Sepia Saturday 222: A Question of Berthage

Last year I had some correspondence with Bill Forster relating to the Stalag XXID Prisoner of War Camp at Poznan in Poland, which I wrote about in the story of Bill Ball and Work Camp 9. Bill had another query in connection with his own research on a group of sailors who also ended up in Stalag XXID:

I have a puzzle in identifying a photograph of a (French?) port where a requisitioned LNER ferry is berthed which carried the troops of the BEF to France in 1939-40. This is in connection with the book I published about my father's wartime destroyer, HMS Venomous, which I update between editions on my web site. I have successfully identified photographs taken by the men on Venomous at Calais on 21 May 1940 and at Boulogne on 22 May 1940 and uncovered some fascinating stories of the refugees they landed at Folkestone and Dover.

HMS Archangel by Eric Pountney
Image courtesy of Bill Forster

But [I] was puzzled by [this] photograph taken by the Wireless Telegraphy Operator, Eric Pountney, until it was identified by members of the "Ships Nostalgia" Forum as the LNER ferry Archangel which was used as a troop transport in 1939-40.

HMS Archangel at northern French port, by Lt Peter Kershaw RNVR
Image courtesy of Bill Forster

I have recently found a further photograph in my own collection taken by Lt Peter Kershaw of a ship which looks very similar berthed alongside a quay with railways wagons. But where was it taken? Venomous escorted troop carriers from the Solent (Southampton/Portsmouth) to Cherbourg, Le Havre and Brest in the first few weeks of the war and I suspect it would have been taken at one of these channel ports. Where there are no letters or journals - as in the case of Eric Pountney - I rely on his photographs to tell the story.

What I've done is had a good look at all three of the ports that Bill mentioned - Cherbourg, Le Havre and Brest - using the myriad of postcard views that are available, many of them on the Delcampe postcard auction web site. European postcard publishers were prolific, and there are a wealth of sources on the net for images of scenic postcards published before, during and after the Great War, up to the mid- to late 1920s. There appear to be far fewer from the 1930s, and I suspect that this may have been due to financial pressures caused by the Depression, although I haven't found a confirmation of what is really just an assumption on my part to explain the apparent paucity of images.


Le Havre, Bassin de l'Eure, undated postcard view
From what I can tell, Le Havre was the only one of the three which had the very distinctive tower lights, one of which appears close to the edge of the quay at centre-left in Bill's Archangel photo. They are very tall, probably of steel construction with a lattice framework, and are characterised by a curious bell-shaped frame for the lamp hanging from a short at the top. The lighting towers appear in most of the postcard views of Le Havre port from the early 1900s until the late 1920s - as in the view above, undated but probably from the 1920s.


The Inner Harbor, Le Havre, by Camille Pissarro, 1903
Image courtesy of The Web Gallery of Impressionism
They are also depicted in many paintings by Impressionist artists, who appear to have congregated in Le Havre before and after the turn of the century. A typical example painted by that "father of the Impressionists," Camille Pissaro, in 1903 includes one of the characteristic tower lights.


La Nouvelle Digue - The New Dike, Le Havre, postcard view, PM 1927

Sadly, I've been unable to find any images of the port, wharves and quays which show railway carriages, or even areas clearly identifiable as railway sidings, although there were tramlines on some of the quays which serviced the ocean liners, I believe. However, I did find a 1927 (postmark) postcard depicting "La Nouvelle Digue" (or, The New Dike), which may well be where railway sidings were later built. The port was extensively damaged by bombing during the Second World War, so looking at modern photographs is probably no use at all.


Bassin des Torpilleurs, Brest, postcard view, PM 1912
None of the postcards I could find for Brest displayed such tower lights.


L'Entrée des Jetées, Cherbourg, postcard view, PM 1908
I did find a postcard view of the port at Brest with a similar tower light, but the design was sufficiently different to rule it out as a candidate for the Archangel's berth. While I can't rule out this particular quay being at some other as yet unidentified port, I think I can be fairly confident in saying that it's not either Cherbourg or Brest. If the Archangel only visited these three ports, then it was, in all likelihood, Le Havre.

