The Postcard
A postcard bearing a glossy real photograph that was taken by W. D. Dobbs. The card was posted in Southend-on-Sea using two ½d. stamps on Saturday the 22nd. August 1931. It was sent to:
Mr. G. Bartlett,
11, Wincott Street,
Kennington Road,
London SE.
The pencilled message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"I wish you had sent the
C. as it will be no use as
I wanted them received
this morning.
Cheerio,
Love from all,
Mary."
The Pierrot
The Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell'arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne.
The name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot.
His character in contemporary popular culture—in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall - is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin.
Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim, more rarely with a conical shape like a dunce's cap.
However most frequently, since his reincarnation by Jean-Gaspard Deburau, he wears neither collar nor hat, only a black skullcap. The defining characteristic of Pierrot is his naïveté: he is seen as a fool, often the butt of pranks, yet nonetheless trusting.
It was a generally buffoonish Pierrot that held the European stage for the first two centuries of his history. And yet early signs of a respectful, even sympathetic attitude toward the character appeared in the plays of Jean-François Regnard and in the paintings of Antoine Watteau, an attitude that would deepen in the nineteenth century, after the Romantics claimed the figure as their own.
For Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, Pierrot was not a fool, but an avatar of the post-Revolutionary People, struggling, sometimes tragically, to secure a place in the bourgeois world.
Subsequent artistic/cultural movements found him equally amenable to their cause:
-- The Decadents turned him, like themselves,
into a disillusioned disciple of Schopenhauer,
a foe of Woman and of callow idealism.
-- The Symbolists saw him as a lonely fellow-
sufferer, crucified upon the rood of soulful
sensitivity, his only friend the distant moon.
-- The Modernists converted him into a
Whistlerian subject for canvases devoted
to form, colour and line.
In short, Pierrot became an alter-ego of the artist, specifically of the alienated artist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
His physical insularity; his poignant lapses into mutism, the legacy of the great mime Deburau; his white face and costume, suggesting not only innocence but the pallor of the dead; his often frustrated pursuit of Columbine, coupled with his never-to-be-vanquished unworldly naïveté—all conspired to lift him out of the circumscribed world of the commedia dell'arte and into the larger realm of myth.
Much of that mythic quality ("I'm Pierrot," said David Bowie: "I'm Everyman") still adheres to the "sad clown" of the postmodern era.
King George V
So what else happened on the day that Mary posted the card?
Well, on the 22nd. August 1931, King George V cut short his vacation at Balmoral Castle in order to head back to London.
The King returned because the resignation of the Ramsay MacDonald government appeared to be imminent due to the country's budget deficit crisis.
A Massacre in Western Australia
Also on the 22nd. August 1931, the front page of the West Australian gave details of a massacre under the headline:
'Family Wiped Out, Seven Persons
Dead, Father’s Dreadful Act.'
The massacre had taken place in a three-roomed weatherboard house in Carlisle, a suburb of Perth, the previous day.
Roderick A. Davies, a 38-year-old carpenter, murdered his wife Dorothy and their children, Dulcie Rita, Robert Beveridge, Dorothy Lorna, Roderick Henry and Alfred Norman, aged between five months and 12 years, at their Carlisle home, before turning the gun on himself.
Details soon emerged of an alleged “death pact” between the husband and his 32 year old wife.
The story revealed that a neighbour, Samuel Knifton, had made the horrific discovery. On calling at the house in the morning, Mr Knifton found a note from Davies which read:
“Mr Knifton, open the door.”
Thinking that the note preceded some practical joke which his friend had arranged, Mr Knifton opened the door and walked into the living room. A horrifying sight met his eyes.
The couple were dead in the living room and the children, all wearing pyjamas, were found in two bedrooms. All were lying as if asleep, and there was no sign that any of them had struggled.
An empty medicine bottle and six letters, addressed to the police and to relatives, were found at the home, including one in which Davies confessed to the killings.
In one letter, Mrs Davies told her mother not to grieve:
"We are going to a better place. I have
been writing under spiritual control for
months, and have known for a long time
that we would all be going on soon.
Do not grieve for me; I am so beautifully
happy.”
An inquest later found:
"Davies and his wife had embraced spiritualism
and, along with their eldest daughter, believed
that life was only a transient stage, and that death
held far more for them than life”.
Weeks before the shooting Davies had remarked to a friend:
“As life continues after death,
what is the use of struggling on.”
The inquest found:
"The dreadful tragedy was brought on by the
attempt of a man to study spiritualism when
he was not suited to study it.
He believed in a short road to an attractive
hereafter, and he had the mother, who aided
and abetted him, completely under his control”.
More than 1,000 people attended the family’s funeral in Subiaco, including 30 children from the Carlisle State School who acted as pallbearers.
Roderick Davies' sister Lorna later recalled that before the shooting, the eldest Davies’ son Robert, 12, told her:
“I’m not afraid to die.”
She dismissed the comment, and only after their deaths realised that the children were likely aware of what was going to happen.
