Arranging to meet ... more than one hundred years ago
A postcard from March 1920 – thoughts about time and place
Here I am, sitting in the sunshine to write, one full hour before the sun will set. I love writing in the late afternoon / early evening, so the clocks changing today is good news from my point of view.
The ‘spring forward’ got me thinking about the days before the automatic time reset provided by our smartphones, and before mobile phones at all. Go further back still, before telephones became commonplace in households in the UK, and you get to the days of making arrangements in writing, by post, and then … showing up at the pre-agreed time.
Here’s one such arrangement, from my postcard collection, made on 1 March 1920 to meet the following day. The card was sent at 4.30 p.m. … so would have been delivered that same evening (in the last post?).
The image is of a set of steps in Barry, South Wales. A place unrelated to the sender’s location or message but, for me, setting up an air of mystery.
The message on the back reads:
Dear Miss White, Thanks so much for your’s this morning. I will be at Clock Tower by 3 p.m. Tomorrow (Tuesday) if you could meet me there, Cheerio for time being. Yours sincerely, Connie
I’ve tried to find their meeting place. Presumably, it was a clock tower in Southampton, which is where both sender and recipient lived. The clock tower that would have been there got moved to a different part of town a decade or so later (imagine if it had been moved the morning of their meeting! You don’t expect a landmark to move). There was also a ‘Clock Tower cinema’ in Southampton which opened in 1920 … I like the idea that they might have been meeting there. Tuesday movie.
I tried to find out what the weather would have been like that day. When I searched the British Newspaper Archive to find out (look you’ve gotta have access to sources if you’re a committed ‘I wonder-erer’), I found a letter printed in a Hampshire newspaper that very day (2nd March 1920):
CORRESPONDENCE —––––––––––––––––– CHURCH ON SUNSHINE? (TO THE EDITOR OF THE "EVENING NEWS.") SIR.—In view of the approaching delightful weather, may I ask some of your readers who are ministers, their opinions on the question, whether we should go to church, or out in the sunshine? Coming down to fundamentals: Men made the church, God made the sunshine: but of course, men, or should I say churchmen, have very plausible arguments in their favour. I wonder what the people who work 6½ days a week and often more, in stuffy, ill-ventilated workplaces, think of having to spend their seventh day under very often equally unhealthy conditions; in the majority of cases, because of a conventional idea of worship. In my own knowledge there are young girls (who naturally are more innocently trustful in these things than are boys) who attend church two or three times a Sunday, simply because they are taught that it is wrong to do otherwise, although they have been at work long hours in the week, and often get no real help from the service, especially the sermon. Yours, etc., CRITICAL INQUIRER.
Which is something to ponder on on a Sunday before the working week. I hope everyone can find some ways to enjoy the approaching delightful weather.
p.s. In the googling process, I also found out that 2 March 1920 is the birth date of the first ever BBC TV weather forecaster, George Cowling. Born before TV was invented (but not before weather was). I love this video of him recreating his first televised weather forecast (I’m not sure why it had to be recreated, but I love that he still jumps when the chart falls down in the changeover from ‘tonight’ and ‘tomorrow’).
You can see the kind of research and fact-checking rabbit holes I wriggle down. And why this post took me until sundown to complete.