I'm grateful to Bill Forster for permission to include the contents of his email and the the HMS Archangel photographs in this article. I have primarily aimed at demonstrating how the huge database of scenic images, in particular of old postcards, now available in various locations on the internet can be used to research and identify our own family photographs. Apart from the postcards for sale on various auction sites such as Delcampe and eBay, there are many web sites created by postcard enthusiasts. A little inventive searching will find the one with a particular focus that you're looking for.

If you haven't yet had your fill of reading about old photographs and postcards, the remainder of this week's Saturday sepians will no doubt have plenty more.

Sepia Saturday 77: The Great Train Wreck

First, I'd like to tender my apologies to Alan, who I'm sure didn't intend that his photo prompt for this week's Sepia Saturday installment should precipitate the series of catastrophes that I'm about to present today. Secondly, I'd like to wish him well on his impending journeys, may they be as sedate and uneventful as he wishes, and I trust he won't see my article as a bad portent.

As Alan's image of a late 19th Century locomotive parked at a strangely empty station platform demonstrates, photographers have long found trains to be worthy subjects. It didn't take long after the invention and popularisation of photography for its potential as a medium to report current events to be appreciated. When there weren't any wars being fought, dignitaries visiting, or the local version of Blondin crossing the Niagara Falls on a tightrope, the next best thing was a good old disaster, whether natural or man-made.


Derailment at the Gare de Montparnasse, 22 October 1895
Photographer unknown
Image courtesy of neil on Scribas
One of the most enduring of these photographically captured catastrophes was a train emerging from an unanticipated direction on an upper level of Montparnasse station, Paris in 1895. I remember this image - or one very similar to it - from my teens, in the form of a poster with the succinct caption, "Merde!" and it even made the grade as the subject of one of Colleen Fitzpatrick's recent Forensic Genealogy quizzes.


Gramado, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 21 December 2004
Photograph © and courtesy of Alexandre Duarte
This particular mishap has so long captured people's interests that elaborate replicas have been fashioned, such as this one somewhere in Brazil, of all places.


Batavia, New York, 18 February 1885, Photograph by P.B. Hausenknecht, courtesy of The Crooked Lake Review
The photographs of such incidents often became an integral part of the legends surrounding such train wrecks. P. J. Erbley (Paul Worboys), in his article "Slaying the Dragon: Bringing an 'Urban Legend' to its Knees, describes how the result of Batavia photographer P.B. Hausenknecht's good fortune later took on a life of its own. The photo of the piggy-back wreck has been used in railway magazines, on calendars, more recently on T-shirts, featured in an episode of Ripley's Believe it Or Not, and was even employed in the embellishment of the legend of a second, much later, train wreck.


Jonestown, 1889, Stereoview by William H. Rau
Image courtesy of the footnoteMaven & Shades of the Departed
On 31 May 1889 the Johnstown Flood, known locally in Pennsylvania as "The Great Flood of 1889," and resulting from the collapse of a dam upstream, left scenes of such devastation that photographic opportunities abounded, including this bizarre photograph of a double-storey house, upended and dramatically impaled by a massive tree, is if it were some morsel on the end of a toothpick. Several photographers were soon on the ground, accompanying the deluge of reporters from over a hundred newspapers and magazines, quickly publishing dramatic three-dimensional stereoviews which were widely sold, possibly helping to garner sympathy, and therefore funds, for the massive relief effort organised by the then newly formed American Red Cross.

The stereoview shown above, depicting some of the railroad debris at Johnstown (click image for more detail, thanks fM), was taken by Philadelphia photographer and publisher William Herman Rau, who later documented the Boston Fire (1904) and was official photographer to the Lehigh Valley Railroad in Pennsylvania during the early 1890s. "Today, Rau is important for his position linking, through subject and style, key aspects of photography in the 19th and 20th centuries" (Legacy of Light, Cleveland Museum of Art).


Unidentified train wreck, undated, possibly early 1890s
Early Kodak roll film print, Kodak Museum [1]
Once cameras became available to the general public, particularly in the 1890s, it was often the case that witnesses to such disasters were able to document them immediately. No longer did the professional photographer have an exclusive opportunity, as in the case of George Barnard's fortuitous daguerreotype which captured the burning Oswego Mills in July 1853. The image above, from the Kodak Museum and reproduced in Gus Macdonald's History of Photography, is one such example, the distinctive circular format print betraying its origin as an early Kodak roll film camera (No. 1 or No. 2). A throng of men are shown around and on top of the spectacular results of a head-on collision between two trains.



