In 1914, much to his later embarrassment, H.G. Wells, then revered as Britain’s foremost man of letters, called the Great War ‘The War that will end War’. We know now that it was simply the beginning of technological warfare that has today reached a level of development where any nuclear power has the capability of annihilating millions perhaps even of ending our world. Between 1914 and 1919, the years of holocaust, many irreplaceable things died. Almost an entire generation of the manhood of the combatant nations was killed. Certain national attitudes and beliefs began to die after the War, such as the British jingoism of blind faith unto death for King and Country. Others disappeared altogether, for example, a narrow moral code about women and their place in society. The end of the War was the end of an era.

With the end of that era came the demise of a phenomenon in the history of communication – the picture postcard.

The postcard was born at the Wiener Neustadt Military Academy in Austria in 1869. Dr Emanuel Hermann, a professor at the Academy, suggested the idea, and the world’s first postcards were issued on 1 October 1869. The object of the exercise was to increase the business of the post office by encouraging people to write to each other more often. This encouragement took the form of a special reduced price for sending the new postcard, which was less than a letter.

The idea worked, and when Britain’s first postcards were issued one year later on 1 October 1870, half a million passed through the post office at St Martins Le Grand on that first day. At the beginning in Britain, cards were only available at post offices and were printed by Messrs De La Rue under an exclusive contract. They were made of plain light buff cardboard, 122mm by 88mm, and one side carried a pre-printed stamp and space for the address, while the other provided room for the message.

Entrepreneurs rose and flourished, making and losing fortunes. In Britain the Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone, loved the postcard and said so. De La Rue clung tenaciously to their monopoly while other publishers seethed. On the Continent greater freedoms allowed the use of the cards for advertisement purposes and, gradually over the first 30 years, the idea of putting pictures onto the cards took shape. By the beginning of the twentieth century the picture postcard was a major communication medium and art form. It recorded political events, personalities, daily news, wars, holidays, indeed every human activity. There were no telephones, no mass produced cameras; there was no radio and the postcard was the Victorian television. In Britain alone in 1900 over 500 million cards were used during the year. There were postcard clubs, postcard exhibitions, postcard machines, postcard magazines, special postcard post boxes, postcard pens, postcard wallets, postcard importers and above all postcard collectors. The cards were Status symbols, recording the ability of the wealthy to travel. They were windows on an exciting world outside the knowledge of most ordinary people; they were contemporary, cheap and collectable. In Germany, where excellent printing processes and a freer commercial climate had produced the most rapid postcard development, the collecting craze was known as ‘The Plague’ and newspapers commented that Europe would be drowned under a sea of postcards.