Victorian cards had stamp of approval

WE celebrate a largely Victorian Christmas, and so it seems appropriate to dig deep into the vaults of the Darlington Centre for Local Studies and un-dust these lovely Victorian Christmas cards.

Victoria came to the throne as an 18-year-old in 1837: a young Queen of a rapidly changing country.

It was a country where railways were speedy enough to take the workers out of the new, urban factories back home to their families in the countryside for two days a year.

It was a country where the new steam-powered machines could massproduce cheap books, toys and novelties that were so much more attractive than a stocking full of dry nuts and wizened apples.

It was a country where new farming techniques allowed new fare to grace the Christmas table. Beef in the north, goose in the south – or poached rabbit anywhere if you were poor – was the pre- Victorian Christmas dinner (the Queen herself in 1840 feasted on roast royal swan), but come the end of the 19th Century everyone was eating turkeys as their price had dropped.

In 1840, Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe- Coburg and Gotha who introduced Germanic traditions to his new country.

When the happy family were etched around a fir Christmas tree – decorated with gingerbread and topped by a Nuremberg angel – in 1848, the whole country fell for the foreign fashion.

Albert also brought with him the rich, fruity dessert puddings of his homeland.

Christmas was beginning to take shape.

In 1843, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol that romanticised a Christmas of cold snow and warm fires, of journeys, of families, of holidays and of church services, and of generous factory bosses giving to the needy.

Door-to-door carollers, with candle lanterns flickering, were a Dickensian idea, and it is no coincidence that many of our favourite carols are Victorian: O Come all ye Faithful (1843), Once in Royal David’s City (1848), O Little Town of Bethlehem (1868), Away in a Manger (1883).

Others chipped in to the changing of Christmas. In 1846, London confectioner Tom Smith wrapped his boiled sweets in a twist of coloured paper along with a motto and a trinket, and the cracker was born.

And the laziness of Sir Henry Cole played a part. He was a busy man, founding the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and organising the 1851 Great Exhibition. He did not have time to handwrite Christmas greetings to his friends and relations. So in 1843, he asked an artist friend, John Calcott Horsley, to come up with something he could quickly sign.

For that Christmas, Horsley designed a card with three pictures on it.

In the middle was a jolly family, all big smiles as they sipped festive wine. Either side of them was a family of paupers being fed and clothed. Beneath them was the legend: “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

And so the Christmas card was born, an idea that others copied because of the Penny Post which had started in 1840. However, the card really caught on after 1870 when the efficiency of the railways allowed a new halfpenny postal rate to be introduced.

In the 1880s, the Darlington shop of Thomas Wood and Son entered the new Christmas market, producing these delightful snowy sketches of local scenes accompanied by the greeting: “A Happy Christmas and a Bright New Year.”

Thomas Wood started in business in Bondgate in 1868 as a carver, gilder and framemaker. Three years later, he moved to Northgate where he began to sell the art that went in the middle as well as the wood that went around the edges.

He used the Christmas cards to entice people into his gallery. One card, published in 1880 showing Blackwell Bridge over a frozen Tees, informed customers: “T. Wood has the honor to invite your attention to his selection of Christmas and New Year’s Cards, 1880-1881, embracing the most charming and artistic novelties of the season, on view at his Fine Art Gallery.”

Most of the cards are drawn by “JB Gibbs” – John Binney Gibbs. He was born in Darlington in 1859 and died in the town in 1935, but between was an art master at Liverpool College, where he also had a studio, and, later, “director of technical classes” at Congleton College in Cheshire.

In 1887, Wood’s business moved to Blackwellgate.

Wood had such a good name that works by Rembrandt, Rubens and Gainsborough passed through his hands.

One of his sons, Sydney, became one of the district’s leading photographers and his portraits of famous faces filled a new-style gallery. He photographed three British kings – Edward VII and Georges V and VI – plus Alfonso of Spain, a cabinet’s worth of politicians and all the stars who appeared at the town’s theatres.

Sydney was not starstruck.

He had not heard of the top-of-the-bill who was starting a week-long run at the Theatre Royal in Northgate, but she agreed to come into his Blackwellgate studio to sit for a portrait, so he snapped away.

She was just halfway up the ladder of fame. When she reached the top, Sydney was inundated with hundreds of requests for his photographs to be sent to London, and he concluded that this Gracie Fields must be a very big name.

In 1911, Wood’s gallery became one of the most famous buildings in town when the family clagged on a mock Tudor facade, all leaded windows and aged beams, topped off by four dogs’ heads, carved in wood by Newcastle sculptor Ralph Hedley.

It is said that gullible Americans insisted on visiting the gallery just to see the genuine Elizabethan architecture.

The trouble with the gallery was that it jutted out into the street, and Blackwellgate was then part of the A1 – the Great North Road that linked London with Edinburgh.

In 1953, Darlington council bought the gallery for £16,000, and knocked it down to widen the road. The site was then re-sold to Binns and so, apparently without a protest, the place where Gracie Fields sat for her portrait was lost for ever.

Thomas Wood and Son moved a few doors west along Blackwellgate, but continued trading only for another decade. Then a third generation – Miss Monica Wood – called it a day.

But after 95 years in business, the Woods had left a large legacy. Hundreds of Sydney’s photographs remain, showing the townscape, the people and the stars of yesteryear.

Three of Hedley’s four dogs’ heads survive in the Head of Steam museum in Darlington’s North Road.

Plus, of course, we have these charming Victorian cards with which to wish our readers a happy Christmas and a bright New Year.

■ With thanks to the Darlington Centre for Local Studies in Darlington library.