn’t full of nasty little jam grabbers!” Hilda replies cautiously, looking askance at the children around her. “If it is, I’m leaving you and heading straight for the perfumery.”

 

“Alright Hilda.” Edith giggles, her pert nose curling slightly upwards as she does. “Come on.”

 

The pair enter Selfridge’s grand department store by one of the three revolving doors and are immediately enveloped by the wonderful scent of dozens of perfumes from the nearby perfumery counters.

 

“Couldn’t we just visit the perfumery first?” Hilda asks.

 

“You’re every bit as bad as the children you moan about, Hilda! I promise we’ll come back here after we’ve visited the book department.” Edith insists.

 

“Oh, alright Edith!” Hilda sighs.

 

“Think of it as a reward for coming with me.” Edith winks cheekily at Hilda and leads her towards the banks of lifts with their smart liveried female lift attendants***.

 

Stepping out onto the floor for the book department, Hilda breathes a sigh of relief, for unlike she imagines the toy department to be, the space is quiet and well ordered. As she and Edith walk towards the main body of the department, away from the central balconied atrium, she shudders as a high pitched scream of a child echoes from the toy department several storeys above and pierces her consciousness.

 

“Come on, old thing,” Edith says comfortingly, wrapping her arm through her best friend’s. “I promise I won’t force you to go up to the toy department.”

 

“Just as well I trust you, Edith.” Hilda replies squeezing her friend’s hand in return.

 

“Anyway,” Edith goes on with a broad smile. “I thought with your love of reading, you’d enjoy the book department more.”

 

“And you’d be right!” Hilda chortles.

 

The two young women walk along the thickly carpeted aisles. Around them stand sturdy shelves of all sizes covered in books, magazines, newspapers and periodicals. Some only stand as high as shoulder height, with shelves tilted slightly upwards from waist height, allowing easier access to titles for customers, whilst other shelves are much higher with rows of spines, or on some shelves the covers of the books on display. Central tables are weighed down with the latest novels like E. M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’****, ‘The Deductions of Colonel Gore’***** by Lynn Brock and Edith Wharton’s ‘Old New York’******, stacked in piles like precarious houses or cards. More valuable and larger books full of beautifully printed lithographs sit open on wide shelves inside glass fronted and topped cabinets, allowing customers the ability to peruse before asking to see them properly. Tops of cabinets share space with more novels and the occasional potted aspidistra, and small chairs and stools are discreetly secreted amongst the shelves and tables, allowing a customer to stop, sit and read a little of title before deciding whether to purchase it or not. Cosy and comfortable, the books muffle the burbling sounds of the departments beyond them and the whole space is flooded with light from lamps above, and through the large frosted glass windows that face out onto Oxford Street, making the Selfridges book department a very pleasant pace to shop.

 

“I thought you were a convert to a bookshop in Charring Cross that Miss Lettice frequents.” Hilda remarks, pausing and picking up a copy of ‘The Man in the Brown Suit’******* by Agatha Christie, and perusing the cover which shows a stylishly dressed woman in a fur trimmed green coat and matching cloche observing a man in an orange suit and a railway conductor looking for signs of life in what she can only assume to be the man mentioned in the title on the edge of an underground railway platform. She deposits the title back as Edith tugs at her arm, encouraging her to continue their exploration of the shelves, cabinets and tables around them.

 

“Whilst Mr. Mayhew******** does a splendid job of supplying copies of Agatha Christie novels with slightly soiled covers at a discounted rate for me to give to Dad, I don’t think he stocks the kind of book I want today.”

 

“What are you looking for, anyway, Edith?”

 

“I told you before, children’s books, Hilda.”

 

“Yes, but what kind of children’s books? Adventure books? Picture books?”

 

“I’ll know them when I see them.” Edith says excitedly. “Come on!”

 

“Who are you buying them for?” Hilda asks. “You don’t know any children that I know of.”

 

“They are for…” Edith pauses mid-sentence and thinks before she speaks. Having become a good friend of Lettice’s charwoman*********, Mrs. Boothby, she has had the rare pleasure of meeting the old Cockney woman’s son, Ken, a forty-four year old man who is a simple and gentle giant with the aptitude of a six year old. Mrs. Boothby’s words ring in her ears about how it is easier for her not to mention that she has a son, not because she is ashamed of him, but because not everyone would understand her wanting to keep and raise a child with such difficulties. She knows that for all her love of gossip, in this matter Mrs. Boothby requires the utmost discretion and has been brave in taking Edith into her into her confidence by introducing her to Ken. Even though she knows that Hilda is every bit as discreet and trustworthy as she is, Edith cannot let it slip who the books are for. “For Mrs. Boothby’s grandchildren.” Edith fabricates. “Remember, Hilda? I bought them some Beatrix Potter books two Christmases ago.”

 

“Oh yes: I remember!” Hilda replies. “How could I forget that trip upstairs?” She casts her eyes to the white painted plaster ceiling above, imaging the horrors of the toy department crowded with excited children in toy heaven escorted by their frazzled parents. She pauses. “You know, even though I’m sure she shares confidences with me that she shares with you, Edith, Mrs. Boothby never talks about her family around me.” She stops, unlinks her arm from Edith’s and places her hands on her hips. “And nor has she ever invited me to her house for a slap-up tea!”

 

“There’s no need to get jealous, Hilda.” Edith replies calmly. “It’s hardly tea with Queen Mary.” she deflects. “It’s just a bit of toast and jam in Mrs. Boothby’s tiny two room tenement. It’s basic and clean, which is certainly more than can be said for the street outside.” She then adds to further discourage Hilda from pursuing the matter, “And she does go on and on and on about her grandchildren. You know what she’s like.”

 

“Oh yes,” Hilda agrees, her stance and facial expression softening into neutrality. “She can talk ‘till the cows come home**********, can old Mrs. Boothby.”

 

“Especially when she’s gossiping.” Edith laughs.

 

Edith feels pangs of guilt, not telling the truth to her best friend, but she assuages the feeling, knowing that it is being done for the greater good. She makes a mental note to make a point of telling Mrs. Boothby how trustworthy Hilda is, and what a good keeper of secrets she is, the next time she is at Cavendish Mews.

 

Edith continues to peruse the shelves until she finally comes across the children’s section.

 

“Here we are!” Edith says, spying a beautiful arrangement of colourful books on a round table in the middle of a brightly woven rug. “This is the sort of thing I’m after! Something colourful and bright, and not what you might see in Poplar.”

 

In front of them stand a selection of beautifully illustrated books by Walter Crane***********. A selection of folk and faerie tales stand alongside an alphabet book, a painting book and various others. All have colourful covers with elegant graphics on them.

 

“Oh! I remember these!” Hilda gasps, following her friend. “Mum used to bring them home from the library for my sisters and brothers and me when we were all little. They were called Toy Books************. Mum taught us our letters from this one.” She takes up ‘An Alphabet of Old Friends’ and cradles it in her arms. “I doubt any poor child in Poplar would have books as pretty as these: poor mites!”

 

“All the more reason to buy one then. Just look at the lovely illustrations!” Edith enthuses as she opens a copy of ‘The Frog Prince’ and sees a double page illustration of the little green hero of the story sitting on a fine damask tablecloth before the princess dressed in gold. Her father the king sists at the head of the table and scolds his daughter for making a promise to the frog that she didn’t intend to keep. The colours are bright and jewel like and the designs rich with interesting patterns and designs. “I wonder which one he… err they, would like?” Edith ponders aloud as she puts down ‘The Frog Prince’ and takes up a copy of ‘Beauty and the Beast’.

 

“I’m sure her grandchildren would be happy to have any of them, Edith.” Hilda remarks. “I know I would if I were a young child this book was made for.”

 

Edith doesn’t reply, keeping her silence about for whom the children’s picture book is really for.

 

“What about this one?” Hilda picks up ‘Walter Crane’s Painting Book’. “They could paint the pictures.” she suggests as she flicks through the pages where Walter Crane’s detailed illustrations are simply line drawings, allowing a child to paint the colours for themselves to match the complete matching colour illustrations printed on the opposite page. “I’m sure Mrs. Boothby could find them some watercolours, or better yet, you could buy them some, Edith.”

 

“It’s a lovely idea Edith, but he… err… they aren’t really painters.”

 

“How queer they sound!” Hilda exclaims. “Not like painting? When we were children, my sisters and I used to be mad about painting.”

 

“Well not everyone’s an artist like you are, Hilda.” Edith remarks in reply.

 

“I bet they really do like to paint,” Hilda goes on. “Only Mrs. Boothby is so used to cleaning for others, that she wants to keep her own house spic-and-span.”

 

“Well, she does like to keep her house tidy.” Edith agrees. “She calls it a clean haven from the outside world, and she isn’t half wrong. But I don’t think she would stop them painting, if that’s what they wanted to do. She loves children, even ones that aren’t her own kin.”

 

Edith looks at a few more of the titles, admiring the finely printed illustrations before finally settling upon one.

 

“I loved the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ when I was a girl.” Edith remarks. “Such a happy ending,” Her voice takes on a wistful air as she continues, “And proof that there is a handsome prince behind even the most unlikely of beasts.”

 

“Well, it’s a good lesson to teach children.” Hilda opines.

 

“Yes! I’ll buy this one.” Edith decides. She picks it up and cradles it to her chest lovingly. “It will make a lovely Christmas gift!”

 

“That’s very good of you, Edith.” Hilda acknowledges.

 

“Oh, it’s the least I can do Hilda. Mrs. Boothby’s become such a good friend to me since we first met. She was genuinely happy for me when I told her that I received an increase to my wages, and yet I bet you she didn’t get an increase from Miss Lettice for all the hard graft she does around Cavendish Mews.”

 

“And she works jolly hard for every penny she earns, too.” Hilda adds.

 

“That she does, so if I can bring her grandchildren some cheer this Christmas, I’ll be only too happy.”

 

“You put me to shame, Edith.” Hilda says guiltily.

 

“What are you talking about, Hilda?”

 

“Well, you’re so generous, thinking of others this Christmas.”

 

“Oh! You’re doing your bit for the less fortunate this Christmas, aren’t you Hilda? You’re knitting for Mrs. Minkin’s knitting circle’s Christmas drive for the needy.”

 

“Pshaw!” Hilda scoffs. “I don’t know how grateful the poor of Poplar and Whitechapel will be to have one of my knitted pairs of socks or scarves, not when you compare it to the knitting done by Mrs. Minkin, Miss Woolencroft, old Ma Badel or Mrs. Minkin’s lovely young nice, Katya Levi. Now she can knit beautifully, can Kayta! It must run though Mrs. Minkin’s family.”

 

“I’m sure that whatever the poor of Poplar and Whitechapel receive thanks to your knitting group’s industry will be gratefully received, Hilda, and that includes your contributions.”

 

“With the stitches I drop, there are a few small holes in a few pairs of socks, even before they’re worn, and my lack of tension control does mean my scarves are a bit…” Hilda pauses to think of the right word. “Uneven.”

 

“Well, dropped stitches and slight differences in tension or not, you’re still helping those who can’t help themselves this Christmas, and I’m sure they’ll be very grateful, Hilda.” Edith insists with a broad smile.

 

“I suppose so.” Hilda mutters, hanging her head.

 

“I know so, Hilda,” Edith replies encouragingly, giving her friend a friendly squeeze of the forearm. “Your knitting is getting better and better, the more you practice. Just remember that not that long ago, you couldn’t knit at all. Now look at you: knitting socks and scarves! I hope you’ve knitted me a Christmas present Hilda.”

 

Hilda blushes as she replies, “I have. I only hope that you’ll like it.”

 

“I shall love it, Hilda!”

 

“Even with a dropped stitch or two?” Hilda asks doubtfully.

 

“Most definitely, Hilda! It will be original that way.” Edith adds brightly. “No-one else will have what I have with stitches dropped in the same place.”

 

“You’re far to kind to me, Edith.”

 

“Seriously though, Hilda, I know I will love it, because you will have made it for me with love.” Edith enthuses. “Be proud of what you’ve achieved and how far you’ve come with your knitting.”

 

“Thank you, Edith!” Hilda gives her friend a grateful hug, which is reciprocated by Edith. “You’re the best friend a girl ever had, you know.”

 

“Well then, you must be the best friend I’ll ever have, because I know you’d do the same to buck me up when I’m feeling low.”

 

“You never have low spirits, Edith.”

 

“Well,” Edith ponders. “You always make sure that you include me in your intellectual conversations you have with Frank, and you explain things to me that I don’t understand in such a way that I don’t feel ignorant or stupid.”

 

“You aren’t ignorant, or stupid, Edith!” Hilda bursts. “You’re very smart.”

 

“Well, I don’t feel quite as smart as I think I should be sometimes, stepping out with a man as intelligent as Frank is. But you’ve helped me learn about things that are important to him, like labour rights and things of that sort. So, you help me too, just as I help you.”

 

“Alright Edith!” Hilda demurs, smiling broadly as she does. “I agree. I help you, and you help me, in equal measures, in different ways.”

 

“That’s it, Hilda!”

 

“Come on then, Edith. Best you buy that book for Mrs. Boothby’s grandchildren before someone else comes along and buys it.”

 

“You’re right Hilda!” Edith giggles.

 

“You’ll make their Christmas with that.” Hilda nods at the book, still clutched to Edith’s chest.

 

“I hope so.” Edith replies quietly, smiling shyly, thinking of Ken’s gormless grin when he sees her and imagining him giggling in delight and wonder at the beautiful illustrations in the book she now holds.

 

The pair of young women wend their way through the aisles of books again to the glass topped counter in front of a large mahogany shelf full of books

 

“May I help you, Miss?” asks a young shopgirl next to the register, who smiles at them cheerfully, her simple black moiré dress brightened with a pretty scarf featuring bright Art Deco patterns from the accessories department downstairs, and her rich chestnut coloured hair set in glossy and cascading, fashionable Marcel waves*************.

 

“How much is this, please?” Edith asks.

 

“Three and six, Miss.” the shopgirl replies with a smile, showing off her perfect pearly teeth as she glances at the book in Edith’s hands.

 

“A bit more than the sixpence they used to cost.” Hilda whispers in Edith’s ear. “Or free on loan from the library, like my Mum got them. You’ll spoil those grandchildren of Mrs. Boothby’s.”

 

“I hope so, Hilda.” Edith replies quietly as she blushes.

 

“A lovely gift for birthday, or perhaps for Christmas, if I may say so, Miss.” the shop girl says cheerfully. “It’s good to get in and do a spot of early Christmas shopping.”

 

“That’s the idea.” Edith replies, smiling pleasurably as she hands the book over to the girl behind the counter and fishes out her purse from her green leather handbag.

 

“The shops down Oxford Street are already starting to get busier, now that it’s December.” the shop girl goes on brightly. “People are suddenly realising that Christmas is just around the corner, really.”

 

*Developed apparently simultaneously by toymakers Morris Michtom in America and Richard Steiff under his aunt Margarete Steiff's company in Germany in the early Twentieth Century, the teddy bear, purportedly named after American President Theodore Roosevelt, became a popular children's toy very quickly, and by 1922 when this story is set, a staple of many children’s nursery toys.

 

**A pixie bonnet is a knitted bonnet usually worn by babies and small children which covers the whole of their head and is fastened under the chin. Adapted from more traditional styles of baby bonnets and introduced in the early 1920s, they quickly became popular with parents as suitable headwear for their young children as they protected the heads of babies with little to no hair from the cold, and were easily made using knitting patterns distributed through women’s periodicals.

 

***Harry Gordon Selfridge believed in women’s emancipation. When the Great War broke out in 1914 and many of his male lift attendants went off to fight, he allowed women to fill their roles, as well as many other roles formerly filled by men in his department store. When hostilities with Germany ended in 1918, many young men didn’t return, having made the ultimate sacrifice for King and country, which meant a scarcity of men. The female lift attendants had proven so popular during the war years that Harry Gordon Selfridge made them a permanent fixture in his department store, much to the shock of many shoppers. However, like most things, he used his choice to his advantage, advertising not only its uniqueness in the department stores along Oxford and Regent Streets, but also wooing the millions of emancipated women who were happy to shop under the roof of such an enlightened man in what was then a very patriarchal society dominated by men. By the 1924 when this story is set, his female lift attendants wore a smart livery of frock coats, breeches and caps in Selfridges colours.

 

****A Passage to India is a 1924 novel by English author E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. It won the 1924 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The story revolves around four characters: Dr. Aziz, his British friend Mr. Cyril Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and Miss Adela Quested. During a trip to the fictitious Marabar Caves (modelled on the Barabar Caves of Bihar), Adela thinks she finds herself alone with Dr. Aziz in one of the caves (when in fact he is in an entirely different cave; whether the attacker is real or a reaction to the cave is ambiguous), and subsequently panics and flees; it is assumed that Dr. Aziz has attempted to assault her. Aziz's trial, and its run-up and aftermath, bring to a boil the common racial tensions and prejudices between Indians and the British during the colonial era.

