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Postcards provide glimpses into yesteryear
Picture postcards “hold more of our physical history than any other source, and … are of inestimable value,” says Ronald G Lightbourn of Nassau. He should know. Lightbourn has seen hundreds of them and devoted 36 pages to postcards in his book: Reminiscing II: Photographs of Old Nassau (2005). These postcards depict vivid scenes from the 1890s to the 1940s in Nassau. Each offers a nostalgic glimpse of bygone days.
Lightbourn’s collection also traces the development of the postcard industry from the black-and-white days of the 1890s to the colour linen cards that dominated the market for more than 20 years, beginning about 1931.
Among the photographers’ favorite subjects were scenes of Bay St and its well-travelled sidestreets, including Market St, George St and Frederick St, plus views of the City Market, workboats along the busy waterfront and the people of various periods. A postcard of a boy on a donkey cart trundling down Market St was a best-seller for 20 years.
Other much photographed subjects included the government buildings on Parliament Sq, the Colonial and the Royal Victoria hotels, Fort Charlotte and Fort Fincastle and Christ Church Cathedral, along with historic sites that are still perennial attractions–the Queen’s Staircase, Gregory’s Arch and the city’s ancient octangular gaol or jail (now the Nassau Public Library).
Even more popular, to judge by the great number of postcards devoted to it, was a giant silk cotton tree on Parliament St. Time has erased that beloved landmark, along with the Royal Vic Hotel, the City Market and other historic buildings.
Postcard periods
Two generations of photographers took pictures of these subjects and others, many of which found their way onto postcards. Some of the earliest cards of Nassau featured photos taken by J F Coonley, who established a studio in Nassau in 1889. When postcards began to be mass-produced by the Detroit Photographic Company in 1901, they used photos taken by William Jackson, a visiting cameraman.
Other cards that appeared in the early 1900s were the work of Nassau photographers W R Saunders and James “Doc” Sands, the latter of whom opened Sands’s Studio and continued to publish them through the linen card period. Stanley Toogood, a British photographer, moved to Nassau in the 1930s, opened a studio in 1937 and contributed several shots to the postcard trade.
Visitors used postcards then just as they do today–to report on their travels to family and friends in a quick, easy and inexpensive way. In 1922, one sojourner wrote to say that Nassau was “a funny old city, as foreign as Europe.” In those days, and until about 1945, you could buy 12 postcards for $1 in Nassau and mail one for two cents.
Beginning in the early 1900s, postcards were meticulously tinted by hand, using watercolours and stencils. “As the black-and-white cards came off the press,” Lightbourn explains, “they passed from hand to hand around a table, where a team of trained woman artists, each with her own brush, was responsible for one colour.” The result, in many cases, was a work of art.
The first picture postcard on record was produced in France in 1870, and the first such card used as a souvenir was mailed from Vienna the next year. The number of cards with images on one side increased steadily in the 1880s, sparked by photos of the new Eiffel Tower in 1889 and 1890. By the mid-1890s, postcards entered their so-called golden age.
Postcard craze in the US
The postcard craze began in the US after a souvenir card was printed in 1893 to advertise the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At first, the United States Postal Service (USPS) reserved the name postcard for itself to distinguish its cards from privately produced ones, which had to be labelled “Private Mailing Cards,” with no writing allowed on the back. Follow those rules, and the USPS was happy to mail the cards for a penny, half the letter rate.
The USPS finally allowed the words Post Card to be used on the cards in 1901, but you still couldn’t write on the back. Printers left a little white space on the front for that. This was called the “undivided back” period. That era ended in 1907, when the USPS allowed writing on half of the reverse side, ushering in the “divided back” period. The use of picture postcards became even more popular after that. In 1908, more than 677 million cards were mailed worldwide. The best ones were printed in Germany until the First World War broke out.
Deltiology–the study and collecting of postcards–divides the history of the postcard into additional periods: the white border era (1915-1930), the linen card era (1931 to the early 1950s) and the photochromes era (1939 to the present). Glossy postcards began to dominate the market around 1950.
Lifelong Nassau resident Paul Aranha owns examples from all these periods. He says he isn’t mainly a collector of postcards, although he has more than 1,600 of them on file among his treasure trove of books, maps and memorabilia.
“I’m interested in the history of The Bahamas,” he says, confirming the obvious, “and a lot of it happens to be on postcards. They are a wonderful record of Nassau’s history.”
Nassau’s olden times may be long gone, but they are not totally lost– thanks to more than a century of picture postcards.
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Feature_Postcards_WBN11
Wish you were here
Postcards provide glimpses into yesteryear
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