The Postcard
A postcard that was published by the Cynicus Publishing Co. Ltd. of Tayport, Fife and distributed by E. Beale, Stationer, Bournemouth.
The card was posted in Worcester using a ½d. stamp on Saturday the 24th. December 1910. It was sent to:
F. Pudham Esq.,
Sturt House,
Bournemouth.
The brief message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"To Fortis from
Gordon."
Cynicus
Martin Anderson, better known by his pseudonym Cynicus, was a Scottish artist, political cartoonist, postcard illustrator, and publisher.
Martin Anderson - The Early Years
Martin Anderson was born in Leuchars, Fife, in 1854. After his mother, Margaret Martin, separated from his father, she moved with her children to Cambuslang, Glasgow.
Anderson studied at Glasgow School of Art under Robert Greenlees, in Ingram Street Glasgow. On leaving he worked as a designer at a calico printer.
Martin Anderson's Career
When he was 19, Martin founded The St. Mungo Art Club in Glasgow, intending it to be an alternative to the grander Glasgow Art Club.
In 1877 he began to provide small illustrations for serial stories in the short-running "News of the Week". In 1878 his painting "The Music Lesson" was accepted for the Royal Scottish Academy's annual exhibition.
In 1879, at the age of 24, he decided to move to London, ("To study art proper" he explained in an 1894 interview in The Sketch).
In 1880 he was invited to join John Leng and Co., (the publisher of titles such as the Dundee Advertiser, the Evening Telegraph, Peoples Journal, and Peoples Friend), as its staff artist. Accepting the position, Andersen became the first such artist to be employed by any daily newspaper in Britain (until then daily newspapers were not illustrated). He moved to Broughty Ferry near Dundee.
In 1881, as a freelance artist, he began contributing cartoons and illustrations to the comic weekly "The Quiz", an imitation of the magazine "Punch". For his illustrations in The Quiz he used the pseudonym "Bob", but in November 1887 he adopted a second pseudonym, that of "Cynicus", and began to move away "from the safe and trivial to the dangerous and powerful realm of politics".
A series of cartoons entitled The Satires of Cynicus appeared in The Quiz in 1888. In 1890 he decided to publish a collected edition of his more controversial subjects. The Quiz cartoons were redrawn in a larger size and hand coloured. They were published in six monthly parts, each part containing two full-page cartoons. However, they did not sell well.
In 1891 he moved back to London in an attempt to get his work noticed, taking a shop in Drury Lane, with the sign "Cynicus Publishing Company" over its door and with prints of his cartoons displayed in its windows. The Satires of Cynicus began to attract public attention and increasing sales. The edition was limited to 1000 copies, and by the end of 1891 it was almost out of print.
In 1891 he began contributing work to the "Pall Mall Budget", as well as to "The Idler" and "Ariel or the London Puck", yet another rival to Punch.
A second book, entitled "The Humours of Cynicus", again containing many reworked The Quiz cartoons, was part-work published starting in September 1891.
The complete 1000-copy edition of the complete volume sold for 25 shillings, with a 100-edition deluxe version priced at 2 guineas. In 1892 he began work on another collection, "Symbols and Metaphors". It was also issued in parts, like its predecessors. A cheaper edition of The Satires of Cynicus was published in June 1892, and there were also later reprints of it.
Postcards
In the late 1890's a new market for Martin's products was quickly emerging - that of picture postcards. In 1898 Anderson began working for Blum & Degan where he designed court-sized postcards. In 1902, after the Post Office allowed divided back postcards, picture postcards became very popular and also began to be widely collected.
In 1902 Anderson decided to form his own company. The "Cynicus Publishing Company" was incorporated and began publishing colour postcards by the second half of 1902. Initially, the company did exceedingly well. However, by 1908 the mass-market popularity of postcards began to decline and the company suffered from dwindling profitability.
In 1911 the North of Scotland Bank forced the company to liquidate its assets. Its stocks of prints and original artwork were sold by the bank for a fraction of their true value and without any thought for their proper market: they were sold in a second-hand furniture saleroom rather than to art dealers in Edinburgh and London.
In 1912, after the collapse of the Cynicus Publishing Company, Anderson set up the "Cynicus Art Publishing Company" based in Leeds (the home of several postcard publishers), and began reissuing his old postcards and designing new ones. About 100 different postcards are known to have been printed by the Leeds company until 1914.
Cynicus and the Great War
The outbreak of war put an end to the seaside postcard market in Britain, and Cynicus Art Publishing Company was forced to close. In 1915 Anderson moved to Edinburgh, leasing a basement shop in York Place.
The printing plates for his postcards were sent from Leeds – but for uncertain reasons, and without the knowledge of Andersen, they were sold for scrap.
In 1915 he created an allegorical anti-war poster entitled "War!" In a pyramidal composition, a crowned Mammon sits on a throne, tossing away the Nation's wealth to an ecstatic crowd clutching sacks marked "War Profits"; a semi-naked Lust caresses him, famine and disease sit at her feet; Justice and Parliament stand bound and gagged; the Lamp of Truth is extinguished by censorship; the Church encourages the slaughter. In the foreground, a bloody river carries away the bodies of the dead while bankers grab the bank deposits of the dead.
This poster was displayed in his shop window until he was warned that he could be interned without trial under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). The poster was removed from view, but was made into a postcard which sold well.
In another allegorical poster titled "The Dictator", produced after the end of the war, soldiers returning home are greeted by a fat figure representing Capitalism, seated on a huge sack full of the earnings of others, using a megaphone entitled "The Press" to blast out "Propaganda and Misrepresentation" and setting his "Black and Tan" dog onto Ireland; the grave of Liberty and Freedom is trampled over by a truncheon-wielding policeman called DORA; two more fat figures, representing Lloyd George (standing on broken pledges) and the Church, carry a banner entitled "Britain's Welcome to the Troops" that frames the entrance to a poorhouse.
