The Postcard
A postcard bearing no publisher's name. The image is a glossy real photograph.
The card was posted in Eastbourne using a half-penny stamp on Wednesday the 1st. March 1905. It was sent to:
Mrs. A, Morton,
Sunnyfield,
Hurst Road.
Local.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"Dear Mother,
Is Goodman coming on
Saturday or not. His cold
is better.
Write in a letter and tell
me.
Please will you send me
some biscuits.
With love,
C. E. Morton."
Wentworth Woodhouse
Wentworth Woodhouse is a Grade 1 listed country house near the village of Wentworth, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
It's big! - Its east front (shown in the photograph) is 606 feet (185m) long, making it the longest country house façade in Europe.
It is also the largest private house in the United Kingdom, with over 200 rooms and 250,000 square feet of floor space.
250,000 square feet is over 5.7 acres! Carpeting such an area at a cost of, say, £36 per square yard would cost a million pounds.
Coal Mining on the Estate
In 1946, on the orders of the Labour Government, a large part of the estate close to the house was mined for coal which was near the surface.
Wentworth Woodhouse became the largest open cast mining site in Great Britain at the time. 132,000 tons of coal were removed solely from the gardens.
Ostensibly the coal was needed in Britain's austere post-war economy in order to fuel the railways, but the decision was widely seen as an act of class-war spite against the coal-owning aristocracy.
Manny Shinwell, Labour's Minister of Fuel and Power, decreed that the mining would continue right up to the door of the house.
What followed saw the mining of 99 acres of lawns and woods, with the destruction of the renowned formal gardens and the showpiece pink shale driveway. Ancient trees were uprooted, and the debris of earth and rubble was piled 50 feet high in front of the family's living quarters
The opencast mining moved into the fields to the west of the house and continued into the early 1950's. The mined areas took many years to return to a natural state, with much of the woodland and the formal gardens never being replaced.
The current owners of the property allege that mining near the house caused substantial structural damage, and lodged a claim in 2012 against the Coal Authority of £100m for remedial work.
Dispersal of the House's Contents
Two sets of death duties in the 1940's and the nationalisation of their coal mines greatly reduced the wealth of the house's owners (the Fitzwilliams).
Accordingly most of the contents of the house were dispersed in auction sales in 1948, 1986 and 1998.
The Dominican Republic
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 1st. March 1905, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay gave assurances to the Ambassador from Haiti that the U.S. had no intention of annexing the Dominican Republic.
Lord Selborne
Also on that day, Lord Selborne (William Palmer), the British First Lord of the Admiralty, resigned in order to accept the position of High Commissioner for Southern Africa, to succeed Lord Milner.
Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume
The day also marked the death at the age of the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume.
Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume (4 July 1822, Montbard – 1 March 1905, Rome) was a French sculptor.
Biography of Jean-Baptiste Guillaume
Jean-Baptiste was born at Montbard on the Côte-d'Or. He studied under Cavelier, Millet, and Barrias at the École des Beaux-Arts, which he entered in 1841, and where he gained the prix de Rome in 1845 with Theseus finding on a rock his father's sword.
He became director of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1864, and director-general of Fine Arts from 1878–79, when the office was suppressed.
Guillaume was a prolific writer, principally on sculpture and architecture of the Classic period and of the Italian Renaissance.
He was elected member of the Académie Française in 1898, and he was also elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy, London, in 1869.
The Works of Jean-Baptiste Guillaume
Many of Jran-Baptiste's works have been bought for public galleries, and his monuments are to be found in the public squares of the chief cities of France.
At Reims there is his bronze statue of Colbert, and at Dijon his Rameau monument. The Musée du Luxembourg has his Anacreon (1852), Faucheur (1855), and the marble bust of Mgr Darboy.
The Versailles Museum has his portrait of Thiers; the Sorbonne Library the marble bust of Victor le Clerc, doyen de la faculté des lettres.
Other works of his are at Trinity Church, Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, and the church of St. Clotilde, Paris. The Musée d'Orsay in Paris hosts Les Gracques (1853).
