The Postcard
A Collo Colour Series postcard that was published by Valentine & Sons Ltd. of Dundee and London.
The card was posted in Ipswich, Suffolk on Sunday the 11th. August 1963 to:
Mrs. Newman,
14, Boston Vale,
Boston Manor,
Hanwell,
London.
There was also an encrypted message on the divided back which used a straight substitution code where A becomes Z, B becomes Y etc. The first word of most postcard messages is 'Dear', so the message's first word 'Wvzi' immediately gives the game away.
Valentine’s Co. Ltd. (Valentine & Sons)
Valentine & Sons were a major postcard publisher of Dundee and London. The Valentine Company, a lithographic printing firm, was founded in 1825 in Dundee, Scotland by John Valentine.
His son James became an early pioneer of photography, and by the 1860’s his work was being reproduced by the Valentine Company as prints and stereo-views.
After James’ death in 1879, his two sons, George Dobson and William Dobson took over the Company, but in 1884 George moved to New Zealand where he became a landscape photographer.
In 1880 Valentine began producing Christmas cards, and by 1896 they began printing postcards. Up until 1882 they had only published views of Scotland, but they began expanding into other tourist markets.
Other offices opened in Jamaica, Madeira, Norway, Tangier, Canada, and New York. They produced a great range of view-cards that were mostly printed in Scotland in tinted halftone lithography or issued as real photo cards.
Valentine produced hand-coloured collotypes as Collo Colour.
In addition they produced a vast array of other products that held photographic images. All interests outside of Great Britain were sold in 1923. By 1929 they had given up their photo portraiture work to concentrate solely on postcard production.
However they did not anticipate the public’s growing demand for colour cards, and by the 1950’s their business was suffering. In response they put most of their efforts into greetings cards.
They were purchased by John Waddington & Co. in 1963, which passed on to Hallmark Cards in 1980. Dundee operations closed in 1994.
Kessingland
Kessingland is a village in Suffolk. It is located around 4 miles (6 km) south of Lowestoft on the east coast of the United Kingdom. It is of interest to archaeologists, as Palaeolithic and Neolithic implements have been found here. The remains of an ancient forest lie buried on the seabed.
The parish extends from the edge of the Pontins holiday park south of Pakefield in the north to the Hundred River which marks the southern border of the parish.
History of Kessingland
There has been a settlement here since Palaeolithic times. Between the Hundred River and Latmer Dam was once a large estuary which was used by the Vikings and Romans.
The sea provided the village with its main livelihood, and at one time the village paid a rent of 22,000 herrings to their Lords, which then made it more important than nearby Lowestoft.
During the early part of World War II, anti-tank defences and gun batteries were installed at Kessingland to help protect the adjacent stretch of vulnerable coastline and the south of Lowestoft itself. As the threat of invasion receded from 1942 onwards, defence levels were reduced, although the advent of V1s prompted a shift of focus to anti-aircraft defences.
The village comprised two separate communities: the "beach" and the "street" and it was not until the 1960's that more housing united the village into a single community. The population is a little over 4,000 — though this can double due to the holiday-makers in the many chalets and holiday villages in the area.
The Church of St. Edmund
St. Edmund's Church is one of the finest in the region. With an imposing 98-foot (30 m) tower it was built in around 1436 for the Franciscans of London. The tower, built like many coastal Churches to act as a beacon by ships out at sea, constitutes the majority of the medieval structure, the rest having been rebuilt in the ensuing centuries.
Features of the Village
Kessingland is home to a Parkdean Resorts holiday park with caravans, chalets and various leisure facilities which are open to the general public, along with other independent parks.
There is also a small tearooms housed in a repurposed and refurbished beach hut, which is next to a children's playground and a fish and chip shop. Kessingland is also home to Africa Alive, an African-themed zoo.
Sir H. Rider Haggard
Sir H. Rider Haggard, novelist, was born in Bradenham, but later in his life spent his summers at Kessingland in a cliff-top house called The Grange (now demolished, however a local road, Rider Haggard Lane, is named after Haggard).
He was visited here by his friend Rudyard Kipling. In a letter to Haggard dated 20th. July 1912, his daughter Lillias documented a sighting of a sea serpent off the coast of Kessingland:
"We are convinced we saw a sea serpent!
I happened to look up when I was sitting
on the lawn, and saw what looked like a
thin, dark line with a blob at one end,
shooting through the water at such a terrific
speed it hardly seemed likely that anything
alive could go at such a pace ... I suppose it
was about 60 feet long."
The letter was printed in the Eastern Daily Press shortly after.
To counter the force of the North Sea and the winds off it, H. Rider Haggard sloped the cliff on the edge of his property and experimented with growing marram grass upon it. The experiment proved a success, and the slope increased in height rather than decreased.
He spent the rest of the year at Ditchingham some 16 miles (26 km) to the west. In 1928 Kessingland Grange was sold to a Mr Catchpole who established a holiday camp in the grounds, and subsequently demolished the Grange. The current Kessingland Cottages development was begun in 1979.
Further Connections to the Arts
Acclaimed social history photographer Hardwicke Knight visited Kessingland in the 1950's and documented aspects of the village in a series of vivid 35 mm Kodachrome slide images.
German writer (and sometime lecturer at the University of East Anglia) W. G. Sebald in his second book 'The Rings of Saturn' details a coastal walk along the Suffolk coast. In his book he describes Kessingland beach fishermen with their oilskins and thermoses as resembling:
"The last stragglers of some nomadic people ...
at the outermost limit of the earth, in expectation
of the miracle longed for since time immemorial,
the miracle which would justify all their erstwhile
privations and wanderings."
The horror writer Joseph Freeman was a resident between 2000 and 2009, and has set some of his work here. Most notably the village appeared (as Freshfield, but featuring many familiar landmarks) as the setting for his novel Vermilion Dawn.
BBC Radio 4's Jan Zalasiewicz recorded a programme about geology on Kessingland's stony beach.
Fashion historian and television presenter Amber Butchart is from Kessingland.
David Robertson
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, the 11th. August 1963 was not a good day for David Robertson, because he died in Norwich at the age of 80 on that day.
David, who was born in 1883 in Sheffield, England, was a British cyclist. He competed in two events at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London.
'Sweets For my Sweet'
Also on that day, the Number One chart record in the UK was 'Sweets for my Sweet' by The Searchers.
