Mulready Stationery

            I’m back with a real post this week!  Yay!

            Last night I finished reading The Brontë Cabinet by Deborah Lutz, which I highly recommend.  It’s a joint biography of the Brontës through nine items.  One of the items was a letter Charlotte had written which had been torn apart and sewn back together.  The chapter about letters discussed them more broadly; the torn one was just a small part of the chapter.  In talking about letters, Lutz went briefly into the history of the postal system and different types of items that were used by the Brontës.  One of the items mentioned was Mulready stationery.

            This is probably going to be a shorter post since Mulreadys didn’t last long, so a bit of background on what was going on with postage at the time.  Before 1840 (when postal reforms went into effect), in England, postage was paid by the sheet of paper, with the envelope counting as a piece of paper; was paid by the mileage the item had to travel; and was paid by the recipient of the mail.

            In 1840, postal reform took place.  Both stamps and letter sheets were introduced.  Stamps were what you think they are, a small square you could stick on any item going through the mail, as long as it had enough postage.  Letter sheets were preprinted and prepaid sheets of paper that would be folded up to create the letter and the envelope in one.  If you’ve ever used or seen air mail sheets, the letter sheets were like that.

            William Mulready was the person who came up with the design that was printed on the letter sheets.  Mulready was a well-known Irish artist, living in London at this time.  He was commissioned to create the illustrations for the letter sheets.  His illustrations had Britannia at the top and center; on either side were symbols of Asia and North America, showing the reach of the British Empire.  The illustration also showed that the mail was prepaid, with different colors of ink being used for different postage: black for one penny, blue for two penny.  Because they were just blue or black inked images, a lot of people hand-colored them in.

            Rowland Hill was a postal officer and one of the men who helped with postal reform.  He was sure that stamps would be a folly and that Mulready stationery would take over.  However, almost immediately it became apparent that people preferred stamps.  Mulready’s design was overly complex and was mocked and caricatured almost immediately.  Stationery creators and sellers also didn’t like it because then they couldn’t sell their product, whereas stamps could be used on anything.  People thought the government was trying to control the supply of envelopes by developing the letter sheets, too.

            Mulready stationery went on sale May 1, and was valid in the mail starting on May 6.  By May 12, Hill realized it wasn’t going well, and within two months the stationery was being replaced by more and different stamps.  The supply of Mulreadys that were in shops were used until they were gone, but distributors weren’t distributing them anymore.  What was left of the Mulreadys were destroyed, eventually having the middles punched out so the part without printing could be reused.  These middles were sold as waste paper or were recycled.

            So that’s it about Mulready stationery.  They only lasted from May to November 1840.  They’re such an interesting part of postal reform and history; I’m surprised I haven’t come across them before.

The Cottingley Fairies

            I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to pick this subject.  I’ve been interested in the Cottingley Fairy story since FairyTale: A True Story came out in 1997 (I would’ve guessed it was earlier than that, actually).  It just ticks all the right boxes for me: the right era, fairies, photos, a hoax.  It’s just great.  Like I said, I should’ve done this post earlier.

            In 1917, Frances Griffiths and her mother went to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins, the Wrights, in Cottingley, near Bradford, in England.  Frances had grown up in South Africa, but due to World War One, her father was now in the army and she and her mother had to go live with family.  Frances was about ten, and her cousin, Elsie, was about sixteen.  They played together down by the Cottingley beck (stream) and would often come back filthy, much to their parents chagrin.  They claimed they were down at the beck playing with fairies.  One Saturday, they decided to borrow Arthur Wright’s Midg camera and “take a photo of the fairies they had been playing with all morning” (1).

            They came back from the beck a picture of Frances and some fairies.  Arthur knew that Elsie was an artist and liked drawing fairies and so thought the photo was faked somehow.  About a month later the girls borrowed the camera again and came back with a picture of Elsie and a gnome.  Again, Arthur thought it was faked, and didn’t let the girls borrow his camera anymore.  Polly Wright, though, believed her daughter’s and niece’s photos were real.