 

*****The Deductions of Colonel Gore is a 1924 detective novel by the Irish-born writer Lynn Brock. It was the first in his series of seven novels featuring the character of Colonel Wyckham Gore. Gore enjoyed popularity during the early stages of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. t was also published under the alternative title ‘The Barrington Mystery’. Colonel Gore gives a Masai knife as a wedding present to Barbara Lethbridge. When he returns to England the following year he finds she stands accused or murder, as the knife has been plunged into a blackmailer Barrington with whom she is involved. Against his better instincts Gore takes on the role of amateur detective in order to clear her name.

 

******‘Old New York’ is a collection of four novellas by Edith Wharton, revolving around upper-class New York City society in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. The novellas are not directly interconnected, though certain fictional characters appear in more than one story. The New York of these stories is the same as the New York of ‘The Age of Innocence” (which had been successfully published in 1920), from which several fictional characters have spilled over into these stories. The observation of the manners and morals of Nineteenth Century New York upper-class society is directly reminiscent of ‘The Age of Innocence’, but these novellas are shaped more as character studies than as a full-blown novel. Some characters who overlap among these four stories and ‘The Age of Innocence’: Mrs. (Catherine) Manson Mingott, Sillerton Jackson, Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, Henry Van der Luyden. Other families and institutions also appear in more than one place among this extended set of New York stories.

 

******* ‘The Man in the Brown Suit’ is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by The Bodley Head on 22 August 1924 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The character Colonel Race is introduced in this novel. Anne Beddingfeld is on her own and ready for adventures when one comes her way. She sees a man die in a tube station and picks up a piece of paper dropped nearby. The message on the paper leads her to South Africa as she fits more pieces of the puzzle together about the death she witnessed. There is a murder in England the next day, and the murderer attempts to kill her on the ship en route to Cape Town.

 

********A. H. Mayhew was once one of many bookshops located in London’s Charring Cross Road, an area still famous today for its bookshops, perhaps most famously written about by American authoress Helene Hanff who wrote ’84, Charing Cross Road’, which later became a play and then a 1987 film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. Number 56. Charing Cross Road was the home of Mayhew’s second-hand and rare bookshop. Closed after the war, their premises is now the home of Any Amount of Books bookshop.

 

*********A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.

 

**********Meaning for a long time, the origin of the phrase “till the cows come home” comes from the practice of cows returning to their shelters at some indefinite point, usually at a slow, languid pace.

 

***********Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the later Nineteenth Century. Crane's work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come. He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and produced an array of paintings, illustrations, children's books, ceramic tiles, wallpapers and other decorative arts. Crane is also remembered for his creation of a number of iconic images associated with the international socialist movement.

 

************In 1863, the engraver and printer Edmund Evans commissioned Walter Crane to produce a set of designs for a potential book series. This was the period of greater mechanisation in publishing, and that this was often used as an excuse to neglect design. Walter Crane wrote: “The books for babies, current at that time (about 1865 to 1870) of the cheaper sort called toy books were not very inspiriting. These were generally careless and unimaginative woodcuts, very casually coloured by hand, dabs of pink and emerald green being laid on across faces with a somewhat reckless aim.” Edmund Evans believed paper picture books could be greatly improved and still sold for sixpence if printed in sufficient quantity. Walter Crane and Edmund Evans gradually transformed the toy book into a sophisticated art form using a variety of technical, intellectual and aesthetic means. Advances in the use of wood engravings for colour printing made it possible for Evans to accurately print Crane’s designs in a wide range of sophisticated colours. Crane’s designs were printed by Evans for the publisher Frederick Warne in a Sixpenny Toybook series, bound in pale yellow rather than white. In 1867 Crane began designing toy books for George Routledge. Over the next ten years, he illustrated thirty-seven of these toy books, which would become the most popular children’s books of the day.

 

*************Marcelling is a hair styling technique in which hot curling tongs are used to induce a curl into the hair. Its appearance was similar to that of a finger wave but it is created using a different method. Marcelled hair was a popular style for women's hair in the 1920s, often in conjunction with a bob cut. For those women who had longer hair, it was common to tie the hair at the nape of the neck and pin it above the ear with a stylish hair pin or flower. One famous wearer was American entertainer, Josephine Baker.

 

These books might be the kind of children’s book you may like to give someone you love for Christmas, but if you do, they may need a magnifying glass, for these are all artisan pieces as part of my extensive 1:12 miniatures collection.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The books on display here, and in the shelves behind are all 1:12 size miniatures made by the British miniature artisan Ken Blythe. Most of the books I own that he has made may be opened to reveal authentic printed interiors. In some cases, you can even read the words, depending upon the size of the print! I have quite a large representation of Ken Blythe’s work in my collection, but so little of his real artistry is seen because the books that he specialised in making are usually closed, sitting on shelves or closed on desks and table surfaces. In this case, this selection of books designed by the prolific children’s illustrator, Walter Crane and two (Abroad and London Town) by this father Thomas Crane. I bought these on purpose because I have loved Walter Crane’s and Thomas Crane’s work ever since I was a child, and I have real life-size first editions of many of these books including, Abroad, London Town, A Masque of Days, Beauty and the Beast, the Hind in the Wood, Cinderella’s Picture Book and The Frog Prince, the latter of which stands open, showing an illustration from the book. What might amaze you is that all Ken Blythe’s opening books are authentically replicated 1:12 scale miniatures of real volumes. To create something so authentic to the original in such detail and so clearly, really does make them all miniature artisan pieces. Ken Blythe’s work is highly sought after by miniaturists around the world today and command high prices at auction for such tiny pieces, particularly now that he is no longer alive. I was fortunate enough to acquire pieces from Ken Blythe prior to his death about four years ago, as well as through his estate via his daughter and son-in-law. His legacy will live on with me and in my photography which I hope will please his daughter.

 

The round display table on which the books stand tilts like a real loo table, and is an artisan miniature from an unknown maker with a marquetry inlaid top, which came from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls House Shop in the United Kingdom.

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Tonight however it is New Year’s Eve 1924, and we are northwest of Lettice’s flat, in the working-class London suburb of Harlesden where Edith, Lettice’s maid is celebrating the end of 1924 and the beginning of 1925 with her beloved parents, George and Ada. Edith’s father, George, works at the McVitie and Price biscuit factory in Harlesden as a Line Manager, and her mother, Ada, takes in laundry at home. With her brother, Bert, on shore leave from his job as a first-class saloon steward aboard the SS Demosthenes* for New Year’s Eve, George has decided to host a small New Year’s Eve gathering in their small, two storey brick terrace house which opens out directly onto the street. Although very far removed from the grandeur of Lettice’s Mayfair flat and the smart and select cocktail parties she likes to host, the Harlesden terrace is a cosy and welcoming venue for such a party. Not being alone on shore leave, Bert has invited two of his fellow saloon stewards from the Demosthenes to join him for the evening’s revels: Conlin Campbell who grew up in Harlesden with both Edith and Bert and went to sea with Bert when he took his first seafaring job, and Irish lad, Martin Gallagher. Of course, Edith has invited her beau, grocer’s boy, Frank Leadbetter, to join them, and to even up the numbers of young women, Edith has arranged for old school friends Katy Bramall, Jeannie Duttson and Alice Dunn to join them too. For their part, George and Ada have invited Mr. and Mrs. Pyecroft to spend new year in the rarified surrounds of Ada’s front parlour, whilst the young ones enjoy being raucous in the kitchen. Ernie Pyecroft is the local Harlesden ironmonger** and he and George have bonded over their love of growing marrows at the local allotment, where they both have a plot. Ada went to school with Lilian Pyecroft and it is through this connection that the Watsfords and the Pyecrofts are such good friends. Sadly, Mr. and Mrs. Pyecroft lost both their sons in the Great War, and their daughter died of the Spanish Flu during the epidemic in 1918, so being alone now, George and Ada make sure they always spend New Year’s Eve together. However the divide between the generations has been broken down by Fank, who has brought with him a gramophone and a selection of popular music records that he has borrowed from a trade unionist friend of his for the evening, which has persuaded George, Ada and the Pyecrots to join the young ones in the kitchen, where after dinner they have enjoyed an evening of celebratory drinking and dancing. Lettice, having heard of the New Year’s Eve party, bestowed two bottles of champagne upon Edith as a Christmas gift, whilst Frank obtained two bottles of wine from his chum who runs little Italian restaurant up the Islington***. Bert has spent some of his wages on buying bottles of stout and ale from a local publican, and Mrs. Pyecroft has brought a bottle of her homemade elderflower wine.

 

We find ourselves in the heart of the Watsford’s family home, Ada’s cosy kitchen at the back of the terrace, where everyone except for Frank and Edith are busying themselves donning coats, hats, scarves and gloves as they prepare to ring in the new year underneath the nearby Harlesden High Street Jubilee Clock Tower**** with its four gas lamps and drinking fountain. Noisily they cheerfully chat and laugh over the musical strains of ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’***** which they have all ended up in fits of laughter over several times across the course of the party, after trying without success to sing all the tongue twisting lyrics correctly.

 

“I say Bert,” remarks Martin over the top of the jolly music on the gramophone. “You never told us your sister was such a beauty.”

 

“What?” Bert asks as he buttons up his heavy grey woollen overcoat.

 

“Your sister, Bert.” Martin replies, nodding in Edith’s direction and indicating to her with a half drunk glass of stout in his hand.

 

Bert looks up from fastening his coat and looks as Edith stands in front of Frank as he sits in her usual ladderback chair. Her hand rests on the edge of the festive cloth covered kitchen table where they had eaten their splendid New Year’s Eve roast chicken dinner cooked up by Ada earlier in the evening, which is now is littered with a selection of records in their paper sleeves. Dressed in a pretty pale pink cotton voile****** dress trimmed with matching linen that she made herself, she wears her long hair in a chignon at the back of her neck and has styled her blonde hair at the front into soft waves around her face, which are held in place with a fashionable pink bandeau******* made of pink ribbon. Being her sister, Bert has never really noticed how striking Edith is, yet as she stands, gazing seriously into Frank’s face, he sees that even without applying makeup, and without the aid of the expensive clothes and jewellery he sees many of the first class passengers in the dining saloon of his ship wear, she looks both elegant and beautiful. She catches Bert staring at her and smiles as she lifts the glass of champagne she holds in her right hand to her lips. Her smile beams like a beacon.

 

“Yes, she’s an English rose alright!” adds Conlin, shrugging on his coat. “Peaches and cream skin and pretty blonde hair.”

 

“Aye. Everyone loves a blonde.” Martin adds, agreeing with his friend.

 

“And what am I then?” pipes up Alice Dunn’s voice plaintively as she looks to Conlin, with whom she’s been spending most of New Year’s Eve, either sitting next to him around the Watsford’s table or dancing in his arms to the music from the gramophone around the crowded kitchen.

 

“You, my dear Alice, are the Vicar’s daughter********,” Conlin replies matter-of-factly, as if his statement answers her question.

 

“So what if I am?” she replies with a shrug, winding her scarf around her neck carefully, so as not to mess her own arrangement of soft, mousy blonde waves that she has held in place by a pale blue ribbon bandeau of her own.

 

“It means my dear Alice,” Conlin continues, sweeping an arm around her waist, making her squeal girlishly. “That however much fun you are, you come with a clergyman as a father-in-law for any prospective suitor, and that, can only spell trouble for me.”

 

“And who says I’m looking for a suitor, Conlin Campbell?” Alice answers smugly. “Least of all you!”

 

“All girls are looking for a suitor, Alice.” Bert opines. “Even you! Just look at Edith over there. She’s got Frank, so she’s happy.” He raises his voice slightly over the cacophony of excited voices around him as he leans on the kitchen table in an effort to catch his sister’s attention. “In fact, she and Frank are so happy in one another’s company, the pair of them don’t even want to ring the new year around the Jubilee Clock with the rest of us!”

 

“Oh get along with you, Bert!” Edith replies, as both she and Frank turn their attentions to her brother. “Go and yell your lungs out around the clock with the rest of them. I’m done with all that! I’ll be much happier here with Frank where it’s quieter.”

 

“See?” Bert says, raising his hands.

 

“Lucky blighter.” murmurs Martin.

 

“Now you just keep your eyes off our Edith, young Martin!” Ada’s voice suddenly interrupts the young people’s conversation, her voice light, yet tinged with a seriousness. “She’s Frank’s sweetheart, not yours.” She taps him on the forearm.

 

“Yes Mrs. Watsford.” Martin replies apologetically.

 

“Luckily not all of us want to be Little Polly Flinders and sit home amongst the cinders*********, Martin!” laughs Katy. “Some of us are modern girls, aren’t we Alice?”

 

“Indeed we are,” Alice agrees in a solicitous voice as she winds her arm through Conlin’s.

 

“And we want to go out and have some fun!” giggles Jeannie, who cheekily squashes Bert’s hat on his head, encouraging him to get ready to go out. “So, hurry up, Bert Watsford! Goodness knows how anyone gets fed in the dining room of your ship when you’ve always been such a slowpoke!” She prods Bert in the ribs as she speaks, making him exclaim in surprise.

 

“We say the same, Jeannie,” Conlin agrees, squeezing Alice’s arm with his own as he draws her closer to him. “But Martin and I keep him on time, don’t we Martin?”

 

“Aye, we do that.” Martin concurs.

 

“We just have to wait for Mum and Dad and the Pyecrofts.” Bert defends himself against his friends and shipmates light hearted teasing.

 

“Well, I’m ready.” Ada replies, squashing her red velvet hat with springs of dried flowers around the brim onto her head.

 

“And we’re here too!” George announces, walking into the room with Lilian and Earnest Pyecroft, all three wrapped up in their coats and hats, ready to go out with the others to cheer in the new year around Harlesden’s Jubilee Clock Tower.

 

“Right! Let’s go then!” Jeannie exclaims excitedly.

 

“Will you like to lead the way, Ernie and Lilian?” George asks with a sweeping gesture towards the door.

 

“Come Lilian my dear.” Mr. Pyecroft says, chivalrously offering his wife his hand. “Shall we?”

 

“Rather!” Mrs. Pyecroft answers, taking his proffered hand with her right as she pulls the small fox fur collar at her throat a little tighter around her neck. “What a marvellous way to end a jolly good knees up, George.”

 

“Glad you’ve enjoyed it, Lilian.” George replies with pleasure.

 

Lead by Mr. and Mrs. Pyecroft, Martin and Katy, Conlin and Alice, Bert and Jeannie and George and Ada begin to drift noisily out of the kitchen, all full of good spirits and laughter.

 

“You know you have to kiss me when the clock strikes twelve, Conlin,” Alice says as the pair of them follow Martin and Katy through the door leading from the Watsford’s kitchen to the scullery and then out the back door.

 

“I promise to kiss those organ playing hands of yours, Alice Dunn.” he replies with a chuckle.

 

“I should hope you’ll kiss me on the lips, Conlin Campbell!” she replies indignantly.

 

“Only if you’re lucky.” his retort rewarding him with a kittenish slap to his upper left arm from Alice.

 

“Are you quite sure you don’t want to come and shout in the new year with the rest of us?” Bert asks his sister and Frank as he moves towards the frosted and stained glass paned door that leads to the scullery with Jeannie on his arm. “It will be ripping fun.”

 

“No thank you, Bert.” Frank replies steadfastly. He raises his hands and grasps Edith’s forearms affectionately. “I’ll be fine here with Edith.”

 

“You go on and cheer the new year in for me, Bert.” Edith assures her brother.

 

“It won’t be the same without you, Edith.” Bert says a little imploringly.

 

“Oh Bert!” Ada scoffs. “It won’t be the last new year that you are on shore leave.” She gives his shoulder a shallow swipe at his silliness. “Come along with you.” She starts to steer her son towards the door.

 

“Are you so blind, Bert, that you can’t see that Edith and Frank would much rather celebrate the new year together, and alone,” Jeannie emphasises the last two words as she speaks.

 

“Yes, let’s give the lovebirds a little privacy.” George agrees, winking at his daughter conspiratorially, making both she and Frank blush at his remark.

 

“Come on! Let’s go, or it will be midnight, and we won’t have reached the Jubilee Clock!” Jeannie urges Bert.

 

“Alright then.” Bert shrugs, allowing himself to be steered out the kitchen door. “I say!” he calls to Edith and Frank over his shoulder. “You won’t play ‘There’s Life in the Old Girl Yet’********** before we get back, will you?”

 

“We won’t be gone that long, Bert!” Jeannie insists in a hiss.

 

“We promise.” Edith assures her brother with a comforting smile.

 

As Jeannie, Ada and George bustle Bert out the back door, he stops on the threshold and says to Jeannie, “You go on ahead. I just want to have a quick word with Mum and Dad. We’ll catch up in a minute.” He gives her a gentle push.

 

“You always were such a slowpoke, Bert.” Jeannie teases again. She smiles as she wags her finger at him warningly. “Don’t be too long, or you really will miss midnight, and I’ll be disappointed if you do.”

 

“I promise I won’t, Jeannie.” he assures her, shooing her away.

 

“What’s all this about then, Bert?” George says seriously as they stand in the streak light cast through the chink in the curtains at the kitchen window and watch Jeannie’s hat covered head disappear out the back gate and into the alleyway that runs between the Watsford’s terrace and the terrace backing onto the next street.

 

“Sorry Dad.” Bert apologises. “I just wanted to ask, whilst we’re alone and no-one else is in earshot, but is everything alright between Edith and Frank?”

