That said, and despite past memories of Miss Newby, little did I realise that, thirty-five years or so later, and purely by chance, I would develop a firm interest in images of Edwardian ladies wearing large feathered hats!
Back in the mid-1970s, I really had no interest in the subject at all but it was a chance visit to the local postcard club in Norwich that changed all that. It was one of their monthly meetings and while browsing through some of the 1000s of cards on offer, I was approached by the club chairman who welcomed me and asked about my collecting interests. I had to admit to having none but asked what he, the expert, would recommend. He took me to one side and produced a beautiful complete set of six cards featuring a very attractive young lady in various poses wearing a large feathered hat.
‘What do you think of these?’ he asked, ‘These are what we call “sleepers” and nobody really wants them at present. You can have this whole set for 90p’.
Ninety pence? A mere ninety pence for the whole set? It seemed far too good a deal to miss. My collection was under way and even all these years later, this first beautifully tinted set is still one of my favourites.
Following my purchase, the postcard-collecting bug had bitten and my journey had begun. I was hooked on these period lovelies and have been ever since, with cards sourced from the UK, Belgium, Austria, Holland, France, across Europe in general and of course the good old USA where, not surprisingly, postcards featuring large ‘showy’ hats are also very popular.
Amusingly, subsequent visits to the Norwich postcard club led me to dealings with a real local character by the name of Ronnie Rouse. The rotund Ronnie was a smalltime postcard, cigarette card and ephemera dealer who, for whatever reason, usually dressed himself in a Sherlock Holmes type ‘deerstalker’ hat complemented by a tent-like heavy old overcoat that almost reached the ground. Quite a sight! However, there was a certain underlying problem. Our intrepid dealer had an aversion to soap and water and although he invariably seemed to have a nice selection of ‘hats’ cards on offer, all dealings with him as far as I was concerned, had to be done at arm’s length – and quickly! I well remember the time when Ronnie was stuck for a lift home at the end of the evening and asked me if I could oblige. My heart sank. There followed an extremely odorous three-mile journey back to his place – a terraced house at the top of a steep hill crammed with postcards and numerous other antique ‘goodies’. You could hardly push the door open such was his acquisitive nature! The favour completed, the trip back to my own place was undertaken with all the windows in the car firmly open. A lingering memory never to be forgotten!
Whilst today, some rare category postcards can fetch very large sums, prices for the ‘sleepers’ in my early ‘Hat’ collecting days often ranged from 10p to 20p each – ridiculously low when you think that today, some of those self same ‘Glamour’ cards, depending on scarcity, condition and aesthetic value, can sometimes run into several pounds each. The ‘sleepers’ it appears are ‘sleepers’ no longer.
