This is the second of a small series of articles in which I will discuss items that I have either purchased or just seen when visiting antique establishments in Hungerford and elsewhere.
Hannah and George Phillips
Sometime in 1826 a young lady named Hannah Phillips wrote her name in a long forgotten book. She also added the year as a reference. Just over forty years later on, June the 19th 1868, George Phillips purchased a full sized house mat for the sum of four shillings and nine pence. How would I know these random facts you might ask? The answer is quite simple.
I found a Victorian receipt and Hannah’s autograph when looking around the Arcade today. The stallholder had kindly placed both items in a cellophane packet and was asking only two pounds. George and Hannah appear to have been related (Possibly a mother and son judging from the dates).
Little did George know when he purchasing the house mat in the summer of 1868 that one hundred and fifty-one years later, the receipt would be sold on a cold and bleak February day in Hungerford, West Berkshire. The same could be said about Hannah who added her simple record of ownership (Hannah Phillips Her Book 1826) one hundred and ninety-three years ago.
Both the receipt and the record of ownership were written in fine copperplate which is nearly always the case when one is looking at handwritten ephemera from the Victorian era. Quite why Hannah’s name was removed from her book is open to question, but it seems that this and George’s receipt have deliberately been kept together for many years which to me is rather haunting.
Perhaps there were other items that have been lost. I will never know. That is why I occasionally collect ephemera (Which is a very cheap pastime) as even the most obscure of items have a history. Letters and other forms of correspondence are fun to research as normally there is a lot more to go on.
Quite often when I am in the Arcade, I see ephemera for sale and it comes in all shapes and sizes as you might expect. In the last few months, I have purchased a number of mortgage deeds (Dating from the 1830s) which belonged to long demolished properties in my home town of Bradford on Avon. I have also purchased a number of items of correspondence dating from the early Victorian years. My main aim is to preserve these items for posterity as once separated (George and Hannah being a good example), they rarely come together again.
Over the years, I have seen boxes of papers that have originated from one individual or from a family, but I do not tend to purchase these. I prefer the random finds.
The dictionary definition of ephemera is as follows:-
Things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time.
The word comes from the Greek (Ephemeros).
There is plenty to find in the Arcade and elsewhere so if you are interested like me, do keep your eyes peeled. You never know what you are going to find.
I once bought two boxes of documents at auction in Marlborough. The docuuments were 19thc receipts and legal papers from a solicitor’s office in a small town in Scotland. A few days later, I happened to be talking on the phone to the author of a book I was interested in (the subject was the Allied forces in Japan in WWII). We chatted for ages, and then she mentioned her husband was the curator of a small museum – it was in the same town in Scotland – and he had the other two boxes from that very same solicitor’s office! His papers were found behind a false wall in a recently renovated tobacconist’s, and I had bought the others! What a strange co-incidence – it still makes my hair stand on end to think about it.
I found a Victorian receipt and Hannah’s autograph when looking around the Arcade today. The stallholder had kindly placed both items in a cellophane packet and was asking only two pounds. George and Hannah appear to have been related (Possibly a mother and son judging from the dates).
I once bought two boxes of documents at auction in Marlborough. The docuuments were 19thc receipts and legal papers from a solicitor’s office in a small town in Scotland. A few days later, I happened to be talking on the phone to the author of a book I was interested in (the subject was the Allied forces in Japan in WWII). We chatted for ages, and then she mentioned her husband was the curator of a small museum – it was in the same town in Scotland – and he had the other two boxes from that very same solicitor’s office! His papers were found behind a false wall in a recently renovated tobacconist’s, and I had bought the others! What a strange co-incidence – it still makes my hair stand on end to think about it.