 

“What do you mean, Bert?” Ada asks.

 

“Has Frank actually proposed yet?” Bert asks with concern.

 

“Well, no. Not as such yet, that I know of, anyway. Ada?”

 

“Edith hasn’t said anything to me, Bert.” Ada answers, her breath spilling out in a cloud of white vapour in the cold of the winter’s night. “I mean, there is an understanding between the two of them. They are both just saving up a bit more money so that they can set up house together before they formalise anything.”

 

“But we are expecting some kind of announcement in the new year, Bert.” George assures his son. “Quite soon as a matter of fact.”

 

“Frank is a good lad,” Ada goes on. “He’d ask your Dad for permission before he formally proposes to your sister.”

 

“What’s all this about, Bert?” George asks, his face clouding with concern.

 

“Well,” Bert says, lowering his gaze and shifting a loose stone across the paving stone beneath the sole of his right boot. “It’s just I had this feeling.”

 

“Feeling? What feeling?” George persists.

 

“Tonight, when they were together, there just seems to be something between them.” Bert says a little uncertainly. “Something awkward.”

 

“I felt that too!” hisses Ada quietly. “On Christmas Day when Frank and old Mrs. McTavish came here.”

 

“I can’t quite put my finger on it.” Bert goes on.

 

“I can’t either, but Edith’s said nothing to me, and she usually tells me most things.” Ada adds.

 

“But not everything.” Bert says dourly.

 

“Look, I’m sure it’s nothing for either of you to worry about.” George assures them, winding an arm around each of them and placing a knitted glove clad hand on their shoulders.

 

“Perhaps that’s why they wanted to stay behind whilst the rest of us went out.” Bert goes on, his eyes brightening.

 

“Perhaps lad,” George agrees. “But if it is, it is none of our affair. So, let’s go and cheer in the new year and leave them to it. Eh?”

 

With a firm hand, George steers his wife and son towards the open gate at the rear of the courtyard.

 

In the Watsford’s kitchen, with the departure of everyone else, a stillness settles in. Edith removes the needle from the gramophone record of the ‘H.M.S. Pinafore selection’ performed by the Court Symphony Orchestra, which has reached its conclusion. The stylus had been sending a soft hissing noise through the copper-plated morning glory horn of the gramophone as the needle remained locked into the groove of the recording. She carefully lifts the record from the gramophone player and slides the shiny black shellack record back into its slip case which rustles as she does.

 

“Gosh!” Frank opines from his seat. “You don’t notice how noisy everyone is until they are gone, do you?”

 

Edith smiles and chuckles. “Bert and his friends are always loud, and Katy, Jeannie and Alice are such giggling girties*********** when they get together.”

 

“Still, they are all very nice,” Frank adds. “And very welcoming. You brother has been so solicitous to me this evening, offering me his stout.”

 

“And Katy dancing with you to try and make Conlin Campbell jealous.” Edith smiles.

 

“Is that her game, then?”

 

“Yes,” Edith laughs. “Although I don’t think it worked. I think Conlin was only happy to leave you in the arms of Katy and more to the point, her two left feet.”

 

“Yes,” Frank admits, sighing as he does. “She wasn’t exactly light on her feet when we danced to ‘Lady Be Good’************.”

 

“No, I could see that.” giggles Edith. “It was rather funny seeing the two of you dance.”

 

“For you, maybe!”

 

“It was… Francis.” Edith adds Frank’s proper name at the end of the sentence cheekily, teasing him.

 

“I wish Gran had never let that slip.” Frank mutters begrudgingly again, as he has several times in the past. “I’m Frank now. No-one at the trades union will take me seriously if I’m called Francis.”

 

“Still, it was awfully good of you to bring the gramophone and records tonight, Frank.” Edith waves her hand across the selection of records on the kitchen table next to the gramophone.

 

“Well, really it’s my friend Richard from the Trade Unionists that we have to thank. He’s spending the new year in Wales with friends, and they already have a gramophone up there, so he didn’t need his.”

 

“Then thank you to Richard of the Trades Union for lending them, but thank you to you, Frank, for being kind enough to bring them with you tonight.” Edith replies. “It certainly made for a much livelier party.”

 

“Well, I’m glad, Edith.”

 

“And it brough Mum and Dad and Mr. and Mrs. Pyecroft down from the front room.”

 

“I’m glad for that too.”

 

The pair fall silent, with only the deep ticking of the kitchen clock on the wall, the crackle from the coal range and the occasional distant squeal or cheer from a new year reveller in the darkened streets outside to break the quiet as it settles down around them. Edith pulls her mother’s Windsor chair up towards Frank so that she can sit opposite him, and once she has settled down comfortably into it, she toys absentmindedly with Frank’s fingers and he lets her.

 

“Frank, there is actually something important I want to talk to you about.” Edith says at length, her head lowered so Frank can’t read her expression as she speaks. “And that’s why I wanted us to stay behind whilst the others went on to the Jubilee Clock to ring in the new year.”

 

“I thought it might have been something like that.” Frank says seriously.

 

“Well, I just think that this needs saying before midnight, so that we can go into 1925 clear in our understanding.”

 

“Oh!” Frank gasps. “That does sound jolly serious, Edith.”

 

“It is serious, Frank.” Ediths head shoots up and she looks at him earnestly.

 

“Oh my!” Frank’s shoulders slump. “Best get it out then, Edith.” He turns and looks at the clock. “There are only a few minutes left in the old year, before the new one starts.”

 

“Well… Frank…” Edith wraps her fingers around Frank’s and holds them tightly in a still grasp as she heaves a heavy sigh. “I’ve been giving this some serious thought.”

 

“Should I be worried, Edith?”

 

“What?” Edith queries, shaking her head. “No. No, Frank. No.”

 

“That’s a relief.” It is Frank’s turn to sigh.

 

“Please Frank,” Edith pleads. “Just hear me out and don’t interrupt for a moment.”

 

When Frank nods shallowly and stares at her intensely with his loving eyes, Edith goes on.

 

“I’ve been thinking about that proposal you made to me that Sunday in the Corner House************* up Tottenham Court Road.”

 

“What proposal, Edith?” Frank blasts. “I haven’t actually proposed marriage yet.” Then he adds hurriedly, “Not that I won’t,” He pauses. “So long as you still want to marry me, Edith.”

 

“Frank!” Edith exclaims in frustration. “You don’t make things easy sometimes! I asked you not to interrupt me.”

 

“Oh! Sorry Edith. I won’t interrupt again.”

 

Edith shakes her head and sighs deeply again as she tries to recollect her thoughts.

 

“So, I thought long and hard about what you said that day. I won’t lie, Frank.” She looks him squarely in the face. “The idea of moving to the country from the city frightened me. In fact, it still does, if I’m being completely honest. I’ve only ever known the city you see.”

 

Realising what she is talking about, Frank longs to speak, and to take his sweetheart into his arms and comfort her, but he thinks better of it, understanding that Edith needs to speak her piece. So, he simply sits in his seat, leaning forward and giving her his full attention.

 

“But now I see that you are only trying to do the best by me, well by both of us really. After that afternoon, I went down to see Mrs. Boothby, and it was she who made me realise that if you and I do go and live in Metroland************** after we are married, it wouldn’t be so bad.” Edith takes a deep breath. “So, I guess what I’m saying, Frank, is that if the opportunity arises after we’re married, for a better position in Chalk Hill or wherever, I’ll go with you.”

 

“Oh Edith!” Frank gasps, standing up.

 

Edith stands too, and they both embrace lovingly.

 

“I knew the idea upset you, Edith, but not as much as it obviously has!” Frank exclaims. “I’m so sorry.”

 

“It’s alright, Frank. I didn’t want to let you see how much it did, because I could see how much it meant to you. You only want a better paying job to help support me, and our family if God grants us one, and a better life for us all. I can see that now.”

 

“Well,” Frank holds Edith at arm’s length, beaming from ear to ear. “God bless Mrs. Boothby for helping you see that, and bless you for being so brave and courageous, my down dear Edith! I must be the luckiest man in the world to have you, Edith Watsford!”

 

“And I must be the luckiest girl.” Edith murmurs in return,

 

“I mean, a job hasn’t turned up yet, and it may not, but if it does, I promise you that you won’t regret it.”

 

The pair embrace again, even more deeply this time.

 

“I better not, Frank Leadbetter!” Edith says with a laugh. “I hope wherever you take me, I will be close to a cinema. I don’t want to miss out on the latest Wanetta Ward film, just because we are living in Metroland.”

 

“I promise you won’t miss out, dear Edith!” Frank assures her.

 

Suddenly there is the distant chime of clocks striking midnight and cheers going up.

 

“Listen!” Edith exclaims. “It’s midnight! Happy New Year, Frank.”

 

“Happy 1925 Edith.” Frank replies.

 

And with that, the two press their lips together in the first kiss between them for 1925, the new year suddenly full of possibility, trepidation and excitement.

 

*The SS Demosthenes was a British steam ocean liner and refrigerated cargo ship which ran scheduled services between London and Australia via Cape Town. It stopped at ports including those in Sydney and Melbourne. She was launched in 1911 in Ireland for the Aberdeen Line and scrapped in 1931 in England. In the First World War she was an Allied troop ship.

 

**An ironmonger is the old fashioned term for someone who sells items, tools and equipment for use in homes and gardens: what today we would call a hardware shop. Ironmongery stems from the forges of blacksmiths and the workshops of woodworkers. Ironmongery can refer to a wide variety of metal items, including door handles, cabinet knobs, window fittings, hinges, locks, and latches. It can also refer to larger items, such as metal gates and railings. By the 1920s when this story is set, the ironmonger may also have sold cast iron cookware and crockery for the kitchen and even packets of seeds for the nation of British gardeners, as quoted by the Scot, Adam Smith.

 

***The Italian quarter of London, known commonly today as “Little Italy” is an Italian ethnic enclave in London. Little Italy’s core historical borders are usually placed at Clerkenwell Road, Farringdon Road and Rosebery Avenue - the Saffron Hill area of Clerkenwell. Clerkenwell spans Camden Borough and Islington Borough. Saffron Hill and St. Peter’s Italian Catholic Church fall within the Camden side. However, even though this was the traditional enclave for Italians, immigrants moved elsewhere in London, bleeding into areas like Islington and Soho where they established bars, cafes and restaurants which sold Italian cuisine and wines.

 

****The cast iron Jubilee Clock has remained a Harlesden landmark since its erection at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. It is ornate, decorated with dolphins, armorial bearings, a fluted circular column with spirals, shields of arms and swags. When it was built, it featured four ornate gas lit lamps sprouting from its column and two drinking fountains with taps and bowls at its base. It also featured a weathervane on its top. During the late Twentieth Century elements were removed, including the lanterns and the fountain bowls. In 1997 the clock was restored without these elements, but plans are underway to restore of the weathervane and recreation of the original four circular lanterns to the clock and the two fountains.

 

*****“I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” (often referred to as the "Major-General's Song" or "Modern Major-General's Song") is a patter song from Gilbert and Sullivan's 1879 comic opera “The Pirates of Penzance”. It has been called the most famous Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. The piece is difficult to perform because of the fast pace and tongue-twisting nature of the lyrics.

 

******Voile is a lightweight, plain woven fabric usually made from 100% cotton or cotton blend. It has the higher thread count than most cotton fabrics, which results in a silky soft hand. Voile fabric is a perfect dressmaking option for summer because it is lightweight, breathable and semi-sheer.

 

*******A bandeau is a narrow band of ribbon, velvet, or similar, worn round the head. They were often accessorised with jewels, imitation flowers, feathers and other trimmings in the 1920s when they were at the height of their popularity.

 

********The vicar of All Souls Parish Church in Harlesden between 1918 and 1927 was Ernest Arnold Dunn. Whilst I cannot find any details about his family life, I’d like to think that he was a happily married man of god and could well have had a daughter named Alice who no doubt played the organ in church on Sundays.

 

*********‘Little Polly Flinders’, is an English nursery rhyme which emerged in the early 1800s. Charles Dibdin, a talented English poet, is said to have composed this delightful ditty. The rhyme spins the tale of a young girl who, one fine morning, wakes up early and adorns her hair with roses. The rhyme was likely concocted as a cautionary tale and a relatable experience for young children. The primary message of the rhyme is to inspire a sense of responsibility, discipline, and order. It cautions against the consequences of neglecting one's duties, such as ruining one's garments. In the mid Nineteenth Century, the song's fame grew tremendously, frequently acting as a helpful aid for instructing children in reading and writing which is why the friends of the Watsford’s children would have known it so well.

 

**********‘There’s Life in the Old Girl Yet’ is a song that was very popular in Britain in 1924. With music and lyrics by Noël Coward the song comes from the 1923 London West End musical, ‘London Calling’ and was popularised by English singer and comic character actor Maisie Gay.

 

***********A “giggling girty” means a girl who laughs a great deal. The term was turned into a popular song in America by the “original radio girl” Vaughn DeLeath. The term has generally fallen out of fashion because the name Gertrude is equally out of favour today.

 

************‘Lady Be Good’ is a foxtrot from the Broadway musical ‘Lady Be Good’ written by George Gershwin, released in 1924.

 

************J. Lyons and Co. was a British restaurant chain, food manufacturing, and hotel conglomerate founded in 1884 by Joseph Lyons and his brothers in law, Isidore and Montague Gluckstein. Lyons’ first teashop opened in Piccadilly in 1894, and from 1909 they developed into a chain of teashops, with the firm becoming a staple of the High Street in the United Kingdom. At its peak the chain numbered around two hundred cafes. The teashops provided for tea and coffee, with food choices consisting of hot dishes and sweets, cold dishes and sweets, and buns, cakes and rolls. Lyons' Corner Houses, which first appeared in 1909 and remained until 1977, were noted for their Art Deco style. Situated on or near the corners of Coventry Street, Strand and Tottenham Court Road, they and the Maison Lyonses at Marble Arch and in Shaftesbury Avenue were large buildings on four or five floors, the ground floor of which was a food hall with counters for delicatessen, sweets and chocolates, cakes, fruit, flowers and other products. In addition, they possessed hairdressing salons, telephone booths, theatre booking agencies and at one period a twice-a-day food delivery service. On the other floors were several restaurants, each with a different theme and all with their own musicians. For a time, the Corner Houses were open twenty-four hours a day, and at their peak each branch employed around four hundred staff including their famous waitresses, commonly known as Nippies for the way they nipped in and out between the tables taking orders and serving meals. The tea houses featured window displays, and, in the post-war period, the Corner Houses were smarter and grander than the local tea shops. Between 1896 and 1965 Lyons owned the Trocadero, which was similar in size and style to the Corner Houses.

 

*************Metroland is a name given to the suburban areas that were built to the north-west of London in the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex in the early part of the Twentieth Century that were served by the Metropolitan Railway. The railway company was in the privileged position of being allowed to retain surplus land; from 1919 this was developed for housing by the nominally independent Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited (MRCE). The term "Metroland" was coined by the Met's marketing department in 1915 when the Guide to the Extension Line became the Metro-land guide. It promoted a dream of a modern home in beautiful countryside with a fast railway service to central London until the Met was absorbed into the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933.

 

This cluttered, yet cheerful and festive domestic scene is not all it seems to be at first glance, for it is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The wonderful nickel plated ‘morning glory horn’ portable gramophone, complete with His Master’s Voice labelling, is a 1:12 miniature artisan piece made by Jonesy’s Miniatures in the United Kingdom. It arrived in a similarly labelled 1:12 packing box along with the box of RCA Victor records that you can see peeping out of their box to the right of the gramophone. The gramophone has a rotating crank and a position adjustable horn.

 

The records scattered across Ada’s kitchen table at the front of the gramophone are all made by the British miniature artisan Ken Blythe. Known for his authentic recreation of books, most of the books I own that he has made may be opened to reveal authentic printed interiors. In some cases, you can even read the words, depending upon the size of the print! I have quite a large representation of Ken Blythe’s work in my collection. What might amaze you is that all Ken Blythe’s opening books are authentically replicated 1:12 scale miniatures of real volumes. Not only did Ken Blythe create books, he also created other 1:12 miniatures with paper and that includes the wonderful gramophone records you see here. Each record is correctly labelled to match its dust cover, and can be removed from its sleeve. Each record sleeve is authentically recreated just like its life-sized equivalent, right down to its creasing and curling corners. To create something so authentic to the original in such detail and so clearly, really does make them all miniature artisan pieces. Ken Blythe’s work is highly sought after by miniaturists around the world today and command high prices at auction for such tiny pieces, particularly now that he is no longer alive. I was fortunate enough to acquire pieces from Ken Blythe prior to his death about four years ago, as well as through his estate via his daughter and son-in-law. His legacy will live on with me and in my photography which I hope will please his daughter.

 

The bottle of champagne is a 1:12 size artisan miniature made of glass by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. The champagne glasses on the table are hand-made 1:12 artisan miniature pieces made from blown glass, acquired from Karen Ladybug Miniatures. The glass and bottles of ale are also :12 artisan miniature pieces made from blown glass, acquired from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls’ House Shop in the United Kingdom.

 

The tablecloth is actually a piece of bright cotton print that was tied around the lid of a jar of home made peach and rhubarb jam that I was given a few years ago.