In mid-1919, Polly took the photos to a theosophy meeting.  Theosophy believes in finding divinity in the mysteries of nature.  Theosophy also believes that humanity is evolving towards perfection.  The photos fit in with these beliefs because they showed people being able to interact with “higher beings”, that were one of those mysteries of nature.

            Polly showed the photos to the speaker at the theosophy meeting, asking if they might be real; the speaker took them and showed them at the society’s conference a few months later.  At this conference Edward Gardner became interested in the photos.  Gardner sent the photos to the photographic expert Harold Snelling.  Snelling believed the negatives were authentic in that they photographed what was in front of them; he wouldn’t comment if the fairies were real though.  Gardner had Snelling clean up the negatives so they could be better printed and better analyzed.  Gardner sold the prints at his lectures.  The photos quickly spread through the spiritualist community.

            The photos were gaining an audience.  In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle heard of the photos from the editor of Light, a spiritualist publication.  Doyle had long been interested in mysticism and spiritualism; after the deaths of his wife, son, brother, brothers-in-law, and nephews all in a fairly short span, this interest deepened.  Doyle contacted Gardner about the photos to find out more about them.  Doyle then contacted Arthur and Elsie Wright, asking their permission to use the photos for an article he was writing.  Arthur agreed, but didn’t want to be paid for their use believing “if genuine, the images should not be ‘soiled’ by money” (3).

            Gardner was still trying to prove the authenticity of the photos.  He went to Kodak for a second opinion.  Kodak said the photos “showed no signs of being faked” but that “this could not be taken as conclusive evidence … that they were authentic photographs of fairies” and wouldn’t give a certificate of authenticity to them (4).  The photographic company Ilford also believed there was evidence of faking.  Doyle, too, was seeing if other people thought they were real.  He showed the photos to the psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge.  Lodge believed they were fake, sighting their “distinctly ‘Parisienne’ hairstyles” (5).

            In July 1920, Gardner went to Cottingley.  He brought two Kodak cameras and “secretly marked photographic plates” and wanted Elsie and Frances to take more photos (6).  By this time Frances was living in Scarborough with her parents, but she was invited back for the summer.  The weather was bad that summer and it wasn’t until August 19 that they were able to take more photos.  Polly Wright was with the girls, but they told her the fairies wouldn’t come out if others were around, so Mrs. Wright left.  The girls were then able to take three new photos.

            The new photos were carefully packaged and sent to Gardner in London.  Gardner was thrilled with the pictures and sent a telegram to this effect to Doyle who was lecturing in Australia.  Doyle replied, “When our fairies are admitted other psychic phenomena will find a more ready acceptance” (7).

            The article Doyle had been working on, and used the photos for, came out in The Strand around Christmas 1920.  The issue sold out in two days.  In the article, the Wrights were called the Carpenters, Elsie was called Iris, and Frances was called Alice.  Press coverage of Doyle’s article was mixed, but with a lot of “embarrassment and puzzlement” (8).

            In 1921, Doyle wrote another article for The Strand about other accounts of fairy sightings.  These articles formed the basis for his 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies.  The second article and the book, too, had mixed receptions.

            In 1921, Gardner made his last trip to Cottingley.  Again he brought cameras and photographic plates, but he also brought the clairvoyant, Geoffrey Hodson.  This time the girls didn’t see any fairies and no photos were taken, but Hodson took a lot of notes about all the fairies he saw around.  By this point Elsie and Frances were tired of the fairies and just played along with Hodson “out of mischief” (9).  The girls grew up, married, and moved abroad, the Cottingley fairies left behind them.

            While mostly fading from view, the photos still popped up after this.  In 1945 Gardner’s book, Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel, was published.  Still, criticisms persisted.  People said they looked like paper cutouts and that people just needed something to believe in after the war.