Continuing the fine tradition demonstrated some three decades earlier by an opportunisitic amateur, my grandfather Leslie Payne used the last shot of the roll in his camera to capture some fellow soldiers inspecting the wreckage of a train with which they'd collided. They were on the ultimate leg of a long journey home from fighting with the CEF in the Great War, a journey which for my grandfather had started some five months earlier, with his stopping a machine gun bullet in his left shoulder, somewhere east of Arras (see previous installments Hospital Blues and Back to Canada on the 'Old Reliable').



The print batch number "5 9" stamped in purple ink on the back of the 63 x 42.5 mm paper print is identical to that on photos that he took on board the HMT Olympic a few days earlier, which is why I am fairly certain that they were taken on this journey. The inscription on the reverse, written in black ink, in my grandfather's handwriting, states:

Train wreck, showing rear coach of front troop train, which our train colid"

Presumably he didn't complete the last word.



He then appears to have reloaded the camera with another film, as a further three prints of the train wreck from various angles have the number "6 11" stamped in grey on the back.



The prints measure roughly 2½" x 1⅝". This appears to correlate rather nicely with the standard 127 film picture size quoted for the Vest Pocket Kodak (manufactured from 1912 and marketed widely as "the soldier's camera") in Todd Gustavson's Camera [2]. However, I suppose it could just as easily have been some other European-manufactured camera using similar film.



Although an extremely popular camera - it was cheap, handy and of solid construction - the shutter speed of the Vest Pocket Kodak and its variants was slow (1/25 or 1/50th sec, depending on aperture setting), requiring a steady hand in poor lighting conditions. Three of the four shots are rather blurred, although clear enough to show the locomotive of the rear train and the demolished coach of the front one, another coach apparently derailed, as well as numerous uniformed soldiers standing and walking around in the snow.



By the time these shots were taken, the camera appears to have suffered some damage, judging by the irregularly shaped dark area at lower left of all four prints. It may even have been knocked about in the train accident itself, and the damage not noticed until later. It is possible that he purchased the camera second-hand just prior to embarking on the voyage back to Canada. There don't appear to be any earlier prints of this size in the collection of his photographs held by my aunt.



I've been searching online newspapers for details of a train crash that might have happened during the troop train's journey westward from Halifax to Winnipeg, where my father was medically examined and discharged, thus far without much success. He, along with 6000 odd other returning soldiers, disembarked from the HMT Olympic on the 17 January 1919, some time after it docked at 11.30 am. A report in The Morning Leader (Regina, Saskatchewan) stated that one train for Calgary and two for Winnipeg (M.D. 10) left Halifax at 1.40 pm, 2.05 pm and 2.40 pm respectively, and The Calgary Daily Herald (Calgary, Alberta) gave the route home as "via Quebec." I know that Leslie had arrived in Winnipeg by 6 February, as his service records indicate that he was examined at Tompkins Hospital, Winnipeg on that date, so presumably the accident happened between those two dates.

Several members of the CEF Study Group Forum have been assisting, via a post on this thread, for which I'm very grateful. If you have any ideas, please feel free to either contribute on the forum (you'll have to register, I'm afraid) or here as a comment.

References

[1] Macdonald, Gus (1979) Victorian Eyewitness, A History of Photography: 1826-1913, New York: Viking Press, 192p.

[2] Gustavson, Todd (2009) Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital, New York: Sterling Publishing, 360p.

[3] Four photographs of train wreck, taken somewhere in Canada, January 1919, Loose paper prints, approx. 63 x 42.5 mm, Collection of Barbara Ellison.

[4] Canadian Expeditionary Force Service Records for Charles Leslie Lionel Payne, 1989, Library and Archives Canada, Ref. RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7671 - 48.

Sepia Saturday 75: Hospital Blues

Alan Burnett’s photo prompt for this week’s edition of Sepia Saturday is a most atmospheric postcard view of the interior of a building in Oxford, taken from the collection of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library Archives. Forgive me if I reproduce a portion of it here, but it is particularly germane to my own submission.