 

The paper chains festooning Ada’s kitchen I made myself using very thinly cut paper. It was a fiddly job to do, but I think it adds festive cheer and realism to this scene, as fancy Christmas decorations would have been beyond the budget of Edith’s parents, and homemade paper chains were common in households before the advent of cheap mass manufactured Christmas decorations.

 

In the background you can see Ada’s dark Welsh dresser cluttered with household items. Like Ada’s table, the Windsor chair and the ladderback chair to the left of the photo, I have had the dresser since I was a child. The shelves of the dresser have different patterned crockery and silver pots on them which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom. There are also some rather worn and beaten looking enamelled cannisters and a bread tin in the typical domestic Art Deco design and kitchen colours of the 1920s, cream and green. Aged on purpose, these artisan pieces I recently acquired from The Dolls’ House Shop in the United Kingdom.

 

You will also notice on the shelves of the dresser a few of the common groceries a household like the Watsfords’ may have had: Bisto gravy powder, Ty-Phoo tea and Oxo stock cubes. All these items are 1:12 size artisan miniatures made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire, with great attention to detail paid to their labels and the shapes of their packaging.

 

The first Bisto product, in 1908, was a meat-flavoured gravy powder, which rapidly became a bestseller in Britain. It was added to gravies to give a richer taste and aroma. Invented by Messrs Roberts and Patterson, it was named "Bisto" because it "Browns, Seasons and Thickens in One". Bisto Gravy is still a household name in Britain and Ireland today, and the brand is currently owned by Premier Foods.

 

In 1863, William Sumner published A Popular Treatise on Tea as a by-product of the first trade missions to China from London. In 1870, William and his son John Sumner founded a pharmacy/grocery business in Birmingham. William's grandson, John Sumner Jr. (born in 1856), took over the running of the business in the 1900s. Following comments from his sister on the calming effects of tea fannings, in 1903, John Jr. decided to create a new tea that he could sell in his shop. He set his own criteria for the new brand. The name had to be distinctive and unlike others, it had to be a name that would trip off the tongue and it had to be one that would be protected by registration. The name Typhoo comes from the Mandarin Chinese word for “doctor”. Typhoo began making tea bags in 1967. In 1978, production was moved from Birmingham to Moreton on the Wirral Peninsula, in Merseyside. The Moreton site is also the location of Burton's Foods and Manor Bakeries factories. Typhoo has been owned since July 2021 by British private-equity firm Zetland Capital. It was previously owned by Apeejay Surrendra Group of India.

 

Oxo is a brand of food products, including stock cubes, herbs and spices, dried gravy, and yeast extract. The original product was the beef stock cube, and the company now also markets chicken and other flavour cubes, including versions with Chinese and Indian spices. The cubes are broken up and used as flavouring in meals or gravy or dissolved into boiling water to produce a bouillon. Oxo produced their first cubes in 1910 and further increased Oxo's popularity.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

There’s also homemade bacon-infused butter, lobster butter, truffle aioli, and cocktail sauce can be added for $4 supplement each.

 

Lbs

100 Yonge St.

Toronto, ON

(647) 351-4747

lbstoronto.com

Twitter: @LbsToronto

 

Owners: Jonathan Gonsenhauser and Will Tomlinson

 

Introducing for TorontoLife: torontolife.com/food/restaurants/lbs-pounds-lobster-burge...

The Georgetown Loop's Silver Plume Yard is home to a handful of relatively rare, narrow gauge diesel locomotives, which are used for yard switching as well as supplemental power for tourist trains. Sometimes, you'll see them used as helpers in conjunction with a steam locomotive and in some circumstances, they become the primary power. Two of these locomotives are GE Model U6, 52-Ton, End-Cab Road Switchers. Number 130, seen here, was built in 1956 and operated on U.S. Gypsum's narrow gauge line in Plaster City, CA before being acquired by Lindsey Ashby, the former operator of the Georgetown Loop. She ran on the loop from 1992 to 2004, and then spent some time at the Colorado Railroad Museum, when the Loop changed operators. As can be seen here, she and her sister (#140) were back at the Loop in 2016, and on this particular day, the 130 was being used as a helper with Steam Locomotive #111. During my next visit to the Loop in August of 2017, I saw this particular locomotive stripped of its cowlings and prime mover, apparently in the process of being re-engined. Hopefully, she'll be back soon. I'm not a big diesel fan, but the 130 and 140 are among the more visually appealing, narrow gauge diesels that I've seen.

 

By Della Monroe

 

The shape of a woman is one that is cherished as the body has many functions and undergoes many changes with age. However, there is hope for any female that desires a healthy body and mind. This is why it helps to investigate the best weight loss supplements for women.

It is hard to say how many new diet trends and fads are on the market today. Since women are the most scrutinized by society about their physique, the majority of the ads target them first. One thing that has changed over the years is that more research is performed to ensure that consumers are using a product that is safe.

These days more scientists are looking into plant derived ingredients as opposed to chemicals that may help a person lose weight but are also harmful when taken over a period of time. In the past, artificial stimulants have been associated with organ damage and users normally regain the weight. By recognizing womanly needs, a safer diet aid is more likely to bring long term results.

Things like the menstrual cycle and hormones can have a profound effect on the energy levels of a woman. More is needed than a cup of extra strong coffee or energy drink as a meal replacement. Incorporating vitamin B help to energize and boost metabolism without side effects or organ damage.

Garcinia cambogia, raspberry ketones and green tea are just some of the ingredients gaining popularity with those trying to lose weight and keep it off. Some of these also contain antioxidants and natural stimulants for more energy. As of recent, no major recalls have been made of any product that contains these ingredients.

However, it is up to the consumer to know what ingredients to steer clear of, as many are claiming to have these ingredients or nutrients that can help women diet safely. Many cheap knockoffs contain filler ingredients that, while harmless, do not help one in the weight loss journey. Taking the time to gather data from reliable sources is the best investment in self.

Anyone who is serious about maintaining a healthy weight knows that it is a two way street. Eating the right foods and exercising on a regular basis can help curb cravings and add to energy levels. While cutting calories and fat are also helpful, a dieter has to make sure that those are empty calories and not proteins or complex carbohydrates.

Shops that sell health products or organic food are better than drugs stores when it comes to choosing a diet plan that is safe. Some stores have nutritional experts who can make dietary recommendations and handle inquiries without bias. These types of places have a reputation to uphold so they work in the interest of the customer.

Getting serious about losing weight is a great effort that can have lifelong effects. Looking for quality products and becoming educated is the key to better health both inside and outward. While the process itself is tough and it is common to get discouraged, it can pay off over time.

 

About the Author:

 

Find an overview of the benefits of taking weight loss supplements and more info about the best weight loss supplements for women at ift.tt/1MhGCVy now.

 

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Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today we are just a short distance from Cavendish Mews, in the artistic and bohemian suburb of Bloomsbury, where Lettice is visiting the pied-à-terre* of Phoebe Chambers, niece and ward of Lady Gladys Caxton. Through her social connections, Lettice’s Aunt Egg contrived an invitation for Lettice to an amusing Friday to Monday long weekend party held by Sir John and Lady Caxton, who are very well known amongst the smarter bohemian set of London society for their weekend parties at their Scottish country estate, Gossington, and enjoyable literary evenings in their Belgravia townhouse. Lady Gladys is a successful authoress in her own right and writes under the nom de plume of Madeline St John. Over the course of the weekend, Lettice was coerced into accepting Lady Glady’s request that she redecorate Phoebe’s small London flat. Phoebe, upon coming of age inherited the flat, which had belonged to her parents, Reginald and Marjorie Chambers, who died out in India when Phoebe was still a little girl. The flat was held in trust by Lady Gladys until her ward came of age. When Phoebe decided to pursue a career in garden design and was accepted by a school in London closely associated with the Royal Society, she started living part time in Bloomsbury. Lady Gladys feels that the flat is too old fashioned and outdated for a young girl like Phoebe. When Lettice agreed to take on the commission, Lady Gladys said she would arrange a time for Lettice to inspect the flat the next time Lady Gladys was in London. Now the day has arrived.

 

Having heard from Lady Gladys over the course of the weekend party in Gossington that Phoebe’s pied-à-terre had been shut up for years and was in a somewhat neglected state of affairs, she expected it to be not unlike the study she recently saw at Arkwright Bury in Wiltshire, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Gifford: a room which she has also agreed to redecorate. However, unlike the musty, dust filled and forgotten study, shut up and stuffed with an odd assortment of bits and pieces and boxes of junk, Lettice is pleasantly surprised to find Pheobe’s flat remarkably cosy. Although too small for her own liking and tastes, Lettice can see how a small flat like this would suit an independent girl like Pheobe. It has one bedroom with an adjoining dressing room, a small kitchenette and a bathroom in addition to the drawing room she stands in now. Traces of the studious and serious Phoebe are everywhere with piles of books stacked on footstools and occasional tables and a cluttered desk buried under books and notes from her studies. The general feel of the flat is comfortable, studious clutter, and whilst Lettice cannot deny that the pre-war furnishings are a little outdated, they seem to be perfectly functional for Pheobe, who appears far more concerned about and focussed upon reading her collection of horticulture books and referring to her notes written in a neat hand, rather than the pattern or design of the sofa or chairs upon which she perches.

 

“So these are your friends from your horticulture course, Pheobe?” Lettice asks as she stands before the small coal fireplace that heats the drawing room and stares at the unframed photographs on its narrow mantle shelf which jostle for space with one another and packets of flower seeds. When Phoebe nods shallowly in a timid manner, Lettice takes a moment to look more closely at them. They are women of around Lettice’s age, all different sizes and shapes as they pose on a pier in an undisclosed seaside town, in front of a formal building which Lettice assumes is likely to be the Royal Horticulture Society and a final one where four girls pose in their bathing costumes at a lido. Phoebe is not amongst their number, Lettice observes. “You aren’t with them, Pheobe?”

 

“I prefer to take photographs.” Pheobe mumbles.

 

“Do you like photography, Pheobe?”

 

Pheobe nods shallowly again, and then mutters, “I prefer plants.”

 

Lettice smiles as she turns back to the photographs and goes on gingerly, so as not to frighten the mousey Pheobe, “Well, all your friends look like quite a jolly crew. Do you get along well with them all?” Phoebe doesn’t reply, but nods quickly again, causing the halo of blonde wispy curls around her face to bounce about and take on a lithe and lively life of their own.

 

“Here we are then!” comes Lady Glady’s booming voice cheerfully as she sails into the cluttered room, a sweep of lavender, lace and winking diamonds and faceted glass beads. “Tea for three.” She deposits a galleried silver tray topped with tea making paraphernalia onto an ornately decorated Edwardian tea table of mahogany standing between two armchairs upholstered in peach floral brocade and an upright backed chair upholstered in cream satin. “I can still find the tea things, even after not having lived here for more than a decade,” She looks pointedly at Pheobe. “Which just confirms my suspicions.”

 

“And what suspicions are those, Lady Gladys?” Lettice asks.

 

“Ah-ah!” the older woman wags her finger admonishing at Lettice. “We may not be at Gossington, my dear, but remember that I am still a Fabian**, and Fabianism is not bound by walls. We are egalitarian, Lettice. We are all on a first name basis.”

 

“Sorry,” Lettice apologises, lowering her head in admonishment. “Old habits die hard, Gladys.”

 

“Never mind, dear.” Lady Gladys reaches out and rubs Lettice’s shoulder comfortingly.

 

“What suspicions were you referring to, Auntie Gladys?” Phoebe asks, uttering the most words Lettice has heard her say since she and Lady Gladys arrived.

 

“The suspicion, Pheobe dear,” The older woman raises one of her diamond ring encrusted hands up to her niece’s face and tugs gently on her chin, teasingly. “And don’t call me Auntie. You know I don’t like it!” she scolds.

 

“No Gladys.” Pheobe replies, lowering her head.

 

“The suspicion is, Pheobe, that this flat is more of a mausoleum to Reginald and Marjorie’s memory, rather than a place for you to live in.”

 

“Where things were left by my parents makes sense to me, Gladys.”

 

“Well, be that as it may,” Lady Gladys says with a serious look clouding her jowly face. “It’s unhealthy to live in the shadows of two people who have been dead for many, many years.”

 

Lettice glances anxiously at Pheobe, who in Lettice’s experience has only shown a demonstrative concern for her parents’ memories beyond her interest in plants. The way her aunt speaks about Pheobe’s parents, she worries the poor, fey girl will start to cry. However, to her surprise, she remains stoic and silent, her gaze falling to the polished floorboards and worn Indian carpet beneath her.

 

Lady Gladys glances up with a critical gaze at the two photographic studio portraits in oval frames hanging to either side of the fireplace. “Don’t you agree, Lettice?”

 

“Me?” Lettice gulps, not wishing to come between the older woman, her niece and the ghosts of both their pasts which are so complexly entwined. “Well I…”

 

However, before Lettice has to try and stumble her way through a stuttered response, Lady Gladys gasps, “The cake! I forgot the cake! It’s still in the kitchenette. We can’t have tea and not have cake, can we?” She asks rhetorically. She quickly sweeps out of the room again with heavy, clumping footsteps.

 

“I only call her Auntie when Gladys is being especially frustrating.” Phoebe whispers, her mouth ends perking up in a tentative smile. “Which is quite often, really.”

 

“Pheobe!” Lettice finds herself surprised that Phoebe can muster that much pluck to rebel against her domineering aunt.

 

“She hates me calling her Auntie because she thinks it ages her, and there are few things Gladys hates more than being reminded that she is old.”

 

“Phoebe!” Lettice gasps again, startled by the girl’s sudden daring streak.

 

“That’s why, aside from Nettie and a very select few others, Gladys won’t entertain anyone her own age. The last thing she wants is to become irrelevant.”

 

“Oh, she isn’t that vain, surely, Pheobe.”

 

Phoebe is about to counter Lettice’s remark when Lady Gladys strides back into the drawing room.

 

“Here we are then, my dears! Since I only pay my London housekeeper to keep house, and Mrs. Brookhurst is very particular about sticking to the assigned specifics designated in her role, Harrod’s finest comes to the rescue!” She places a beautifully light and golden Victoria sponge oozing jam and cream onto the tea table next to the pink Art Nouveau floral teapot.

 

“Not bake it yourself, Gladys?” Phoebe remarks saucily, glancing cheekily at Lettice from below her fluttering blonde lashes.

 

“I may have lived here once, Phoebe, but I wouldn’t remember how to use that old range in there.” Lady Gladys defends. “Besides, you know my opinion on household chores.” She looks at Lettice and goes on with a bright smile. “It is my opinion, which is to the contrary of what is written in story books, that cooking and cleaning are a guaranteed way to quash beauty, charm and wit in women. It’s why you’ll never see any of my heroines scrubbing pots and pans or dusting mantlepieces. I’ve yet to see a maid who, after a few years of service, doesn’t look as drab as an old worn bedsheet washed and put through the mangle one too many times.” She sinks onto an armchair dramatically. “My main readership consists of middle-class housewives and I suspect more than a few domestics. None of them want to read about a girl who skivvies away just like them. They want escape from the dull everyday through glamour, excitement and romance.”

 

“My maid reads your novels, Gladys. She was positively thrilled when she saw your name on the invitation to the weekend we had at Gossington.”

 

“Well, I must sign a spare copy of one of my latest novels for her when the redecoration is done, Lettice. Would she like that?”

 

“Oh I’m sure she’d love that, Gladys. Thank you.” Lettice replies with a smile as she takes a seat in a remarkably comfortable straight backed chair. “Thinking of Edith, she is only a plain cook, so I too, find Harrod’s Food Hall and catering service to be of great service.”

 

Lady Gladys nods in appreciation. “Not poured the tea yet, Pheobe?” she remarks critically as she watches her niece drape herself like a falling leaf into the armchair opposite the tea table and withdraw a black pencil marking the page in a large botanical studies book on roses before lowering her head towards it to read.

 

“You may be adverse to housework, Auntie Gladys, but you’re far better at playing hostess than me.” Phoebe responds with a tired sigh without looking up from the page.

 

“Don’t call me that, Phoebe.” Lady Gladys snaps irritably. “Anyway, you’d be far more adept at hosting, if you’d only try and make an effort to play the host a little, dear.”

 

Phoebe pointedly ignores her aunt’s whining protestations and runs the point of her pencil underneath a sentence in the description of a red dogwood rose, demonstrating how ardent her studies are.

 

“Very well then.” Lady Gladys says with a huff of irritation. “Shall I be mother*** then?”

 

Without waiting for a reply, Lady Gladys takes up a cup and pours in some strong tea before handing the cup to Lettice. She indicates with a sweeping gesture to the milk jug and sugar bowl, implying that Lettice should help herself. After pouring tea for Phoebe and herself, she slices the Victoria sponge, her knife gliding through the layers of soft cake, jam and cream.

 

As Lettice carefully pushes a pile of books so as not to topple them, to clear some space on the table to the left of her elbow to place her plate, Lady Gladys opines, “I do wish you’d made a little room for us, Phoebe dear. All these piles of books are most difficult to navigate. You knew we were coming today.”

 

“In case you don’t remember, Gladys,” Phoebe mutters testily from her book. “There isn’t any more room.”