In 1966, the Daily Express found Elsie back in England and interviewed her.  She said maybe the fairies were just her imagination and maybe she’d found a way to photograph her thoughts.  This interview renewed interest in the photos.  In 1971, Elsie was interviewed on the television program Nationwide, and said the same thing as 1966.  In 1976, Elsie and Frances were interviewed together.  They said “a rational person doesn’t see fairies” but still said the photographs were real (10).

In 1978 James Randi investigated the photos.  He found the fairies looked very similar to images in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, which came out in 1915.  In 1982-83, Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the British Journal of Photography, came out saying the photos were fakes.

In 1983 in The Unexplained magazine, Elsie admitted the fairies were faked to Joe Cooper.  She admitted that they were drawings and that hatpins were used to hold them in place.  She still claimed that they had seen fairies and only the ones in the photos weren’t real.  Frances admitted to the fakes as well.  However Elsie said all five photos were faked, while Frances claimed the fifth one was real.  In 1985, on Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, Elsie expanded, saying that once Doyle was brought in, believing in the photos, she and Frances were too embarrassed to tell the truth.  Frances said, “it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun – and I can’t understand why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in” (11).

Frances died in 1986 and Elsie died in 1988, both not long after they came clean.  Interest in the photos continued though.  In 1998 prints, a first edition of The Coming of the Fairies, and some other items were auctioned off for £21,620.  Also in 1998, Geoffrey Crawley sold off all the Cottingley things he had acquired; this included prints, two of the cameras, fairy watercolors Elsie did, and a letter in which Elsie admitted the hoax.  Crawley sold the items to the, now called, National Media Museum in Bradford (near Cottingley).

In 2001, some of the glass plates were auctioned for £6,000 to an unnamed buyer.  In 2009, Frances’s daughter went on Britain’s Antiques Roadshow with some of the photos and one of the cameras from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  She, like her mother, believed the fifth photo was real.  Her items were appraised at £25,000-£30,000.  Later in 2009 Frances’s memoirs were published.

In 1994, Terry Jones and Brian Froud parodied Cottingley in Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book.  In 1997 two movies related to Cottingley came out: FairyTale: A True Story and Photographing Fairies.

            The lure of the fairies continues…  I think part of it is the wonder and mystery, but also how someone like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in them.  I think it also tells you something about the time period that the photos became so popular and had both believers and skeptics.

1 - The Cottingley Fairies

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 - Cottingley Fairies

The Royal Menagerie

            I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately (to the detriment of my audiobook listening…).  My mom recommended the Rex Factor podcast, and it’s great.  The gist of it is, the hosts go through all the Kings and Queens of England and rate them in different categories and determine if the monarch has the Rex Factor.  Presumably (because I’m not that far yet) they’ll pit those who do have the Rex Factor against each other and try and figure out who the best English monarch was.  I think they’re doing Scotland now that they have finished England, which should be cool too.  All this to say: I heard about today’s topic in a couple episodes of Rex Factor and decided to look into it further.

            Throughout history, monarchs have been exchanging crazy gifts as a way of showing how powerful they are and to forge alliances.  This included food stuffs, gems, princesses (because really, you’re giving away your daughter to another country in order to forge an alliance, and what shows power more than that?), as well as all sorts of wild and exotic animals.  A lot of these animals were not even natural to the country that was gifting them, and so it showed that monarch’s wealth in that he could pay for this crazy animal to come from India or Africa or wherever and just give it away.  Some animals signified the strength of the monarch giving it away as well.

            England was given a lot of gifts of exotic animals over the years; as well as being symbols of wealth and power for those gifting them, they were symbols of power for the English monarch as well, often being purely “for the entertainment and curiosity of the court” (1).  Some monarchs wanted to show off so much, they acquired exotic animals on their own.  William the Conqueror was the first king to keep animals.  His home, Woodstock, was stocked with a number of exotic animals, though what kinds they were isn’t known.  William’s son, Henry I, enclosed Woodstock’s grounds and expanded the collection of animals to ultimately include “lions, leopards, lynxes, camels, owls and a porcupine” (2).  These two were really just the king keeping these animals because he wanted to, the gifted animals would begin later.

