Issue Number 23: August 2011 £2.00 ; free to members FOMA Members Honoured! FOMA member Anne Wade was awarded the MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the community in Rochester. In June, Anne received a bouquet of congratulations from Sue Haydock, FOMA Vice President and Medway Council Representative. More inside... Ray Maisey, Clock Tower printer became Deputy Mayor of Medway in May. Ray is pictured here If undelivered, please return to: with his wife, Buffy, Deputy Mayoress and FOMA Medway Archives office, member. Civic Centre, More inside... Strood, Rochester, Kent, ME2 4AU. The FOMA AGM FOMA members await the start of the AGM on 3 May 2011 at Frindsbury. Betty Cole, FOMA Membership Secretary, signed members in at the AGM and took payment for the FOMA annual subscription. Pictured with Betty is Bob Ratcliffe FOMA Committee member and President of the City of Rochester Society. April Lambourne’s Retirement The Clock Tower is now fully indexed! There is now a pdf on the FOMA website (www.foma-lsc.org/newsletter.html) which lists the contents of all the issues since Number 1 in April 2006. In addition, each of the past issues now includes a list of contents; these are highlighted with an asterisk (*). If you have missed any of the previous issues and some of the articles published, they are all available to read on the website . Read them again - A Stroll through Strood by Barbara Marchant (issue 4); In Search of Thomas Fletcher Waghorn (1800- 1850) by Dr Andrew Ashbee (issue 6); The Other Rochester and the Other Pocahontas by Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck (issue 6); Jottings in the Churchyard of Celebrating April All Saints Frindsbury by Tessa Towner (issue 8), The Skills of the Historian by Dr Lambourne’s retirement from Kate Bradley (issue 9); The Rosher Family: From Gravesend to Hollywood by MALSC at the Malta Inn, Amanda Thomas (issue 9); George Bond, Architect and Surveyor, 1853 to 1914 by Allington. April is pictured Pat Salter and Bob Ratcliffe (issue 10) plus all the regular features on the Victoria top right. County History by Dr. Sandra Dunster and Dr. Andrew Hann, Edwin Harris by Janet Knight and Alison Thomas, not to mention regular contributors such as Betty Cole, Brian Joyce, JL Keys, Peter Burstow, Odette Buchanan and Catharina Clement. 2 47 Betty’s Postcards From the Chairman Betty Cole Tessa Towner, Chairman. FOMA Membership Secretary, Betty Cole, has collected postcards for about 25 years, and to date she has hundreds in her collection, including at least 50 on a Dickens theme. It was with great pleasure that the news broke on 11 June that one of our FOMA members, The comic postcard was popular from the 1900s right through to the 1950s when they were part and parcel Anne Wade, had been awarded the MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the of a day out at the seaside. Groups of people, women in their Kiss Me Quick bonnets, men in their community in Rochester. Anne was born and brought up in Frindsbury and has a long everyday jackets (no casual clothes for men then), crowded around the racks outside bucket and spade and association with the area, but she won’t forgive me if I say how long! Anne has spent a lifetime gift shops at Margate and other coastal towns to have a laugh at these brightly coloured cards with their of service to the community in many ways. She was my Guide Captain in the 1950s at 3 rd saucy captions. It seems strange to us now that people on a daytrip found it necessary to send their friends Strood (All Saints Frindsbury) Guides, she was Churchwarden at All Saints with my father on or neighbours a postcard: “Wish you were here!” more than one occasion, and a parish councillor for Frindsbury Extra Parish Council for many years. Anne was also a founding member of the Frindsbury and Wainscott Community Because of the long period of their popularity there are a huge number and variety of these postcards still Association which has campaigned tirelessly to preserve and conserve our local area from around and for this reason collectors restrict themselves to a particular theme. My cards all feature th policemen. So, like the card illustrated here, they are often to do with drunks coming into contact with The unsightly and unnecessary development. At our meeting on the 14 June FOMA Vice Law! Mostly bought from an internet auction site, I usually have to pay around £5 for each card, although President Sue Haydock presented a bouquet of flowers to Anne to celebrate her award. some go for much