 

“A lesser person might think you didn’t want us here, dear.” Lady Gladys goes on, a slightly hurt and clearly annoyed tone to her voice as she speaks.

 

Phoebe sighs as she reluctantly withdraws her head from the book she is studying. “As you well know, I’ve been busy attending my garden design classes, and besides, this arrangement suits me very well. Why should I change it?”

 

“Humph!” snorts Lady Gladys, frowning. She turns her attentions away from her niece, who has already returned her nose to her book, and focuses instead on Lettice. “Now, thinking of arrangements: my dear Lettice, what do you think? It’s a rather poky little place, isn’t it, and shabby?” She sighs. “But, it was Reginald and Marjorie’s intention to bequeath it to Phoebe.”

 

“Well,” Lettice begins, feeling rather awkward when being faced with Lady Glady’s overt criticism of the flat that belonged to her brother and sister-in-law. “I think it’s quite compact and charming.”

 

“Compact!” Lady Gladys snorts derisively. “Charming! Come, come, Lettice. There is no need for your diplomacy here, my dear. Let’s be honest: it’s old and shabby, and most things need flinging out into the street, and replacing with something newer, fresher and more stylish.”

 

“Oh, I wouldn’t be that dramatic, Gladys.” Lettice retorts.

 

“Nonsense, Lettice! The dustbin is where most of this old tatt should go. Out with the old, and in with the new. Eh?”

 

“Well, what do you think, Pheobe?”

 

When Pheobe’s head doesn’t rise from her book, and her wispy blonde curls continue to obscure her face, Lady Gladys goes on. “It’s no use trying to engage her my dear Lettice. Goodness knows I’ve tried.” She raises her voice and annunciates each syllable even more clearly than she was already doing with round vowels and clipped tones. “Pheobe could test the patience of a saint! She can hear us perfectly well, but as Phoebe seems to have abrogated her involvement in redecorating the flat, I see that like most things outside her life as a landscape gardener, I shall have to step in and fill her place and make the decisions, like usual.”

 

“I said I was happy with repainting the flat green. Isn’t that enough?” Phoebe grumbles, almost in a resigned whisper. “I’d rather the flat wasn’t disturbed whilst I’m studying for my latest round of horticulture exams.”

 

“Don’t worry, Phoebe dear.” Lady Gladys says with a dismissive wave of her bejewelled fingers. “We’ll organise it all to take place when there is a hiatus in your studies. Now,” She claps her hands and looks about her gleefully, like a small child with a shiny new toy, with sparkling eyes. “I think these can go for a start.” She starts bouncing up and down on her seat, the springs groaning in protest as dust motes emitted from the old armchair tumble and fly through the air around her. “Nasty old Edwardian things. Marjorie chose them of course, even though my dear Reginald wanted something a bit more up-to-date and fashionable. She always was frightfully dull and conservative, my sister-in-law.”

 

“Oh, I’m sure they are quite comfortable, Gladys.” Lettice begins. “With a little bit of respringing and some new fab…”

 

Lady Gladys stops Lettice speaking by holding up her hand in protest. “No, no! I won’t hear of these awful things being kept. They represent everything vulgar in Marjorie’s middling middle-class taste. No, fling them out!”

 

Lettice glances at Phoebe again, but the girl makes no move to interject.

 

“Didn’t I read about an eau de nil sofa and chairs in the Country Life article about your redecoration of the Channons house, Lettice?” Lady Gladys goes on unabated.

 

“Err… yes.” Lettice replies warily.

 

“Good. Then we’ll have an eau de nil suite here too. Quite fashionable and up-to-date! Excellent! Excellent!” Gladys toys excitedly with the violet faceted beads draped around her neck and down her front. “Now, of course being the bookish girl that she is, we’ll need something better than this rather haphazard arrangement,” She waves her hands about at the precariously balanced towers of books about the drawing room. “For her library.” She looks around. “There!” She points to a lovely old, stylised Art Nouveau china cabinet full of pretty Edwardian floral porcelain cups and saucers. “We’ll replace that monstrosity of the last decade with a new era bookcase. What do you say, Lettice?”

 

“Well perhaps we should…” Lettice begins as she turns once more to Pheobe’s halo of blonde curls.

 

“Don’t delegate decisions to Pheobe when I’m asking the question, Lettice!” Lady Gladys snaps sharply, causing Lettice to shudder involuntarily at the tone of her quip. “She’s clearly demonstrated that she isn’t interested, so I’m the one making decisions.”

 

“Of course, Gladys.” Lettice answers in quiet deference to the dominating woman. “A more modern bookshelf will be perfect there.”

 

“Splendid! Splendid!” Lady Gladys replies, rubbing her fingers together in glee. “I knew you’d see it my way, my dear. Everyone does,” She pauses. “Eventually.” She picks up her plate and scoops off a slice of cake with her fork and eats it. As Lady Gladys chews, her powdered and rouged cheeks expanding and contracting and her painted lips moving around rhythmically, Lettice can almost see the thoughts in her head as she glances around. Swallowing she eyes the two photographs to either side of the fireplace.

 

Following her gaze, Lettice quick says, “I have a great fondness for family photographs, Gladys. I think we should keep the photos of your brother and sister-in-law where they are in the new scheme. They are, after all,” She looks imploringly at Pheobe’s gently bobbing head, but she does not look up from the printed page. “Phoebe’s parents.”

 

“Yes of course, Lettice. Very good. Then there is that.” She points to the pretty Georgian desk in the corner of the room. “That desk was my brother’s, and is an old family heirloom. I’ll take that.”

 

Pheobe’s head suddenly shoots up from her books. “But that’s mine, Gladys. It was Father’s.”

 

Lady Gladys looks across at her niece with cool eyes. “I know it was dear.” She pauses for a moment and makes a show of sighing heavily for dramatic effect before continuing. “And I didn’t want to tell you this, but he really did want to leave it to me. I’ve just left it here out of ease. I’ll have it moved to the Belgravia when the redecoration starts.”

 

“But I thought you said that Mother and Father left me the flat and all its contents.” Phoebe exclaims, sitting upright in her seat, suddenly very alert and aware of everything going on around her, any appearance of nonchalance gone.

 

“Well, they did, dear.” Lady Gladys replies.

 

“Then it stays here, where it belongs.” Phoebe insists, a sudden anxiousness in her voice as she glances between Lettice and her aunt with startled eyes.

 

“But Reginald really did want me to have it, Phoebe dear.” Lady Gladys insists.

 

“But that’s the most poignant thing I have to remind me of Father.” Phoebe tries to protest.

 

“It was my father’s, and his father’s before him, and his before that, Pheobe. It should come to me, by rights. Don’t be selfish.”

 

“But… but I love it.” Tears begin to fill Pheobe’s pale blue eyes, making them sparkle and glitter. “It was… Father’s.”

 

“I see now, I should have removed it before you became attached to it,” Lady Gladys remarks, settling back comfortably into the armchair she seems so much to dislike and takes another scoop of cake, popping it into her mouth.

 

Lettice sees her moment to interject and pipes up, “I’m sure I could easily accommodate such a pretty and classical piece of furniture into my designs, Gladys. My style is Classical Revivalist, after all.”

 

“The desk is mine!” Lady Gladys commands in a sharp and raised voice that indicates she is not to be crossed on this matter, a few pieces of sponge not yet consumed flying from her mouth and through the air, landing in half chewed wet globs on the carpet. “This is not your concern, Lettice.” She forces a chuckle. “With all due respect of course.” She swivels her head back to her niece. “You heard Lettice. You will have your parents’ portraits retained as part of the redecoration. What could be more poignant than that?”

 

“But I…” Phoebe begins meekly.

 

“Don’t worry, Phoebe dear. Lettice will get you a much nicer, and bigger new desk as part of the design.” She sharply turns her head back to Lettice and eyes her with a hard stare. “Won’t you, Lettice?”

 

Lettice hears the undisguised warning in the older lady’s bristling tone of voice. “Yes, yes of course I will, Pheobe.” She answers brightly with a smile, but failing to obscure her awkwardness and regret as she utters the words which she does not want to air.

 

“That’s settled then.” Lady Gladys says with a smile, confirming the end to that particular part of the conversation about décor. “You’ll soon forget it, Pheobe dear. After all, until you came of age, you didn’t even know any of this existed.” She glances around the small drawing room of the flat. “And anyway, you’ll get it back when I die. Now, about curtains and carpets,” she adds, quickly changing the subject. “I think we’ll have new ones in more contemporary patterns, in shades of green, perhaps with a touch of blue or yellow, Lettice.”

 

“Yes, of course, Gladys.” Lettice answers in a deflated tone.

 

As Lady Gladys continues to talk unabated about her vision for the flat’s redecoration, Lettice listens in silence, occasionally nodding her polite ascent, even though the words just wash around her like the distant drone of London traffic. After meeting Lady Gladys at Gossington, Lettice had her suspicions that she had an underlying ulterior motive to her request for Lettice to redecorate the flat: to eradicate the presence of her deceased brother and sister-in-law from the place, and perhaps make them even more of a distant memory to Phoebe, who has spent more of her life growing up with Lady Gladys and her husband, than her parents. Although she could not pin it specifically to anything she had said or done, Lettice fancied that having raised Phoebe, Lady Gladys sees the memory of her dead brother and his wife as a threatening spectre in Pheobe’s and her own life. Now she knows her suspicions to be well founded, and clearly out in the open as Lady Gladys strips away almost every reminder of her brother and sister-in-law as she shares her wishes about the redecoration of the flat. She feels sick to her stomach as she glances over at Phoebe, who up until now has shown little emotion, as silent tears well in her eyes and spill down her pale cheeks.

 

*A pied-à-terre is a small flat, house, or room kept for occasional use.

 

**The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. The Fabian Society was also historically related to radicalism, a left-wing liberal tradition.

 

***The meaning of the very British term “shall I be mother” is “shall I pour the tea?”

 

This rather ramshackle drawing room of the studious Phoebe Chambers may look real to you, but in fact it is made up entirely with pieces from my 1:12 miniatures collection, including pieces from my own childhood.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

Phoebe’s drawing room has a very studious look thanks to the many 1:12 size miniature books made by the British miniature artisan Ken Blythe. Most of the books I own that he has made may be opened to reveal authentic printed interiors. In some cases, you can even read the words, depending upon the size of the print! I have quite a large representation of Ken Blythe’s work in my collection, but so little of his real artistry is seen because the books that he specialised in making are usually closed, sitting on shelves or closed on desks and table surfaces. Therefore, it is a pleasure to give you a glimpse inside one of the books he has made as it lies open on a footstool in the foreground, the page bookmarked by a pencil. It is a book of botanical prints by the renown botanical illustrator Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759 – 1840). To give you an idea of the work that has gone into his volumes, the book contains fifty double sided pages of illustrations and text. What might amaze you even more is that all Ken Blythe’s opening books are authentically replicated 1:12 scale miniatures of real volumes. To create something so authentic to the original in such detail and so clearly, really does make this a miniature artisan piece. He also made the packets of seeds seen on the mantlepiece and the bureau in the background, which once again are copies of real packets of Webbs seeds. Ken Blythe’s work is highly sought after by miniaturists around the world today and command high prices at auction for such tiny pieces, particularly now that he is no longer alive. I was fortunate enough to acquire pieces from Ken Blythe prior to his death about four years ago, as well as through his estate via his daughter and son-in-law. His legacy will live on with me and in my photography which I hope will please his daughter. I hope that you enjoy this peek at just two of hundreds of his books that I own, and that it makes you smile with its sheer whimsy!

 

The floral Edwardian style armchairs are made by JaiYi miniatures, who are a high quality miniature furniture manufacturer, whilst the ornate Victorian tea table on which the tea set stands and the Art Nouveau china cabinet in the background were made by Bespaq miniatures, who are another high quality miniature furniture manufacturer. The two highly lacquered occasional tables in the mid and foreground I bought from a high street dolls’ house supplier when I was twelve. The dainty fringed footstool in the foreground with its tiny rose and leaf pattern ribbon trim was hand made and upholstered by a miniatures artisan in England. The armchair in the foreground with its serpentine arms I acquired from Kathleen Knight’s Doll House Shop in the United Kingdom.

 

The floral tea set on the tea table, I acquired through an online stockist on E-Bay, whilst the silver galleried tray comes from Warwick Miniatures in Ireland, who are well known for the quality and detail applied to their pieces. The Victoria sponge (named after Queen Victoria) on the tea table and the slices of it on the plates on the occasional tables are made by Polly’s Pantry Miniatures in America.

 

The Georgian revival bureau to the left of the picture comes from Town Hall Miniatures. Made to very high standards, each drawer opens and closes. On the writing surface of the bureau sit miniature ink bottles and a quill pen made by the Little Green Workshop in England who specialise in high end, high quality miniatures. The ink bottles are made from a tiny faceted crystal beads and feature sterling silver bottoms and lids. The pencils on the bureau, acquired from Melody Jane’s Doll House Suppliers are 1:12 miniature as well, and are only one millimetre wide and two centimetres long. The French dome clock bookended by Ken Blythe volumes on top of the bureau is a 1:12 artisan miniature made by Hall’s Miniature Clocks, supplied through Doreen Jeffries Small Wonders Miniatures in England.

 

The wonderful Carlton Ware Rouge Royale jardiniere (featuring real asparagus fern fronds from my own garden) comes from Mick and Marie’s Miniatures in the United Kingdom.

 

Phoebe’s photos of her student friends on the mantlepiece are all real photos, produced to high standards in 1:12 size on photographic paper by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. The photos of Phoebe’s parents in the gilded round frames come from Melody Jane’s Doll’s House Suppliers in the United Kingdom. The floral picture in the round frame came from Kathleen Knight’s Doll House Shop in the United Kingdom.

 

The china tea set in the cabinet in the background I sourced through a miniatures supplier in Australia, whilst the silver pieces came from Warwick Miniatures in Ireland.

 

The oriental rug is a copy of a popular 1920s style Chinese silk rug and has been machine woven.

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Tonight, Lettice is entertaining her old childhood chum Gerald, also a member of the aristocracy who has tried to gain some independence from his family by designing gowns from a shop in Grosvenor Street, in the dining room of her Cavendish Mews flat: a room equally elegantly appointed with striking black japanned Art Deco furnishings intermixed with a select few Eighteenth Century antiques. The room is heady with the thick perfume of roses brought back from Glynes, the Chetwynd’s palatial Georgian family estate in Wiltshire, from where Lettice has recently returned after visiting a neighbour of sorts of her parents, Mr. Alisdair Gifford who wishes Lettice to decorate a room for his Australian wife Adelina, to house her collection of blue and white china. A bowl full of delicate white blooms graces the black japanned dining table as a centrepiece, whilst a smaller vase of red roses sits on the sideboard at the feet of Lettice’s ‘Modern Woman’ statue, acquired from the nearby Portland Gallery in Bond Street. Silver and crystal glassware sparkle in the light cast by both candlelight and electric light. The pair of old friends have just finished a course of Suprême de Volaille Jeanette: a fillet of chicken served with a rich white roux creamy sauce, ordered from Harrod’s Meat and Fish Hall* and warmed up and finished off by Edith, Lettice’s maid, in the Cavendish Mews kitchen. Gerald returns to the table with two small glasses of port after filling them from a bottle of liqueur in Lettice’s cocktail cabinet in the corner of the room just as Edith steps across the threshold of the dining room carrying a silver tray laden with three types of cheese and an assortment of biscuits, wafers and crackers.

 

“About time, Edith.” Lettice mutters irritably as Edith approaches and slides the tray gently onto the dining table. “Careful! Don’t scratch the table’s surface.”

 

“I’m sorry, Miss.” Edith says as she blushes, a lack of understanding filling her face. “I… I didn’t realise I was scratching it.”

 

“Well, you haven’t, Edith,” she snaps back. “But you need to be more careful!”

 

“Yes Miss.” Edith bobs a curtsey, a wounded look on her usually bright face.

 

Glancing between Lettice toying distractedly with the rope of pearls about her neck looking anywhere but at either her maid or himself, and the poor embarrassed domestic, Gerald pipes up, “There’s nothing to apologise for, Edith. There’s no harm done. Miss Chetwynd is just a bit tired and overwrought. Aren’t you Lettice darling?”

 

When Lettice doesn’t answer, whether because she hasn’t heard Gerald as she gets lost in her own thoughts, or because she knows that she is in the wrong, admonishing her maid like that for no reason, Gerald adds, “The Suprême de Volaille Jeanette was delicious. Thank you.” He then gently indicates with a movement of his kind eyes and a swift sweeping gesture of his hand that she should go.

 

“Yes Sir. Thank you, Sir.” Edith replies as she bobs a second curtsey and quickly scuttles back through the green baize door leading from the diming room back into the service area of the flat.

 

“You don’t seem yourself at all, Lettice darling!” Gerald says in concern once he estimates that Edith is out of earshot. “Upbraiding Edith like that, and for no good reason. She didn’t mark the table. You’ve been in a funk ever since you came back from Wiltshire.” He pauses momentarily and reconsiders. “Actually no, you’ve been like this for a little while before that.” He looks at her knowingly. “What’s the matter with you, darling?”

 

“Oh I’m sorry.” Lettice sighs.