            The first records of what became known as The Tower Menagerie or The Royal Menagerie began in 1204 with King John.  John kept his animals at the Tower of London, a practice that would continue for over six-hundred years.  We know John received three boat loads of animals from Normandy, but we don’t know what they were.  We do know he had lions and bears, though.  The only way we know he really had anything is because of bookkeeping records referencing them.

John’s son, Henry III, is usually credited with the creation of the Menagerie, because we know so much more about the amounts and kinds of animals he had.  Henry III came to power in 1216; the first known gifts of animals were in 1235.  Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, gave Henry III three lions or leopards as a wedding gift upon Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence.  Frederick II had married Henry III’s sister, Isabella, and “this gift was a sign of their alliance and friendship” (3).  Frederick gave Henry three lions (or leopards) because there were three lions on Henry’s shield; this emblem is still used on English football and cricket patches.

            In 1251 Henry III was given a “white bear” from King Haakon IV of Norway, generally believed to be a polar bear, though that term was not in use then.  The bear was kept muzzled and chained when it was on land, but was put on a large rope and was allowed to fish in the Thames.  The sheriffs had “to pay fourpence a day towards the upkeep” of the bear (4).

            The sheriffs’ having to pay to keep the king’s animals is a recurring theme.  Just three years later they had to pay to build an elephant house at the Tower for the arrival of at least one, male, African Elephant from King Louis IX of France.  The elephant obviously needed a lot more space than the lions did, and so a forty foot long, wooden elephant house was built with the money from the sheriffs.  The elephant house eventually was converted into prison cells.

            In 1264, the animals were moved to the west end of the Tower of London.  This new area had “rows of cages with arched entrances, enclosed behind grilles.  They were set in two storeys, and it appears that the animals used the upper cages during the day and were moved to the lower storey at night” (5).  Most popularly and in the long-term, the lions were kept here.  Originally just the Bulwark, this part of the Tower of London became known as Lion Tower under the reign of Edward I at the beginning of the fourteenth century.  Edward I created the position, Master of the King’s Bears and Apes, later called Keeper of the Lions and Leopards.

            We’ll skip ahead a few hundred years to the reign of Elizabeth I.  At some point during his reign, Henri IV of France had been sent an Indian elephant.  He found the elephant too expensive to feed, though, so he sent it on to Elizabeth I.  Elizabeth I is also the first monarch to open the menagerie to the public; previously it had only been for the enjoyment of the court.  At the time she opened it to the public, the menagerie included “lionesses, a lion, a tiger, a lynx, a wolf, a porcupine and an eagle” (6).  Under the reign of James I, public shows included lions, bears, and dogs fighting as entertainment (7).

            While James I was king, the British Empire was expanding, and he received gifts accordingly.  He received “a flying squirrel from Virginia, a tiger, a lioness, five camels and an elephant” (8); the camels and elephant were a gift from the King of Spain in 1623.  James was so invested in his lions in particular that he created a special nippled bottle so orphaned cubs could be fed.  James I’s elephant was housed at St. James rather than at the Tower of London and “was given wine daily from April to September, as it was believed it couldn’t drink water at that time of year” (9).  James I expanded the menagerie; because it was now open to the public, James had viewing platforms installed.

            Jumping forward a bit again, in 1672 Christopher Wren supervised the building of a new Lion House at the Tower.  People were still flocking in to see the animals and new structures were needed.

            Along with all the new visitors, misfortune streamed in.  In 1686, Mary Jenkinson was petting a lion’s paw “when it suddenly caught her arm ‘with his Claws and mouth, and most miserably tore her Flesh from the Bone’” (10).  Mary’s arm was amputated, but she still died.