Although the precise location is not immediately evident, it seems to be an orchestra room in the Town Hall, with a large pipe organ forming a grand backdrop. There are eighteen men seated and standing around the room, apparently watching the final play in a game of snooker or billiards. Apart from the postcard’s caption, which refers to the 3rd Southern General Hospital, the main clue to who these men are lies in their clothing. Six of the men are wearing ordinary suits, the remaining twelve are garbed in what are generally termed “hospital blues.”


An image of this postcard view is included within the Oxfordshire County Council’s Photographic Archive, the location described as St Aldate’s, Oxford, and a further view which includes the billiards table on the stage in the background demonstrates that the entire Town Hall was converted, even the stalls. The Woodrow Wilson Archive has a similar view with somewhat better definition. A post on the Great War Forum suggests that the Town Hall Section had 205 beds reserved for malaria cases amongst the Other Ranks. The single stripe on the arm of the man about to strike the ball with his cue confirms that he was a Lance Corporal, and indeed an “other rank.”


"I look pretty thin, Eh!"
Paper print, Collection of Barbara Ellison, Coloured by Andre Hallam
My grandfather Charles Leslie Lionel Payne (1892-1975) and his younger brother Harold Victor Payne (1898-1921) both spent time wearing hospital blues. My grandfather served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), having immigrated to Canada in 1912, initially with the Canadian Army Service Corps (CASC) and then with the Canadian Machine Gun Corps (CMGC). Harold joined the British Army in England towards the end of the war and served with the Tank Corps. The photograph above, accurately coloured by Andre Hallam with the expert historical assistance of various members of the Great War Forum, shows Harold (sitting at centre) and friends wearing hospital blues at an unknown location. “I look pretty thin, Eh!” is handwritten in pencil on the reverse.


"Wounded Soldiers - I've met 'em. Yes sir."
Paper print, Collection of Barbara Ellison
Unfortunately his British Army service documents did not survive the Blitz - some 60% of the British Army’s Great War service records were destroyed by German bombs in 1940, and the remainder badly damaged – so it is difficult to be sure of his movements. A postcard sent to his family in Derby in November 1919 shows that he was then "in Cologne awaiting demob[ilization]" from the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR), was “quite well” and recorded hopefully, “guess I shan’t be long now.” I suspect that he took ill shortly after, before he could be demobilised. He died on 1 May 1921 at Derby. His mother was devastated, and although she would outlive him by a decade, I get the impression that she never really recovered from the shock. I have yet to order his death certificate, which may provide clues to his illness, and state whether or not he was still in the Army at that time.


Sgt. Leslie Payne, Winter 1918/1919
Paper print, Collection of Barbara Ellison
Sgt. Leslie Payne, CMGC, Winter 1918/19, in England or Canada
My grandfather’s CEF service records, on the other hand, have survived more or less intact although, sadly, I have no photographs of him wearing hospital blues. The portrait above, in which he wears his army greatcoat adorned with sergeant’s stripes, was probably taken in the Winter of 1918/19, after his recuperation had ended. I obtained a copy of his records from the Library & Archives of Canada some years ago. From this treasure trove of shorthand scribblings, indecipherable abbreviations and obtuse acronyms, and together with transcripts of the CMG Corps history and the War Diaries for his unit, I was eventually able to piece together a detailed itinerary of his movements.


Constance May Hogg, Christmas 1913
Postcard, Collection of Barbara Ellison
By the spring of 1918, my grandfather had been in the Canadian Army for almost three and a half years, two and a half years of this on the Western Front, and two years as a machine gunner. He had fought at the Battles of St. Eloi Craters (April 1916), Mount Sorrel (June 1916), Flers-Courcelette (September 1916), Vimy Ridge (April 1917), Lens (June 1917) and Passchendaele (November 1917) and appears to have survived unscathed – at least physically - with not a single day of sickness or other misadventure recorded. During a period of rest and recuperation Leslie was granted two weeks of leave on 26th November, and he lost no time in heading home. Four days later, having been granted permission to do so by his Commanding Officer, he married his sweetheart “Con” at Chester, and was back with his unit by 14th December.