 

“It’s not me you should be sorry to.”

 

“I’ll apologise to Edith a little bit later. I’ll let her settle down first.”

 

“Well, I should hope you will.” Gerald takes a sip and cocks his eyebrow over his eye as he stares at Lettice. “Alright, out with it! What’s the matter, then?”

 

“Looking at me the way you are, can’t you guess, Gerald darling?”

 

“It’s that rather awful Fabian** charlatan, Gladys, isn’t it?” Gerald replies. As he does, he shudders as he remembers the awful snub Lady Gladys gave him.

 

Through her social connections, Lettice’s Aunt Egg contrived an invitation for Lettice to an amusing Friday to Monday long weekend party held by Sir John and Lady Caxton, who are very well known amongst the smarter bohemian set of London society for their weekend parties at their Scottish country estate, Gossington, and enjoyable literary evenings in their Belgravia townhouse. Lady Gladys is a successful authoress in her own right and writes under the nom de plume of Madeline St John. Over the course of the weekend, Lettice was coerced into accepting Lady Glady’s request that she redecorate the Bloomsbury flat of her ward, Phoebe Chambers. When Lettice agreed to take on the commission, Lady Gladys said she would arrange a time for Lettice to inspect the flat the next time Lady Gladys was in London. The day it happened, Lettice was invited to hear Lady Gladys give a reading from her latest romance novel ‘Miranda’ at its launch in the Selfridge’s book department. Wanting company, and thinking he might enjoy the outing, Lettice invited Gerald to join her. When Lady Gladys met Gerald, she took an instant dislike to him and snubbed him, calling him ‘Mister Buttons’ much to his chagrin.

 

“Well done, Gerald darling.” Lettice replies sulkily, toying idly with her own glass.

 

“So, what’s the trouble with Gladys now?” Gerald asks. “Come on, tell me all the ghastly details.”

 

“What’s the point, Gerald darling? It won’t make one iota of difference.” Her shoulders slump forward as she speaks.

 

“You don’t know that.” Gerald counters. “If nothing else, it will probably make you feel better just talking about it, and hopefully by unblocking the frustrations you so obviously feel, you’ll be a bit kinder to poor Edith.” He gives her a hopefully glance.

 

“I know. Edith didn’t deserve my ire.”

 

“Especially when she didn’t do anything wrong. It would be a shame to lose such a good maid. Good servants like Edith are hard to come by.”

 

“I know, Gerald! I know!”

 

“If I could afford to employ her full time as a seamstress, I would. However I can only afford Molly to do some piecework for me a few days a week at the moment. But once my atelier expands, you’d better watch out. I’ll poach her.”

 

“Edith?”

 

“Yes of course, darling. Who else?”

 

“As a seamstress? Why?”

 

“Good heavens! Haven’t you noticed how smartly turned out she is when she’s not in uniform and is going out?” Gerald asks with incredulity. When Lettice shakes her head coyly he continues, “For a woman who has an eye for detail, you can be very unobservant sometimes. Edith, like most working girls, makes her own clothes, I’d imagine from patterns in one of those cheap women’s magazines directed towards middle-class housewives I see flapping in the breeze at newspaper kiosks. However, unlike a great many of them, she obviously has a natural aptitude for sewing. That’s why I’d take her on as a seamstress.”

 

“I must confess, I’ve never really noticed what Edith wears. She’s just…” Lettice isn’t quite sure how to phrase it. “She’s just there.”

 

“Well, one day she may not be,” Gerald warns before taking another sip of liqueur. “And then you’ll be in trouble trying to find her like as a replacement. Anyway,” he coughs. “I’m not going to pinch her from you just yet. Now, what’s the problem with Gladys?”

 

Lettice lets out a very heavy sigh. “Oh, she’s awful, Gerald darling: positively frightful. She rings me nearly every day, or sometimes several times a day, hounding me! I’m starting to make Edith answer the telephone more often now, because I’m terrified that it will be Gladys.”

 

“Well, we all know how much dear Edith hates the telephone.”

 

“Well, usually that would be true, but she knows that Gladys is Madeline St John, and I’ve told her that Gladys promises to give her a few signed copies of her books one of these days, so she doesn’t seem to mind when it’s her. Gladys seems to have that common touch with her.”

 

“Common is right.” quips Gerald. “Low-class gutter novelist works her way into the upper echelons by way of an advantageous marriage.”

 

“Gerald!” Lettice gasps

 

“It’s true Lettice, and you must know it by now, even if you didn’t know it before.”

 

“Well, whatever she may or may not be, Gerald, I just can’t talk to her directly. I need a moment to gird my loins*** before I take on the unpleasant task of talking to her, or perhaps a more appropriate description would be, being spoken to by her, at considerable length.”

 

“You haven’t corrupted poor Edith and coerced her into telling little white lies for you when Gladys does ring and say that you’re out.”

 

“No!” Lettice gives Gerald a guilty side glance. “Well not yet anyway.” she corrects. “I’ve thought about doing it, and it’s a very tempting idea. However, I know how much Edith already hates answering the telephone, and being such a despicably honest girl, I think asking her to fib for me, especially to her favourite romance writer, might be just a bridge too far for her.”

 

“Damn the goodness of your maid, Lettice darling.” Gerald replies jokingly with a cheeky smile causing his mouth to turn up impishly, as he cuts a slice of cheese and puts it on a water cracker wafer, before lifting it to his lips.

 

“Oh you’re no help!” Lettuce swats at her best friend irritably. “You make me feel guilty for even countenancing such a thought.”

 

“Well, someone has to try and keep you honest in this sinful city, darling.” he jokes again. “Mummy would never forgive me if I didn’t try and keep you as virtuous as possible.”

 

“I’d believe that of Aunt Gwen.” Lettice agrees. “On the other hand, Mater is convinced that you’re the root of the destruction of her precious, obsequious youngest daughter.”

 

“Sadie is wiser and more observant than I’ve ever given her credit for.” Gerald murmurs in surprise. “I should be more charitable to her in future as regards her intellect.”

 

“That I should like to see.” Lettice giggles, a smile breaking across her lips and brightening her face, dispelling some of the gloom.

 

“That you will never see.” Gerald replies firmly. “That’s better. At least I made you laugh.”

 

“You always make me laugh, darling Gerald.” Lettice reaches across the table and grasps his hand lovingly, winding her fingers around his bigger fisted hand. “You are the best and most supportive friend I could ever hope to have.”

 

“Jolly good, my dear. Now, besides telephoning far too often, what else is the trouble with Gladys?” Gerald presses.

 

“Well, she seems to want to be in control of everything in relation to Pheobe’s Bloomsbury pied-à-terre redecoration.”

 

“Isn’t Gladys footing the bill, Lettice darling?”

 

“Well yes, she is.”

 

“Then it seems to me that she has every right to be involved in the decision making that goes on, particularly as you’ve told me that Phoebe shows a lack of interest in the whole project.”

 

“Yes, but what Gladys is doing is taking over. I don’t think she’d even engage my services if I didn’t have the contacts in the painting, papering and furnishing business she needs. I have no chance to exercise any of my own judgement. Anything I do has to be checked by her: the paint tint for the walls, the staining of the floorboards, the fabric for the furnishings. And she has demonstrated that she has no real interest in my ideas.”

 

“Hhhmmm…” Gerald begins, chewing his mouthful of cheese and biscuit thoughtfully before continuing. “That does sound a trifle tiresome.”

 

“A trifle tiresome? Gerald, you always were the master of understatement.”

 

“I see no reason to panic. She is the client exercising her rights. And since she is the one paying for your services, indulge her in her necessity to be consulted on all facets of the redecoration.”

 

“Oh I’m doing that. Against my better judgement, I’m having floral chintz draperies hung in the drawing room and bedroom because that’s what she wants.”

 

“Good heavens!” Gerald exclaims, nearly choking on a fresh mouthful of cheese and wafer biscuit. “You, selecting chintz as part of your décor decisions?”

 

“My point exactly. It isn’t me that’s decided that, it’s Gladys who has. You know how much I loathe chintz at the best of times.” Lettice shudders at the thought. “I tried hinting at some plain green hangings instead as a very nice alternative, but like anything else where I try my best to negotiate for Phoebe, I am barked at and told in no uncertain terms that I will do no such thing.”

 

“Negotiate for Phoebe?”

 

“Yes, now that I’m well and truly wound up in what you rightly called Gladys’ sticky spiderweb, I’m beginning to see things for what they truly are.”

 

“Such as?”

 

“For a start, I don’t think Phoebe is disinterested in the renovations to her pied-à-terre at all. I’ve seen with my own eyes now, how whenever Pheobe expresses an opinion contrary to that of Gladys, Gladys quickly snuffs out any dissention. As far as Gladys is concerned, her choice is not only the best and right choice, but the only choice to make. Pheobe wants to keep some of her parents’ belongings in the flat, but Gladys won’t hear of it! She wants a clean sweep! I suggest a compromise, but Gladys dismisses it. So, the colours to go on the walls, the furnishings, the fabrics, even the hideous chintz curtains have all been decided upon and approved by Gladys, and Phoebe doesn’t even get a chance to express an opinion. Phoebe isn’t disinterested, she’s simply overruled and completely smothered by Gladys’ overbearing nature.”

 

“Delicious.” Gerald murmurs as he leans his elbows on the black japanned surface of the dining table and leans forward conspiratorially.

 

“It’s not delicious at all!” Lettice splutters. “It’s a frightful state of affairs!”

 

“Well, in truth, that really does sound bloody*****, Lettice darling!”

 

“Like I said, it’s a dreadful state of affairs! I feel as if I am betraying not only poor Pheobe, but the memory of her dead parents in favour of a domineering woman whom no-one it seems can stand up to.”

 

“Have you tried her husband, Sir John?”

 

“He kowtows to her wishes as much as anyone else. I now understand why he has such a dogged look upon his face. I thought it was just age.”

 

“When in fact it was just Gladys?”

 

“Indeed! And what’s even worse is that Gladys is wearing me down now too. It’s just easier to agree to everything she says, and not even attempt a compromise in Phoebe’s favour.”

 

“Well, whilst I know you don’t like the situation, from my own personal experience of dealing with difficult clients, I can say that the path of least resistance is sometimes the best. Do you remember that frock I made for Sophie Munro, the American shipping magnate’s daughter?”

 

Lettice considers Gerald’s question for a moment. “Yes, I think I do. Wasn’t it pale pink with blue trimming?”

 

“Indeed it was, Lettice darling: pink linen with blue trim, with a bias cut drape over one sleeve and a flounced skirt. Poor Sophie has an… ahem…” Gerald clears his throat rather awkwardly as he thinks of the correct phrase. “A rather Rubenesque figure, and the flounced skirt was perhaps less flattering than something with long pleats, which was I had suggested to Mrs. Munro.”

 

“But Mrs. Munro was like Gladys?”

 

“She was, darling, and she wouldn’t hear a word of it. A flounced skirt was what Mrs. Munro wanted, and a flounced skirt was what Sophie received, and she flounced her way back to America, where I’m sure her rather voluptuous derrière will be commented upon by every young eligible man on Long Island, for all the wrong reasons. However, I did it, and I cut ties with Mrs. Munro because now that my atelier is finally turning a modest profit, I can. I don’t need recommendations from her, but I do need her to be happy so that she will at least speak favourably of me, rather than say disparaging things. The same goes for you. Do what Gladys wants and then be done with her. Do it as quickly as possible, then the pain will be over, and she will praise you to boot.”

 

“I can’t help but feel badly for Phoebe though, Gerald.”

 

“I know you do, and I feel sorry for poor Sophie Munro being laughed at behind her back by young cads as she tries to be beguiling with a large derrière, but there you have it. You cannot be responsible to solve the relationship between mother and daughter.”

 

“Aunt and ward.” Lettice corrects.

 

“It equates to the same.” Gerald counters. “You are a businesswoman, Lettice, not an agony aunt******.”

 

“Well, you’re a businessman, and you seem to be a good agony aunt to me.”

 

Gerald and Lettice chuckle before Gerald replies, “Indeed I am, but I’m also a friend. You aren’t friends with Pheobe, and even if you were, you still wouldn’t be able to solve Gladys’ overbearing personality. She is who she is, and Pheobe has to learn how to make her way through life with it. Perhaps you will afford her a little freedom from Gladys by redecorating her pied-à-terre, so she can escape from under Glady’s overbearing shadow, even if the redecoration is not quite as Phoebe would have it. Even then, Phoebe will probably add her own personal touches to her new home over time. It’s only natural that she should.”

 

“Oh,” Lettice sighs heavily. “I suppose you’re right, Gerald.”

 

“Of course I’m right, Lettice darling. I’m always right.” he adds jokingly.

 

“Now don’t you start!” Lettice replies wearily before smiling as she recognises Gerald’s remark as a jest, teasing about Lady Gladys’ overbearing personality.

 

“Well, it sounds like you need a bit of cheering up, Lettice darling,” Gerald goes on as he places another slice of cheese on a biscuit.

 

“I could indeed, Gerald darling!”

 

“Well then, if you are a good girl, and apologise to Edith like I told you, like Cinderella you shall go to the ball!”

 

“Oh you do talk in riddles sometimes, Gerald darling! What on earth do you mean?”

 

“My birthday!” Gerald beams. “Come join me at Hattie’s down in Putney for my birthday!”

 

“You’re having your birthday at Hattie’s?” Lettice queries, her voice rising in surprise. “I thought we were going to the Café Royal****** to celebrate: my treat!”

 

“Now, now, be calm, Lettice darling! We are, but Hattie wants to throw a party for me on my birthday at Putney with Cyril, Charlie Dunnage and a few of the other chaps she has living with her in the house, so we’ll do that first, and then go to dinner at the Café Royal: your treat.”

 

“Well…” Lettice says warily. Her stomach flips every time Gerald mentions his lover, Cyril, an oboist who plays at various theatres in the West End and lives in the Putney home of Gerald’s friend Harriet Milford, who has turned her residence into a boarding house for theatrical homosexual men, not because she is in any way jealous of their relationship, but because she knows that Gerald being a homosexual carries great consequences should he be caught in flagrante with Cyril. Homosexuality is illegal******** and carries heavy penalties including prison sentences with hard labour, not to mention the shame and social ostracization that would follow any untoward revelations. It would mean the end of his fashion house and all his dreams.

 

Gerald misinterprets the look on his best friend’s face as being misgivings about the party. “Oh come on Lettice! Every time I’ve been spending the night with Cyril down in Putney, which has been quite a lot lately,” he confesses with a shy, yet happy smile. “I’ve been sneaking one or two bottles of champagne into his room, which he’s been stashing under the bed, so there will be plenty to drink, and Hattie is making me a birthday cake, so it will be a rather jolly party. You aren’t still imagining Hattie to be a usurper to you in my affections, are you Lettuce Leaf?”

 

“Don’t call me that Gerald! You know how I hate it!” scowls Lettice. “I’ll call you Mr. Buttons!” She threatens.

 

“You can call me what you like, Lettice darling, only please say you’ll come! You’re my best and oldest chum! It would make me so happy!”

 

“Oh very well, Gerald. Of course I’ll come.”

 

“Jolly good show, Lettice darling!” Gerald enthuses. “We’ll have a whizz of a time!”

 

*Harrod’s Meat and Fish Hall (the predecessor to today’s food hall) was opened in 1903. There was nothing like it in London at the time. It’s interior, conceived by Yorkshire Arts and Crafts ceramicist and artist William Neatby, was elaborately decorated from floor to ceiling with beautiful Art Nouveau tiles made by Royal Doulton, and a glass roof that flooded the space with light. Completed in nine weeks it featured ornate frieze tiles displaying pastoral scenes of sheep and fish, as well as colourful glazed tiles. By the 1920s, when this scene is set, the Meat and Fish Hall was at its zenith with so much produce on display and available to wealthy patrons that you could barely see the interior.

 

**The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. The Fabian Society was also historically related to radicalism, a left-wing liberal tradition.

 

***To gird one’s loins: to prepare oneself to deal with a difficult or stressful situation, is likely a Hebraism, often used in the King James Bible (e.g., 2 Kings 4:29). Literally referred to the need to strap a belt around one's waist, i.e. when getting up, in order to avoid the cloak falling off; or otherwise before battle, to unimpede the legs for running.

 

****A pied-à-terre is a small flat, house, or room kept for occasional use.

 

*****The old fashioned British term “looking bloody” or “sounding bloody” was a way of indicating how dour or serious a person or occasion looks.

 

******An agony aunt is a person, usually a woman, who gives advice to people with personal problems, especially in a regular magazine or newspaper article.

 

*******The Café Royal in Regent Street, Piccadilly was originally conceived and set up in 1865 by Daniel Nicholas Thévenon, who was a French wine merchant. He had to flee France due to bankruptcy, arriving in Britain in 1863 with his wife, Célestine, and just five pounds in cash. He changed his name to Daniel Nicols and under his management - and later that of his wife - the Café Royal flourished and was considered at one point to have the greatest wine cellar in the world. By the 1890s the Café Royal had become the place to see and be seen at. It remained as such into the Twenty-First Century when it finally closed its doors in 2008. Renovated over the subsequent four years, the Café Royal reopened as a luxury five star hotel.