            In addition to animals harming humans, humans harmed the animals, whether through intent or negligence.  Many of the animals had to travel great distances to get to England and then to the Menagerie.  People on the ships and in England didn’t know how to take care of these exotic animals and so many died on the voyages over.  Once in England, those that survived would still suffer due to their keepers just not knowing how to handle them.  Many animals were kept in cages that were much too small and were fed food that wasn’t part of their diet.  In addition to the elephant drinking wine mentioned above, some ostriches also suffered because of what people thought their diet was.  In the late eighteenth century, two ostriches were sent from the Dey of Tunis.  It was commonly believed at the time, for whatever reason…, that ostriches could digest iron.  In 1791, one of the ostriches died after having eaten over eighty nails that were fed to it (11).

            These animals were on display to entertain, not to educate, and everyone suffered for it.  Leopards were made or allowed to play with umbrellas; zebras were allowed to roam and one went into a soldier’s canteen and proceeded to drink what was available; while still on the ship it travelled over on, a baboon threw a nine-pound cannon ball at a young sailor boy on the ship and killed him; a wolf escaped; a monkey bit a soldier’s leg; in the 1780s monkeys were living in a completely furnished room, as if they were people.  Much like Mary Jenkinson above though, according to the 1810 guidebook, one monkey tore part of a boy’s leg off and so the monkeys were removed (12).

            In the early eighteenth century it cost three half pence to get in, or you could bring a cat or dog to be fed to the lions.  At this time the menagerie had slipped in the number of animals it had; there were really only lions, tigers, hyenas, and bears.  When George IV became king in 1820 (though he had been Prince Regent since 1811), he began rebuilding the menagerie.  With the help of his Keeper, Alfred Cops, George IV built the menagerie up from four animals (a lion, a panther, a tiger, and “a grizzly bear called Martin” (13)) in 1821, up to over sixty species and over two-hundred-eighty individual animals in 1828.  New additions to the menagerie included “a zebra, an alligator, a bearded griffin, a pig-faced baboon, an ocelot, kangaroos and a Bornean bear” (14).

            Alfred Cops was a good Keeper.  He seemed to really care about the animals and knew a bit better how to care for them.  He even brought some of his own animals to the Tower when he moved in (Keepers of the Royal Menagerie lived up in Lion Tower).  Despite all this, there were still accidents with the animals.  Cops himself had a boa close around his neck once while trying to feed it.  In early-mid 1830 a leopard attacked the person who had come in to clean its exercise yard.  In December 1830 a door was accidentally raised “allowing a lion and a Bengal tiger and tigress to meet” (15).  The animals fought for half an hour and were “only separated by applying heated rods to the mouths and nostrils of the tigers who were winning” (16); the lion still died a few days later.

            It was becoming apparent that the Tower was no longer suitable (if it really ever was) for the keeping of animals and for crowds to come through to see them.  When William IV became king, he really didn’t care about the menagerie, and so the animals were moved in 1831.  The Zoological Society of London at Regent’s Park received thirty-two animals beginning in 1831, and Dublin Zoo and another zoo received others.  By 1835 the last of the animals were transferred to Regent’s Park “after one of the lions was accused of biting a soldier” (17).  Only Alfred Cops and his personal animals remained.  When Cops died in 1853, Lion Tower was torn down.

            Despite this, the monarchy continued to receive animals from other countries and still does today.  Queen Elizabeth II has received jaguars and sloths from Brazil and was sent an elephant from Cameroon as a wedding anniversary present (18).  In 2011, an art installation by Kendra Haste was on display at the Tower of London.  The wire lions, near where Lion Tower stood, were a big hit; the display also included an elephant, polar bear, and baboons.

1, 15, 16 - Tower of London – The Royal Menagerie:life with the lions

2, 5 - Menagerie

3, 7, 10, 11, 12 - Tower of London - Tragic andSurprising Stories

4, 17 - Tower of London - Menagerie

6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 18 - Julia Stuart, “Thepolar bear who lived at the Tower… along with a grumpy lion and a baboon whothrew cannon balls: Britain’s first (and most bizarre) zoo”, The Daily Mail, September 21, 2010.