Canon de 380 m/m capturé par les Australiens près de Chuignes et destiné au bombardement d'Amiens
Postcard with 1930 postmark, Collection of Barbara Ellison
On 20th April 1918, as part of the overall reorganization of the CMGC being undertaken at that time, Leslie was promoted to the rank of Sergeant, and thus put in charge of a machine gun section, comprising two Vickers machine guns with crews. On 9 July he was sent to the Canadian Corps School on a four week long training course. He probably returned to his unit just in time to participate in the very successful Battle of Amiens, on 8th, 9th and 10th August.


AMIENS - AUG 11 1918 - STATION PLATFORM BUFFET
Paper doily, Collection of Barbara Ellison
No. 2 Company of the 2nd Battalion CMGC was relieved and withdrawn from the line into reserve at Caix, allowing Leslie and his crew to enjoy the luxury of real food in Amiens on the evening of 11th August. After a week of rest, during which time the ranks were brought back up to strength by very welcome, but green, reinforcements, the entire Canadian Corps was moved back to the Arras Front. Leslie’s company arrived at their billets in the village of Monts-en-Ternois at noon on the 21st, and was bussed to the front lines the following day.


According to the corps history, the massive task of the Canadian Corps was to drive in south of the Scarpe towards Cambrai, to break the Quéant-Drocourt Line and, once the Canal du Nord was reached, to swing southward behind the Hindenburg Line.  No. 2 Company was, as usual, to be in support of the 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade on the right front, the attack scheduled for the 26th.

The machine gun crews were assigned positions on high ground near Telegraph Hill, from where they would form part of a series of 16 batteries putting up a creeping barrage of indirect fire to cover the infantry’s advance.  One machine gun was all0tted to every 35 yards of front. Zero hour was at 3 a.m., when the barrage commenced. By 6 a.m. reports of casualties and guns put out of action - by the German counter-barrage - were coming in from crews hampered by thick mist and smoke from the artillery barrage.


Testing a Vickers machinegun, September 1916
Image © and courtesy of Library & Archives of Canada
Some time during the day Leslie was hit in the left shoulder, probably by a machine gun bullet, although it could have been a piece of shrapnel. He was not the only one, the 2nd Battalion CMGC suffering its greatest number of casualties of any single attack in the war up to that point, with a total of 27 men killed and 183 wounded between 26th and 28th August. The CO’s report stated:

Lack of stretchers was very pronounced. In some cases our wounded lay out for over 12 hours and in all cases it was most difficult to evacuate our casualties or to attend to them in the absence of stretchers or bearers.

Hospital Ship Princess Elizabeth
Image © and courtesy of Ian Boyle/Simplon Postcards
He was stretchered first to the nearest first aid post or dressing station, then to No 42 Casualty Clearing Station, where it was ascertained that the "foreign body" was still lodged in his shoulder. Later that day he was evacuated to No 4 General Hospital in Camiers, on the coast. As soon as space could be found in the transports, he was shipped across the Channel aboard the Hospital Ship Princess Elizabeth, a converted Isle of Wight paddle steamer, arriving at the County of Middlesex War Hospital, Napsbury St Albans on 30th August.

An examination at Napsbury the following day is reported on his Medical Case Sheet, in the usual almost indecipherable handwriting:

Entry 2" internal to point of acromion. F.B. (Foreign Body] palpable mid way between this + axilliary fold on post surface. Clean.

An X-ray examination report described a "Bullet present subcutaneous," and a notation makes it clear that he was a "walking," rather than "stretcher" or "chair," patient. Although no X-ray image appears to have survived in his records, the image of a skiagraphic above, extracted from a fellow soldier’s service record, shows a similar lodged bullet. On 6th September an operation was conducted and the doctors successfully removed the offending piece of lead.


Patients and nurses at Napsbury St Albans, 1917
Image © Rohan Price and courtesy of Hertfordshire Genealogy
The subsequent entries on his medical records indicate that he "returned from auxilliary, healed" on 4th October, and was discharged to the Canadian Military Convalescent Hospital at Woodcote Park, Epsom three days later. He was given a final medical examination on 8th October which pronounced him fit “Di” and, after recuperating for another week, he was discharged on Monday 14th and sent on furlough for ten days.