 

********Prior to 1967 with the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act which decriminalised private homosexual acts between men aged over 21, homosexuality in England was illegal, and in the 1920s when this story is set, carried heavy penalties including prison sentences with hard labour. The law was not changed for Scotland until 1980, or for Northern Ireland until 1982.

 

Lettice’s fashionable Mayfair flat dining room is perhaps a little different to what you might think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures I have collected over time.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The silver tray of biscuits have been made in England by hand from clay by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination. The empty wine glasses and the glass bowl in the centre of the table are also 1:12 artisan miniatures all made of hand spun and blown glass. They are made by Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering. The vase is especially fine. If you look closely you will see that it is decorated with flower patterns made up of fine threads of glass. The cream roses in the vase were also hand made by Beautifully Handmade Miniatures. The Art Deco dinner plates are part of a much larger set I acquired from a dollhouse suppliers in Shanghai. The cutlery set came from Beautifully Handmade Miniatures. The candlesticks were made by Warwick Miniatures in Ireland, who are well known for the quality and detail applied to their pieces.

 

In the background on the console table stand some of Lettice’s precious artisan purchases from the Portland Gallery in Soho. The silver drinks set is made by artisan Clare Bell at the Clare Bell Brass Works in Maine, in the United States. Each goblet is only one centimetre in height and the decanter at the far end is two- and three-quarter centimetres with the stopper inserted. Lettice’s Art Deco ‘Modern Woman’ figure is actually called ‘Christianne’ and was made and hand painted by Warwick Miniatures in Ireland. ‘Christianne’ is based on several Art Deco statues and is typical of bronze and marble statues created at that time for the luxury market in the buoyant 1920s.

 

Lettice’s dining room is furnished with Town Hall Miniatures furniture, which is renown for their quality. The only exceptions to the room is the Chippendale chinoiserie carver chair (the edge of which just visible on the far left-hand side of the photo) which was made by J.B.M. Miniatures.

 

The carpet beneath the furniture is a copy of a popular 1920s style Chinese silk rug hand made by Mackay and Gerrish in Sydney, Australia. The paintings on the walls are 1:12 artisan pieces made by Amber’s Miniatures in the United States. The geometric Art Deco wallpaper is beautiful hand impressed paper given to me by a friend, which inspired the whole “Cavendish Mews – Lettice Chetwynd” series.

Due to the poor weather conditions we finished our day at Strekov, just across the river from Usti-nad-Labem. The busy junction north end of the station deals with traffic from Line 073 and that from the main yards at Usti. This Railpool leased E186 is working a Metrans FLT service. They often need to supplement their fleet of class 386 due to good traffic levels.

The cover to the 1966 (I think) John Plain Spring and Summer Supplement .

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SUNDAY MAINICHI - Aug 2006

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15 December 2020

 

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Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today however we are to the west of London, in nearby Buckinghamshire, at Dorrington House, a smart Jacobean manor house of the late 1600s built for a wealthy merchant, situated in High Wycombe, where Lettice’s elder sister, Lalage (known to everyone in the family by the diminutive Lally), resides with her husband Charles Lanchenbury and their three children, Harrold, Annabelle and baby Piers. Situated within walking distance of the market town’s main square, the elegant red brick house with its high-pitched roof and white painted sash windows still feels private considering its close proximity to the centre of the town thanks to an elegant and restrained garden surrounding it, which is enclosed by a high red brick wall.

 

Lettice is nursing a broken heart. Lettice’s beau, Selwyn Spencely, son of the Duke of Walmsford, had organised a romantic dinner at the Savoy* for he and Lettice to celebrate his birthday. However, when Lettice arrived, she was confronted not with the smiling face of her beau, but the haughty and cruel spectre of his mother, the Duchess of Walmsford, Lady Zinnia. Lady Zinnia, and Selwyn’s Uncle Bertrand had been attempting to marry him off to his cousin, 1923 debutante Pamela Fox-Chavers. Lady Zinnia had, up until that moment been snubbing Lettice, so Selwyn and Lettice arranged for Lettice to attend as many London Season events as possible where Selwyn and Pamela were also in attendance so that Lettice and Selwyn could spend time together, and at the same time make their intentions so well known that Lady Zinnia wouldn’t be able to avoid Lettice any longer. Zinnia is a woman who likes intrigue and revenge, and the revenge she launched upon Lettice that evening at the Savoy was bitterly harsh and painful. With a cold and calculating smile Lady Zinna announced that she had packed Selwyn off to Durban in South Africa for a year. She made a pact with her son: if he went away for a year, a year during which he agreed neither to see, nor correspond with Lettice, if he comes back and doesn’t feel the same way about her as he did when he left, he agreed that he will marry Pamela, just as Bertrand and Lady Zinnia planned. If however, he still feels the same way about Lettice when he returns, Lady Zinnia agreed that she would concede and will allow him to marry her.

 

Leaving London by train that very evening, Lettice returned home to Glynes, where she stayed for a week, moving numbly about the familiar rooms of the grand Georgian country house, reading books from her father’s library distractedly to pass the time, whilst her father fed her, her favourite Scottish shortbreads in a vain effort to cheer her up. However, rather than assuage her broken heart, her father’s ministrations only served to make matters worse as she grew even more morose. It was from the most unlikely of candidates, her mother Lady Sadie, with whom Lettice has always had a fraught relationship, that Lettice received the best advice, which was to stop feeling sorry for herself and get on with her life: keep designing interiors, keep shopping and most importantly, keep attending social functions where there are plenty of press photographers. “You may not be permitted to write to Selwyn,” Lady Sadie said wisely. ‘But Zinnia said nothing about the newspapers not writing about your plight or your feelings on your behest. Let them tell Selwyn that you still love him and are waiting for him. They get the London papers in Durban just as much as they get them here, and Zinnia won’t be able to stop a lovesick and homesick young man flipping to the society pages as he seeks solace in the faces of familiar names and faces, and thus seeing you and reading your words of commitment to him that you share through the newspaper men. Tell them that you are waiting patiently for Selwyn’s return.”

 

Since then, Lettice has been trying to follow her mother’s advice and has thrown herself into the merry dance of London’s social round of dinners, dances and balls in the lead up to the festive season. However, even she could only keep this up for so long, and was welcomed home with open and loving arms by her family for Christmas and the New Year. On New Year’s Eve, Lally, sitting next to Lettice, suggested that she spend a few extra weeks resting and recuperating with her in Buckinghamshire before returning to London and trying to get on with her life. Lettice happily agreed, and since arriving at Dorrington House with her sister and brother-in-law, she has enjoyed being quiet, spending quality time with her niece and nephews in the nursery, strolling the gardens with her sister or simply curling up in a window seat and reading.

 

This morning we find ourselves in one of Dorrington House’s ten guest bedrooms: a pretty and cosy one overlooking the elegant rear garden in which Lettice has been accommodated since her arrival from Glynes. Lettice lies beneath the beautifully embroidered satin comforter, luxuriating in the joy of being allowed to have breakfast in bed at her sister’s house. If she were at home in Glynes, there is no way known that her mother would let her take her breakfast in her boudoir, never mind in bed, since Lettice is unmarried and therefore undeserving of such a privilege**. She sighs contentedly as she listens to the blackbirds and robins chirping in the greenery beyond the sash window of her comfortably appointed room. In the hearth a fire, lit for her by one of Lally’s lower house maids long before Lettice was awake, crackles cheerfully, its heat warming the room enough that Lettice may sit up against a nest of her pillows and have her bare arms exposed without feeling cold. In the distance she can hear the clock on the landing ticking away the minutes and hours of the day, and still further away the muffled sound of a childish squeal indicates that Lettice’s nephew and niece are awake and playing in the day nursery with their nanny. Lettice sighs again and stretches her legs beneath the covers, her left foot connecting with the wooden breakfast tray placed at the foot of the bed by Lally’s cook, Mrs. Sawyer, nudging it slightly, causing the breakfast china and the ornate Indian silver teapot on it to rattle in protest at being pushed out of the way. She picks up a current copy of Vogue that has been sent to her from London and silently peruses the latest frocks from Paris whilst she contemplates reaching down and taking up her breakfast tray to put on her lap to commence her breakfast, but just the thought of doing so seems like too much of an effort. So, she casts a desultory gaze over the newest designs by Jeanne Lanvin*** instead and dreams about dancing with Selwyn arrayed in such a gown.

 

As she admires a robe de style**** design in black with embroidered red poppies, Lettice’s morning daydreams are interrupted by a gentle tapping at her door.

 

Quickly tossing the copy of Vogue aside, Lettice snatches up her pale pink bed jacket trimmed in marabou feathers from the other side of the large bed, and drapes it across her bare shoulders and arms as the tapping begins for a second time. “Yes?” she asks as calmly as possible.

 

The door opens and Lally pokes her head around it. “It’s only me, Tice darling. May I come in?”

 

“Lally!” Lettice exclaims as she shuffles herself into a more upright position against the nest of pillows behind her. “Yes, of course! Do, do come in, darling.”

 

“Thank you.” Lally replies quietly, slipping into her sister’s room and closing the door behind her.

 

Lally looks around what she and Charles call the ‘Chinese Bedroom’ because of all the Eighteenth Century chinoiserie furnishings filling it, still unused to the best guest bedroom in the house being occupied. Traces of her little sister lie about everywhere. Her travelling set of brushes and a mirror sit on the dressing table’s surface, along with bottles of Lettice’s favourite perfumes and a selection of her cosmetics. A blue hatbox sits against the Chinese dressing screen with the hat Lettice wore to the wedding of Mary, Princess Royal***** to Viscount Lascelles in 1922 sitting atop it. Her peacock blue embroidered robe hangs from the end of the screen, whilst a row of dainty shoes sit just behind it, the latter obviously organised into neat order by one of the housemaids, since Lettice is not known for the organisation of her own wardrobe. The room is filled with the comforting fug of sleep intermixed with the scent of woodsmoke and roses brought in especially for Lettice from the Dorrington House greenhouse. And there, on the left side of the bed is Lettice, draped in her delicate bedjacket, her golden tresses spilling freely across the pillows behind her.

 

“I hope you don’t mind me popping in like this.” Lally says a little defensively. “Oh, you haven’t touched your breakfast.” She observes the undisturbed pot of tea, hard boiled egg, triangle of toast, square of butter from the home farm and orange from the Dorrington House orangery******. “Is everything alright?”

 

“Oh it’s fine, Lally, and yes,” Lettice lurches towards the breakfast tray, dragging it across the orange and yellow embroidered flowers of the counterpane towards her. “Breakfast is perfect. I was just about to start. I was just so engrossed in my latest copy of Vogue.”

 

“I see.” Lally purrs with a satisfied smile. “I see you received your post this morning then.”

 

“Yes, thank you Lally.” Lettice indicates with an open hand to the two copies of Vogue as well as a card sent down from London sitting atop a silver salver next to a silver letter opener near the raised mound of her feet beneath the covers.

 

“I received some post this morning too.” Lally admits, holding up a postcard featuring an idealised photographic scene of a couple in a donkey cart.

 

“Not a postcard from Charles, opining about me having breakfast abed, surely? He and Lord Lachenbury only left for India a few days ago.”

 

“Oh!” Lally says, laughing as she looks at the postcard. “No! No, Charles and Lord Lachenbury will still be en route abord the P&O*******. No, it will be ages before the arrive in Bombay.”

 

“Then what is it?” Lettice enquires.

 

“It’s an invitation for the two of us to attend a luncheon party at Mrs. Alsop’s down at Shalstone Cottage.”

 

“That sounds rather dull. A cottage? Who is Mrs. Alsop, Lally?”

 

“Head of the local branch of the WI********.” Lally pulls a face. “She’s a dreadful gossip, and rather a bore, I’m afraid. I can say you’re indisposed if you like, but as treasurer of the WI, I had better go.”

 

“Well,” Lettice says with a sigh, reaching down to the silver salver near the foot of the bed and snatching up the card from atop its envelope. “Even if I didn’t want to come, I’d go to support you, Lally. However, you may have to pass on my excuses anyway.” She holds the card out to her elder sister.

 

“What is it, Tice?”

 

“It’s from Aunt Egg.” Lettice wags the card in her sister’s direction. “Read it.”

 

Approaching the bed, Lally accepts the card from her sister. She smiles and snorts in amusement as she stares at the stylised gilt decorated Art Nouveau card featuring a woman in a long russet coloured tea gown facing away from the viewer, her old fashioned upswept hairstyle with its topknot clearly a feature of the design. “God bless Aunt Egg. Anyone would think she was living in 1904 not 1924.”

 

“I know.” agrees Lettice with a smile as she starts buttering her toast, the crisp scrape of her knife against the slice cutting through the air.

 

“She’s going to leave you all her jewellery, you know, Tice.” Lally says with a knowing look.

 

“Oh!” Lettice scoffs, waving her sister’s remark away dismissively with a wave of her hand. “She teases all of us with her flippant remarks about her jewellery. No, she plays her hand close to her chest.”

 

“But you’re the most like her, Tice: the most artistic. I’m just like all the other Chetwynd cousins – a rather pedestrian country squire’s wife who attends luncheons at the behest of the head of the WI – unlike you, who has her own successful interior design business and socialises with a smart and select London set.”

 

“Read the card, Lally.” Lettice hisses as she takes a bite of her toast.

 

Lally reads aloud, “’Dearest Lettice, I’m sorry to write like this, but I really can’t have you lolling about at Dorrington House, being pandered to, and mollycoddled by Lally.’” Lally drops her arms, the card still clenched tightly in her right hand. She stares wide eyes in astonishment at their aunt’s statement. “Mollycoddling! What a cheek, Aunt Egg!”

 

“Well,” Lettice indicates down to the breakfast tray across her lap as she gulps down a slice of toast. “Charles would doubtless agree with her. Let’s be honest, Lally, that whilst I have adored staying here with you, being feted, and waited upon hand and foot, you are pandering to me.”

 

“Well…” mutters Lally, blushing as she speaks.

 

“Keep reading.” Lettice insists as she takes up the silver teapot and pours hot tea into her dainty blue sprigged china teacup.

 

Lally takes up the card again. “Let’s see, where was I? Oh yes, ‘being pandered to, and mollycoddled by Lally. It’s time you stopped hiding away in the bucolic bosom of Buckinghamshire’,” Lally pauses again. “Aunt Egg does have a way with words, doesn’t she?” She sniggers and shakes her head.

 

“Keep reading!” Lettice insists.

 

“’And come home to London, where I will admit, you are missed by your Embassy Club coterie of friends. Only last week I heard from Cilla Carter Minnie Palmerston, and Margot Channon three times, asking when you were coming home. I simply must insist that you come back post haste. However, like me, I know you are a woman of your own will,’” Lally looks across at her sister as she sips her tea in bed. “She’s right there. The two of you are by far the most stubborn of the women in the Chetwynd family.”

 

“Keep reading, Lally!”

 

“’So, well aware of the fact that you won’t return solely upon my request, I have had to make arrangements to compel you out of your broken hearted stupor in the stultifying countryside and thrust you back into the beating heart of London society. I’ve managed to wrangle an invitation for you, and Dicke and Margot Channon, to attend one of Sir John and Lady Caxton’s amusing Friday to Monday long weekend parties at Gossington along with a host other notable Bright Young Things********. It will do you good to be with some people of your own age.’” Lally drops her arms again. “People your own age?” she blusters. “Does Aunt Egg suddenly think me ninety, rather than thirty five?”

 

“You know how she is, dear Lally.” She’s just trying to create a compelling reason for me to leave you and go back to London as she bids. Don’t take it personally.” Lettice implores as she takes another dainty bite of her toast. “Keep reading.”

 

“’The Channons will be expecting dinner at Cavendish Mews on Monday evening to discuss arrangements. Apparently, Dickie has enough money for petrol for the motor to be able to drive three of you up to Gossington! Will wonders never cease? Please wire, if indeed you can find a telegraph office in the wilds of Buckinghamshire, what train you will be arriving on at Victoria Station and I will arrange to collect you. With love, Aunt Egg.’”

 

“So you see, Lally darling, I’ll have to arrange a journey back to London.” Lettice says apologetically. “Perhaps you can drop me at High Wycombe railway station on your way to luncheon this afternoon, and then send Tipden back to fetch me after he drops you off at Mrs. Whatsit’s.”

 

“Mrs. Alsop.” Lally reiterates.

 

“Exactly!” Lettice sighs. “Quite right! By the time he’s back I’ll have sent a wire.”

 

“Well of course, Tipden and my car are at your disposal, Lettice darling,” Lally says in a disappointed voice. “But it really is too beastly of Aunt Egg to charge in and spoil our plans like this. I was arranging for us to visit Lady Verney********* at Claydon House********** in Aylesbury Vale whilst you were stopping with me. Oh well!” She sighs and raises her hands in despair. “I shall simply have to telephone her and cancel.”

 

“I’m sure you could still visit Lady Verney, even without me, Lally darling.”

 

“You’d like Lady Varney. She’s been a campaigner for girls’ education for decades now, and is really quite intelligent and independent.”

 

“Oh that is a pity, but I’m afraid it can’t be helped, Lally. An invitation from the Caxtons cannot be refused.”

 

“And who are Sir John and Lady Caxton?” Lally queries. “I don’t think I know them.”