more. A card I have tried to buy on two occasions has gradually risen to £10 before I have had to give up. In July April Lambourne retired from MALSC, and I was invited along with staff old and new to an informal get together at the Malta Inn in Allington to celebrate the occasion. Although the Not all postcards under the heading Comic were of the saucy seaside variety. There were political sketches, weather wasn’t warm enough for us to sit out by the river, we all had a good time, as you can some from Punch , for the more sophisticated customers. During the First World War there were the comic see in the photographs opposite. On behalf of FOMA a gift of garden vouchers was presented sketches of Bruce Bairnsfather which were published on postcards and are much sought after. However it is the earlier category that I am illustrating in this issue. Crudely drawn, they were the postcard version of to her and April and husband Mike are now taking a long summer break touring France. We a Carry On film, full of double entendres and farcical situations. Large ladies with small henpecked wish her well in her retirement, but April will be back at MALSC as a casual employee in the husbands, honeymooners, drunks, miserly landladies and well endowed young women abounded. Some of future. the artists, such as Donald McGill, who is said to have designed more than three thousand cards, made a lot of money. Among other well known postcard artists were Phil May, Tom Browne and Dudley Hardy. On 3 May 2011 we held our fifth AGM at Frindsbury. We could hardly believe it was five years ago that we held the inaugural FOMA meeting on 6 April 2006. Since then FOMA has In a recent edition of I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue on Radio 4, the comedian Jack Dee spoke about a museum gone from strength to strength with highlights such as the grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund of seaside postcards and remarked that he didn’t know why anyone would want to waste an hour looking at and MALSC being voted Archive of the Year this February by readers of Your Family History a collection of, “unamusing relics from the 1950s.” I do find them amusing, in fact, that’s my rule: if they don’t make me smile, at least, I don’t buy them. Our taste in humour in the ’40s and ’50s was not as magazine. The AGM was well attended and concluded with Odette Buchanan’s amusing talk on sophisticated as it is now. Remember programmes such as The Clitheroe Kid and Educating Archie which how life Used-to-Be in Strood: Strood – The Land of Used-to-Be . Odette’s talk will be were regular Sunday afternoon listening. I don’t think they would entertain many people today. published in the next issue of The Clock Tower . There is a family anecdote concerning seaside postcards. My father and his brother were great jokers and FOMA members are a busy lot and this issue of The Clock Tower is full of news of what we some time in the 1940s my family was visiting Margate and was walking past the shops along the front have all been doing. However, last but not least, you will have seen that our Clock Tower where they came upon a crowd of people having a great time laughing at the saucy postcards on display. printer and FOMA member, Ray Maisey, has been made Deputy Mayor of Medway. The You may remember that in those days men often wore detached collars and my uncle, standing behind this residents of Cuxton and Halling gave Ray an increased majority in the local elections in May. group of people, turned his collar round showing only a white band above his shirt. He then made a few little coughs and as the people in front turned round, thinking they had been caught out in some indecent When he is not printing The Clock Tower for FOMA, Ray sits on Medway Council’s Health activity by a man of the cloth, hastily moved off. My cousin tells me he has never seen a crowd disperse so and Adult Social Care Overview and Scrutiny Committee, and the Regeneration, Community quickly! and Culture Overview and Scrutiny Committee. More information is available on the council’s website at www.medway.gov.uk. 46 3 The FOMA Collection The Committee FOMA Committee member, Bob Ratcliffe, was Patron contacted in May by Fieldstaff’s antique shop Position vacant in Rochester High Street about a document they had recently acquired and was for sale. President FOMA has now purchased this document, the Russell John Race, JP, DL sales particulars for a house and shop at 1 King St and corner of Union Street, Troytown, Rochester, dated 1893.