154 Almond Street, Normanton, Derby
Image © & courtesy of Google Maps Street View
Of course Leslie headed straight home to Derby but when he arrived he found Con very ill. She succumbed to influenza at 154 Almond Street, Normanton, Derby on Sunday 20th October. It was the second major wave of the “Spanish” flu epidemic in the United Kingdom, with hundreds of thousands dying, and Leslie’s distress during the journey back to the Canadian Machine Gun Depot at Seaford, Sussex on the 24th must have been acute. The regulation requirement to report to the Paymaster that his wife was deceased, and therefore he was no longer entitled to separation pay, would no doubt have added insult to injury, the loss of $25 a month being the least of his concerns.

At 11 a.m. on 11th November 1918, the day that Leslie received his final TAB inoculation, the armistice between the German and Allied Forces came into effect, and the war was suddenly over. Without Con, Les must have looked at peace time with mixed emotions. Who knows what their plans had been? Would they have gone back to Winnipeg together, where Leslie had a decent clerk’s job at Eaton’s department store waiting for him? It seems likely. He was eventually demobilised in Canada in February 1919, after a prolonged stay at Kinmel Park in Wales and a trip across the Atlantic on the S.S. Olympic, but that’s a story for another time.


Leslie Payne, Summer 1915 (left) and Winter 1918/19 (right)
Paper prints, Collection of Barbara Ellison
I find it telling how much he changed in that short space of time. He was a fresh-faced 22 year-old when he enlisted in the CEF in November 1914, and a haggard 26 on discharge. He looks at least a decade older in the later photo, not just three or four years, and I’m sure it was not just his appearance that was different. I've been told that Grandpa hardly ever talked about the war, at least not to anyone who ever felt comfortable to share such confidences with others, and from what I can tell this was not uncommon amongst Great War veterans.

How should he communicate and explain such a kaleidoscope mish-mash of contradictory emotions and experiences in which they had been suddenly immersed on the Western Front, in Leslie’s case, for 2 years, 11 months and 14 days? Their subjection, after rudimentary initial training, to a totally unfamiliar environment, the exhausting slog of marching and carrying supplies to the front, the tedium and discomfort of life in the trenches, the camaraderie eventually engendered between members of a machine gun crew who lived every moment of every day together, often within inches of each other, for months on end, and the anticipation of death at any moment, from any quarter, in the trenches, eventually replaced with mind-numbing resignation – all these would have been incomprehensible to their families and friends back home.

I hope that he was eventually able to dispel at least some of the dark thoughts, but I am sure there were many others that he could never forget. And nor should we.

Have space suit - Will travel

Almost a year ago I posted this image of a rather bizarre transportation device in an article on Photo-Sleuth in the hope that readers would be able to help solve the mystery of what exactly it was, and why it appears in my aunt's collection of old family photographs. The footnoteMaven's 18th Smile for the Camera Carnival has the theme of "Travel" and seems an opportune moment to revisit the subject, summarizing what I've learnt.


Transport contraption, St Malo, France
Carte de visite by unknown photographer
Image © and courtesy of Barbara Ellison
The carte de visite is part of the Payne family heritage, held by my aunt, which I scanned on a visit to England a couple of years ago. There is no background to it at all, except that it probably came from the collection of my great-grandfather Charles Vincent Payne (1868-1941). The photograph shows some kind of viewing platform on which at least two dozen people are crowded, itself mounted on stilts or a tower standing in water. Ripples in the water around the base of the legs suggest some movement, either of the water, or of the contraption itself. It is apparently located in a bay, as a shoreline with buildings is vaguely visible in the background.


Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein,
1958 hardcover edition illustration by Ed Emshwiller,
published by Charles Scribner & Sons, New York
The contraption is a little too rectangular - and authentic - to be one of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds tripods, but it does seem almost in the genre of science fiction, or what passed as science fiction in the Victorian era. Hence my somewhat off-the-wall visualization of the theme of Robert Heinlein's 1958 book which lends its title to this article.