 

“Oh, Sir John and Lady Gladys are very well known amongst the smarter bohemian set of London society for their amusing weekend parties at their Scottish country estate and enjoyable literary evenings in their Belgravia townhouse. Lady Gladys is a successful authoress in her own right and writes under the nom de plume of Madeline St John, so they attract a mixture of witty writers and artists mostly.”

 

“Oh!” Lally gasps. “So that’s who it is!”

 

“Who, Lally?”

 

“Aunt Egg mentioned to me when we were at Glynes over Christmas and New Year, that she was arranging something for you with a lady novelist. It must be this, Lady Gladys.”

 

“I suppose the artistic connection is how Aunt Egg knows the Caxtons, although, I didn’t actually know that they were acquainted.”

 

“Well she must be more than acquainted with them if Aunt Egg could,” Lally scans the message on the card in her aunt’s spidery cursive handwriting. “Wrangle you an invitation, Tice darling.” Lally sighs disappointedly before snatching the half eaten slice of toast off her sister’s plate and takes a large bite from it. After swallowing her mouthful she continues, “I don’t see why, if she has organised an invitation for Dickie and Margot Channon, why she couldn’t have arranged one for me. She knows Charles has set sail for India and that I’ll be alone without you.”

 

“You’re hardly alone, Lally darling. What about Mrs. Alsop?” Lettice says with a cheeky grin as she takes back what is left of her triangle of toast.

 

“Oh, ha-ha!” replies Lally sarcastically.

 

“But in all seriousness Lally, you aren’t alone here. There are Nettie Fisher and Alice Newsome, and all those other lovely friends of yours who have been so hospitable to me since I arrived. They are all quite wonderful.”

 

“I suppose.” Lally replies deflatedly.

 

“Well, this is all rather thrilling!” Lettice says excitedly, pushing aside her breakfast tray and throwing back the covers with a sudden surge of gusto. “The Caxtons are quite eccentric characters, especially Lady Gladys, and from what I’ve read of them, they are refreshingly different and amusing. Thus, there is never a shortage of guests for their Friday to Monday house parties, and invitations to Gossington are a highly desirable, yet all too rare commodity. Margot will be beside herself!”

 

“Well then, however sad it is, I shall bid you a fond farewell, dear Tice.”

 

Lettice climbs out of bed and embraces her sister lovingly, inhaling her familiar scent of Yardley’s English Lavender. “Don’t worry, Lally darling.” She kisses her affectionately on the left cheek. “I’ll come back down again as soon as this weekend with the Caxtons is over.”

 

“I bet you won’t, Tice!” Lally retorts resignedly. She holds her sister at arm’s length, taking in the sudden vitality that has put a sparkle back into her eyes and roses into her cheeks. “This will be the beginning of a welcome distraction for you.” Then she adds sadly, “And one that is far better than any remedy I can provide you with. Best you follow Aunt Egg’s instructions and go back to London.”

 

“Oh thank you, Lally Darling!” Lettice cries joyfully, throwing her hands around her elder sister’s neck and clinging tightly to her. “You are a brick!”

 

“Yes, you’ll get all of Aunt Egg’s jewellery, Tice darling. You are her favourite by far.”

 

*The Savoy Hotel is a luxury hotel located in the Strand in the City of Westminster in central London. Built by the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte with profits from his Gilbert and Sullivan opera productions, it opened on 6 August 1889. It was the first in the Savoy group of hotels and restaurants owned by Carte's family for over a century. The Savoy was the first hotel in Britain to introduce electric lights throughout the building, electric lifts, bathrooms in most of the lavishly furnished rooms, constant hot and cold running water and many other innovations. Carte hired César Ritz as manager and Auguste Escoffier as chef de cuisine; they established an unprecedented standard of quality in hotel service, entertainment and elegant dining, attracting royalty and other rich and powerful guests and diners. The hotel became Carte's most successful venture. Its bands, Savoy Orpheans and the Savoy Havana Band, became famous. Winston Churchill often took his cabinet to lunch at the hotel. The hotel is now managed by Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. It has been called "London's most famous hotel". It has two hundred and sixty seven guest rooms and panoramic views of the River Thames across Savoy Place and the Thames Embankment. The hotel is a Grade II listed building.

 

**Before the Second World War, if you were a married Lady, it was customary for you to have your breakfast in bed, because you supposedly don't have to socialise to find a husband. Unmarried women were expected to dine with the men at the breakfast table, especially on the occasion where an unmarried lady was a guest at a house party, as it gave her exposure to the unmarried men in a more relaxed atmosphere and without the need for a chaperone.

 

***The House of Lanvin was named after its founder Jeanne Lanvin in 1889. Jeanne Lanvin was born in 1867 and opened her first millinery shop in rue du Marche Saint Honore in 1885. Jeanne made clothes for her daughter, Marie-Blanche de Polignac, which began to attract the attention of a number of wealthy people, who requested copies for their own children. Soon, she was making dresses for their mothers, which were included in the clientele of her new boutique on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In 1909, Jeanne Lanvin joined the Syndicat de la Couture, which marked her formal status as a couturière. The Lanvin logo was inspired by a photograph taken for Jeanne Lanvin as she attended a ball with her daughter wearing matching outfits in 1907. From 1923, the Lanvin empire included a dye factory in Nanterre. In the 1920s, Lanvin opened shops devoted to home decor, menswear, furs and lingerie, but her most significant expansion was the creation of Lanvin Parfums SA in 1924. "My Sin", an animalic-aldehyde based on heliotrope, was introduced in 1925, and is widely considered a unique fragrance. It would be followed by her signature fragrance, Arpège, in 1927, said to have been inspired by the sound of her daughter's practising her scales on the piano.

 

****The ‘robe de style’ was introduced by French couturier Jeanne Lanvin around 1915. It consisted of a basque bodice with a broad neckline and an oval bouffant skirt supported by built in wire hoops. Reminiscent of the Spanish infanta-style dresses of the Seventeenth Century and the panniered robe à la française of the Eighteenth Century they were made of fabric in a solid colour, particularly a deep shade of robin’s egg blue which became known as Lanvin blue, and were ornamented with concentrated bursts of embroidery, ribbons or ornamental silk flowers.

 

*****Mary, Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood (1897 – 1965), was the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. She was the sister of Kings Edward VIII and George VI, and aunt of Queen Elizabeth II. She married Viscount Lascelles on the 28th of February 1922 in a ceremony held at Westminster Abbey. The bride was only 24 years old, whilst the groom was 39. There is much conjecture that the marriage was an unhappy one, but their children dispute this and say it was a very happy marriage based upon mutual respect. The wedding was filmed by Pathé News and was the first royal wedding to be featured in fashion magazines, including Vogue.

 

******An orangery or orangerie was a room or a dedicated building on the grounds of fashionable residences of Northern Europe from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries where orange and other fruit trees were protected during the winter, as a very large form of greenhouse or conservatory.

 

*******In 1837, the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company first secured a Government contract for the regular carriage of mail between Falmouth and the Peninsular ports as far as Gibraltar. The company, established in 1835 by the London shipbroking partnership of Brodie McGhie Willcox (1786-1861) and Arthur Anderson (1792-1868) and the Dublin Ship owner, Captain Richard Bourne (1880-1851) had begun a regular steamer service for passengers and cargo between London, Spain and Portugal using the 206 ton paddle steamer William Fawcett. The growing inclination of early Twentieth Century shipping enterprises to merge their interests, and group themselves together, did not go unnoticed at P&O, which made its first major foray in this direction in 1910 with the acquisition of Wilhelm Lund’s Blue Anchor Line. By 1913, with a paid-up capital of some five and half million pounds and over sixty ships in service, several more under construction and numerous harbour craft and tugs to administer to the needs of this great fleet all counted, the P&O Company owned over 500,000 tons of shipping. In addition to the principal mail routes, through Suez to Bombay and Ceylon, where they divided then for Calcutta, Yokohama and Sydney, there was now the ‘P&O Branch Line’ service via the Cape to Australia and various feeder routes. The whole complex organisation was serviced by over 200 agencies stationed at ports throughout the world. At the end of 1918, the Group was further strengthened by its acquisition of a controlling shareholding in the Orient Line and in 1920, the General Steam Navigation Company, the oldest established sea-going steamship undertaking, was taken over. In 1923 the Strick Line was acquired too and P&O became, for a time, the largest shipping company in the world. With the 1920s being the golden age of steamship travel, P&O was the line to cruise with. P&O had grown into a group of separate operating companies whose shipping interests touched almost every part of the globe. By March 2006, P&O had grown to become one of the largest port operators in the world and together with P&O Ferries, P&O Ferrymasters, P&O Maritime Services, P&O Cold Logistics and its British property interests, the company was, itself, acquired by DP World for three point three billion pounds.

 

*******The Women's Institute (WI) is a community-based organization for women in the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. The movement was founded in Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada, by Erland and Janet Lee with Adelaide Hoodless being the first speaker in 1897. It was based on the British concept of Women's Guilds, created by Rev Archibald Charteris in 1887 and originally confined to the Church of Scotland. From Canada the organization spread back to the motherland, throughout the British Empire and Commonwealth, and thence to other countries. Many WIs belong to the Associated Country Women of the World organization. Each individual WI is a separate charitable organisation, run by and for its own members with a constitution agreed at national level but the possibility of local bye-laws. WIs are grouped into Federations, roughly corresponding to counties or islands, which each have a local office and one or more paid staff.

 

********The Bright Young Things, or Bright Young People, was a nickname given by the tabloid press to a group of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites in 1920s London.

 

*********Lady Margaret Maria Verney, was an English-born Welsh educationist. Verney was the daughter of Lady Sarah Elizabeth Amherst and her husband John Hay-Williams, 2nd Baronet Williams of Bodelwyddan. On the death of her father in 1859, she inherited his house "Rhianfa", on Anglesey, which she retained as a family home. In 1868 she married Sir Edmund Hope Verney, MP, then merely Captain Verney. She became a leading campaigner for girls' education in Britain. In 1894 she became a member of the Statutory Council of the University of Wales, holding the position until 1922.

 

**********Claydon House is a country house in the Aylesbury Vale, Buckinghamshire, England, near the village of Middle Claydon. It was built between 1757 and 1771 and is now owned by the National Trust. Claydon has been the ancestral home of the Verney family since 1620. The present Verney family, are the descendants of Sir Harry Calvert, 2nd Baronet who inherited the house in 1827. He was very tenuously related to the Verneys only through marriage. However, he adopted the name Verney on inheriting. The house was given to the National Trust in 1956 by Sir Ralph Verney, 5th Baronet. His son, Sir Edmund Verney, 6th Baronet, a former High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, lived in the house until 2019.

 

This cosy boudoir may look real to you, but it is in fact made up of pieces from my 1:12 miniatures collection.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The mahogany stained breakfast tray came from an English stockist of 1:12 artisan miniatures whom I found on E-Bay. On its surface the crockery, serviettes with their napkin rings came from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls House Shop in the United Kingdom. The teapot also came from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls House Shop. It is sterling silver, hallmarked Birmingham 1910 and has a removable lid, so it was probably a commissioned piece of Edwardian whimsy for someone wealthy, be they an adult or child. The cutlery came from an online stockist of miniatures. The orange comes from Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering. The egg cup come from Warwick Miniatures in Ireland, who are well known for the quality and detail applied to their pieces. The egg in the egg cup is amongst some of the smallest miniatures I own, and came from Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering. The square of butter in the glass dish has been made in England by hand from clay by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination.

 

The two copies of Vogue, the Art Nouveau style card and the addressed and postmarked envelope on the silver tray are 1:12 size miniatures made by the British miniature artisan Ken Blythe. Ken Blythe was famous in miniature collectors’ circles mostly for the miniature books that he made: all being authentically replicated 1:12 scale miniatures of real volumes. I have quite a large representation of Ken Blythe’s work in my collection. However, he did not make books exclusively. He also made other small pieces like the card and envelope. To create something so authentic to the original in such detail and so clearly, really does make these miniature artisan pieces. Ken Blythe’s work is highly sought after by miniaturists around the world today and command high prices at auction for such tiny pieces, particularly now that he is no longer alive. I was fortunate enough to acquire pieces from Ken Blythe prior to his death about four years ago and through his estate courtesy of the generosity of his daughter and son-in-law. His legacy will live on with me and in my photography which I hope will please his daughter.

 

The small silver letter salver is a 1:12 artisan miniature piece of sterling silver. The artist is unknown. Being made of silver, it is very heavy for its size. The sterling silver letter opener is made by the Little Green Workshop in England who specialise in high end, high quality miniatures.

 

Lettice’s comforter is in fact a piece of beautiful vintage embroidered sari silk from the 1970s, laid over a box to give the appearance of the corner of a bed. I even put my fingers under the covers to give the impression of a body as you can see in the bottom right-hand corner of the image, where the comforter is raised slightly.

 

Lettice’s elegant straw hat sitting on the French blue hatbox in the background is decorated with an oyster satin ribbon, three feathers and an ornamental flower. The maker for this hat is unknown, but I acquitted it through Doreen Jeffries’ Small Wonders Miniatures in the United Kingdom. 1:12 size miniature hats made to such exacting standards of quality and realism as this one is are often far more expensive than real hats are. When you think that it would sit comfortably on the tip of your index finger, yet it could cost in excess of $150.00 or £100.00, it is an extravagance. American artists seem to have the monopoly on this skill and some of the hats that I have seen or acquired over the years are remarkable.

 

The blue hatbox in the background on which the hat sits is a 1:12 artisan miniature and made of blue kid leather which is so soft to the touch, and small metal handles, clasps and ornamentation. It has been purposely worn around their edges to give it age. It also comes from Doreen Jeffries’ Small Wonders Miniatures in England.

 

The Chinese screen is made of black japanned wood and features hand painted soapstone panels, so it is very heavy. I picked it up at an auction some twenty years ago.

 

The dressing table featuring fine marquetry banding appears to have been made by the same unknown artisan who made the round table. This piece I acquired from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls House Shop. The brush on its surface is part of a set painted by miniature artisan Victoria Fasken, and was also acquired from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls House Shop. The vase on the dressing table surface is a 1950s Limoges piece. The vase is stamped with a small green Limoges mark to the bottom. I found this treasure in an overcrowded cabinet at the Mill Markets in Geelong. The pink roses it contains came from beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering.

 

The Chippendale style chair pushed into the dressing table is a very special piece. It came from the Petite Elite Miniature Museum, later rededicated as the Carol and Barry Kaye Museum of Miniatures, which ran between 1992 and 2012 on Los Angeles’ bustling Wiltshire Boulevard. It is part of a dining table setting for six. One of the chairs still has a sticker under its cushion identifying which room of which dollhouse it came. The Petite Elite Miniature Museum specialised in exquisite and high end 1:12 miniatures. The furnishings are taken from a real Chippendale design.

Supplement to the 'Birds of New Zealand'

London :The author,1905.

biodiversitylibrary.org/page/37485529

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

'metaphysical supplement' On Black

Incorporating herbal supplements into your diet can unlock a world of health benefits! 🌱 Boost your immune system, reduce inflammation, improve digestion, manage stress, and sleep better with these natural wonders. 🌙💪 CLICK LINK IN BIO to discover the power of herbal supplements. 🌿✨

Double page spread for a supplement on the might of the new China

Leosmusclebeach.com has the best selection of vitamins, supplements, minerals, herbs, sports nutrition, diet and energy, and health and beauty products. Contact us to start your exercise routine and a well balanced supplement specifically for your body needs.

 

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Phone: 011-575-665-2822

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...something added to complete a thing,

a little extra effort might have worked!

its never too late!

 

Taj Mahal, Agra, India

 

see the set here

Due to Sunday engineering works, no Trans Pennine Express services were running between Manchester and Liverpool. This resulted in a shuttle service between York and Scarborough, to supplement the through services across the Pennines to and from Manchester. 68 024 'Centaur', having arrived at Scarborough with the 14.00 from York, sits under the station roof prior to providing the power for the 15.34 return service.

...u light up my life.

The birds of Australia, supplement /.

London :Printed by Taylor and Francis ... published by the author ...,[1851]-1869..

biodiversitylibrary.org/page/48517456

This image is excerpted from a U.S. GAO testimony:

www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-708T

 

SUPPLEMENTAL NUTRITION ASSISTANCE PROGRAM: Policy Changes and Calculation Methods Likely Affect Improper Payment Rates, and USDA Is Taking Steps to Help Address Recipient Fraud

 

Note: Improper payment rate estimates shown in this figure for fiscal years 2007- 2014 have a margin of error no greater than plus or minus 0.33 percentage points at the 95 percent level of confidence. Confidence level and margin of error information were not available from USDA's Performance and Accountability Reports for fiscal years 2005 and 2006.

 

For purposes of government-wide reporting, such as at the federal government's Payment Accuracy website, SNAP's improper payment rates may be reflected as the fiscal year in which they are reported in the USDA agency financial report, not the year in which benefits were paid.

 

Supplementing MG’s popular TC and TD roadsters was the Y-Type range of saloon cars. Introduced in 1947, the Y-Type was derived from a prewar Morris design. By the time production ceased in 1953, the model was looking very dated.