Martin Anderson's Retirement and death
In 1924 Martin's Edinburgh shop was destroyed by fire. Everything inside it was lost, and he did not have the funds to repair and restock it. He retired to his castle-like mansion in Balmullo to live in increasing poverty. A final edition of The Satires of Cynicus was published in 1926.
In 1930 he wrote "Memoirs of Cynicus", published in 12 instalments in the Glasgow Evening News.
Martin died suddenly on the 14th. April 1932, and was buried in the Martin family grave in Tayport Old Churchyard. The funeral was never paid for, and his grave is unmarked.
His mansion in Balmullo was extensively vandalised after his death.
A Reconsideration in China
So what else happened on the day that Gordon posted the card?
Well, on the 24th.December 1910, China's National Assembly adopted a resolution denying the right of the Emperor to reject their demands for a democratic constitution.
Two days later however, the Assembly reconsidered after an edict was issued suggesting that its demands would eventually be granted.
A Fiery Train Crash
Also on the 24th. December 1910, a fiery train crash at Hawes Junction in northern England killed 12 people.
The "Scotch Express" was carrying 500 passengers home from England to Scotland when it derailed.
The Hawes Junction rail crash occurred at 5.49 am, just north of the Lunds viaduct between Hawes Junction (now known as Garsdale station) and Aisgill on the Midland Railway's Settle and Carlisle main line in North Yorkshire.
It was caused when a busy signalman, Alfred Sutton, forgot about a pair of light engines waiting at his down (northbound) starting signal to return to their shed at Carlisle. They were still waiting there when the signalman set the road for the down Scotch express.
When the signal cleared, the light engines set off in front of the express into the same block section. Since the light engines were travelling at low speed from a stand at Hawes Junction, and the following express was travelling at high speed, a collision was inevitable.
The express caught the light engines just after Moorcock Tunnel near Aisgill summit in Mallerstang, and was almost wholly derailed.
Casualties were made worse by the telescoping of the timber-bodied coaches, and by fire which broke out in the coaches, fed by the gas for the coaches' lights leaking from ruptured pipes.
Twelve people lost their lives as a result of this accident, some of whom were trapped in the wreckage and were burned to death.
The Accident
In the hour preceding the accident, signalman Sutton at Hawes Junction had to deal with nine light engines and a heavy load of scheduled traffic as well as some unscheduled special trains as part of the holiday traffic.
The express train consisted of four timber-bodied coaches, two sleeping cars and two brake vans. It was running sixteen minutes late due to signal and other delays at Leeds and Skipton, but was running at 60 miles per hour.
The two light engines were running at only 25 miles per hour. They had cleared Moorcock tunnel just over a mile north of Hawes Junction and were running across the Lunds viaduct 500 yards (460 m) north of the tunnel when driver Bath glanced back and saw the express as it emerged from the tunnel. He opened his regulator and whistle.
At the same time, driver Oldcorn on the express saw the red tail light on Bath's tender and applied the express's continuous brake. Driver Oldcorn estimated that the distance between the speeding express and the light engine was only 6 yards (5.5 m), so neither measure had time to take effect, and the express struck the light engines from behind.
Bath's locomotive was derailed and lost its front bogie, but his locomotive carried on for over 200 yards (180 m) before coming to rest against the side of a cutting. The two locomotives of the express were also derailed, and the coaches piled up behind them. The first two coaches were badly telescoped, and the twelve passengers who died were in these two coaches.
Except for two electrically lit sleeping cars, the coaches were lit by the Pintsch oil gas system. The main gas pipe on the leading coach was broken off in the impact, and the entire contents of the pressurised gas cylinders escaped in under two minutes. The gas then ignited in a single flash.
Driver Bath had been injured in the leg but made his way on foot to the Ais Gill signal box a mile and a half north to summon help. The signalman there, Benjamin Bellas, sent another light engine under driver Judd, with Bath, along the up line. Judd attempted to put out the fire by bucketing water from his tender.
Another light engine had been sent from Hawes Junction and its crew tried to drag the rear coaches away from the fire but could move only the brake vans at the rear of the train. The six leading coaches were immovable.
The engine crews and the express train's guards, the sleeping car attendants, some platelayers from a hut a short distance up the line and a shepherd whose home was nearby tried desperately to rescue the trapped passengers but were eventually driven back by thick smoke. Because a strong wind was fanning the flames, the fire could not be extinguished and all six coaches were burned out.
The bodies of the dead were taken to the nearby Moorcock Inn. The Board of Trade Inquiry into the crash commenced on the 27th. December 1910 in the same inn.
Causes
The immediate cause of the accident was that signalman Sutton forgot that he had moved the two light engines to the down line, waiting there to proceed to Carlisle. He later improperly cleared the down line signals without ascertaining that the line was clear.
George Tempest, the driver of another light engine waiting at Hawes Junction to return south to Leeds, witnessed Scott's and Bath's engines depart followed closely by the express. After he and his fireman heard the whistle of Bath's locomotive, he went to the signal box and related what he had seen.
Sutton refused to believe him until he had checked his train register, and then telephoned signalman Bellas at Aisgill to ask whether the two light engines had gone through. Bellas replied that none had been offered to him; nor had the express passed.
Sutton had apparently been under the mistaken impression that he had despatched the two light engines to Carlisle some time earlier. By this time, the glare of the fire to the north was visible. Simpson, the signalman sent to relieve Sutton, then arrived for his shift, whereupon Sutton asked him:
"Go to Bunce [the stationmaster] and
tell him I am afraid I have wrecked the
Scotch Express".