There are some further clues to the moving tower. Handwritten in purple ink on the front and reverse of the card mount is the following text:

Passes between St Malo & ...
It goes by
Machinery
I passed over it last year
& again this year twice
Aug 1882
It takes about 3 minutes
to cross, its only 1 sous

By comparison with handwriting that I know to be that of Charles Vincent's father Henry Payne (1842-1907) - from an 1891 letter, reproduced in a previous Photo-Sleuth article - I believe this must be the hand of Henry. If he did indeed travel from his home town of Derby in the English Midlands to France a couple of times in the early 1880s, Henry must have been a pretty well travelled - and busy - man. In 1880 Henry, his wife Henrietta and children made a short-lived attempt to settle in America, spending a few months farming at Bladensburg, Maryland before returning to England late that year or in early 1881.

What was Henry doing abroad again so soon? Nigel Aspdin has suggested in a comment to the previous article that he may have used a separate and more circuitous route back from the United States, rather than the more direct Baltimore-Liverpool run which the rest of the family presumably took. He also postulates that wrapping up the farming business venture in North America may have required another trip, and it was easier, quicker or cheaper to "take a train Derby-Portsmouth, a ferry across to St Malo, and catch a ship in France, say Le Havre, St Nazaire, Cherbourg or maybe St Malo itself." All of these possibilities are worth thinking about and investigating in further detail some time, but I will resist getting too sidetracked for the duration of compiling this article.

Nigel also remarks on the sous (or should that be "sou") apparently still being used as the colloquial price for a fare, almost a century after the official currency had changed from livres/sous/deniers to francs/centimes. Another diversion which I shan't pursue for the moment, although still of interest.


Meccano model of the St Malo Transporter Bridge, Brittany
Image © and courtesy of the Melbourne Meccano Club Inc.
Nigel again provided the vital clue to the real nature of what I had referred to as a possible tourist trap with the key search words, "St Malo transporter bridge," which brought up a modern image of a Meccano model made by a hobbyist to a design from the May-June edition of Meccano Magazine.


Part of front page of Meccano Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 9, May-June 1919.
Image © and courtesy of Rémi's Meccano Pages
I also found an original image of the design in the facsimile online Meccano Magazine hosted by Rémi's Meccano Pages, which includes in its caption: ... an excellent representation of the Rolling Bridge which conveys passengers from St. Malo to St. Servan.


Côte d'Émeraude. 535. Saint-Malo - Le Pont Roulant à marée basse
Postcard published c.1900
Image courtesy of Wikipedia user Fibo.cdn
From this it was but a short step to several descriptions of the history and numerous images of what was more correctly termed the Pont Roulant of St. Malo. Two of the most informative are on the Tramway Information pages and in a Wikipedia article. The latter is in French, which I could conceivably have read (with some difficulty), but for which I more conveniently used Google's handy Translation Toolbar. The result is not too bad in terms of fluency, although as is common with most online translators, it produces an unintentionally amusing commentary on the workings of the unusual machinery:

The bridge was traveling on Vignoles rail 38 kg / m, whose spacing was 4.60 m. The truck was supported by wheels 1 m in diameter, which was placed before a stone-hunting.
The platform 7 mx 6 m, surrounded by a railing crossbar with benches in length, included a pool party where the passengers took shelter in bad weather.
The set of 14 tons was pulled by strings. A steam 10 c. was prepared in a wood shop located on the wharf. The driver of the platform indicated by the sudden departure of trumpet at machinist posted in this shop. The arrest was served by a second blow of the trumpet.

1509. Côte d'Émeraude. 19. Saint-Malo-Saint-Servan - Le Pont-Roulant
Image © John R.Prentice and courtesy of Tramway Information
The Tramway Information article reveals that the Pont Roulant was constructed in 1873 by a local architect, Alexandre Leroyer, who held a concession to operate it for sixty years. It spanned the entrance to the French port of St Malo, which at low tide could be traversed along a stone causeway, and was designed to transport passengers between the towns of Saint-Malo and Saint-Servan. The original two-minute (or three, according to Henry) passage on the 13 metre-high rolling platform was made between two specially designed "docking stations," powered by a steam engine housed at the St.-Servan end, and carried up to two thousand people a day. Later, after the Leroyer's death the new concessionaire replaced the steam engine with electric motors. The centre of the platform had a covered cabin with glazed sides, affording panoramic views even under inclement weather conditions. Despite being seriously damaged by fire on one occasion in August 1909, and by collisions with ships in February 1889 and November 1922, it continued running until its eventual closure in November 1923.


The tourist attraction has also, I have discovered, been the subject of a book, L'Épopée du Pont Roulant de Saint-Malo à Saint-Servan, by Henri Fermin.


I even found a stereographic image of the Pont-Roulant, presumably from around the turn of the century ...


Pont-Roulant, St. Malo, c.1890
Magic lantern slide
Image © and courtesy of Collecting House
... and a lantern slide from slightly earlier showing passengers alighting.


Côte d'Émeraude 226 - Saint-Malo - Le Pont Roulant
Postcard posted 1910
Judging by the number of extant used and unused postcards from the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, such as the example above posted in 1910, the ride continued to be a popular novelty with tourists right through to Edwardian times. I have noticed, however, that the postcard views rarely show as many customers aboard as Henry's carte de visite.

The final words I will leave to Phil Beard, who in his commentary on the visual arts and popular culture refers to the Pont-Roulant as Leroyer's "magnificent indifference to appearing ridiculous" and a product "of the Nineteenth Century imagination, notable for [its] impudent attempt to conquer time and space with the most slender resources." Perhaps so, but it succeeded in catching the tourists' imagination, and their sous.


References

St Malo Rolling Bridge from Tramway Information

Pont roulant de Saint-Malo from Wikipedia

Heilprin, A. & Heilprin, L. (1906) The Geographical Dictionary of the World. partially available online from Google Books.

Fermin, Henri (2005) L'Epopée du Pont Roulant de Saint-Malo à Saint-Servan, Nouvelles Impressions, ISBN 2951473508.

Le Pont Roulant by Phil Beard's Notes on the Visual Arts and Popular Culture

Charlie Smith in the Machine Gun Corps

Some time ago Nigel Aspdin sent me this postcard photograph of a family member, Charles Sydney Smith, who served in the Machine Gun Corps (British/Imperial, rather than Canadian) during the Great War. Charlie was born in 1890 in Nottingham, son of a bank clerk John Bywater Smith (1847-1897) and Mary Ann Woolley. After his father died in 1897, they moved to Derby, where he married Beatrice Slater in 1915. In the outdoors portrait, he is shown in the uniform of a British officer, the cap badge identifying him as a member of the Machine Gun Corps, and mounted on a horse. The lower margin of the photograph is annotated, "France. May 1916," while the reverse, shown below, has a lengthier message to his wife.

17/5/16
Darling little girlie,
What do you think of this photo, it is not very good as my horse won't keep still. Hope the measles are OK. We move up into the trenches to-day. Weather is A.1. Want a letter from you and can't get one. Will write if possible to-night, hope to get leave after this spell in the trenches, but will let you know in plenty of time.
All my love
Charlie

This would be an interesting photograph to research on its own, and it was sitting in my "to do" file, waiting for a suitable moment. However, yesterday, while browsing photographs for sale on eBay, I came across a listing of a postcard which seemed rather familiar:


It seems an extraordinary coincidence, but this photograph was taken at exactly the same spot as the one of Charlie Smith, albeit that the shutter on the window has been raised and a woman stands in the previously empty doorway. The eBay listing states that it is inscribed on the reverse, "Dick 21.6.16," so it appears to have been taken just over a month later. Unfortunately, my meagre funds allowed for eBay purchases won't stretch to this one. I presume the photographer's studio was located in the vicinity of the yard.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission web site and database show that Major Charles Sydney Smith of the Machine Gun Corps, and husband of Beatrice Smith of 3 Wheeldon Avenue, Derby, died on 28 November 1918 at the age of 28, and was buried at the Nottingham Road Cemetery in Derby (Grave/Memorial Ref. 3872 (C.)). It also states that he was awarded the Military Cross, and was mentioned in dispatches. The Nottingham Road Cemetery, which featured in a recent article, "contains 193 First World War burials and 134 from the Second World War. There is a small war graves plot of about 40 burials from both wars, the rest of the graves are scattered throughout the cemetery."


His medal card shows that he arrived in France on 11 March 1916, but there is sadly little else to show what he was doing between then and his death in November 1918, shortly after the war had ended.