Collectables 3: Blanchet's Hair Saloon Advertisement

I love ephemera. I love the very word - ephemera. It's so beautiful.

Ephemera.

Fragile pieces of paper that survive the vicissitudes of time to remind us of days gone past.

Postcards, tickets, greeting cards, trade cards, advertisements, letters, invoices...treasures all.

This advertisement for Blanchet's - a hair saloon in Fenchurch Street in London - is printed on very thin (presumably cheap) yellow paper. I bought it many years ago from my favourite dealer in ephemera - Bella. Bella has a stall at Covent Garden market on Mondays and Spitafields Market on Thursdays and is hugely appreciated by a seemingly vast number of customers (mostly men) who throng around her stall, practically pushing other people out of their way in their eagerness to find that elusive special something.

This elusive special something is so charming I framed it.

Blanchet's was run by one Etienne Celestin Blanchet, a Frenchman. It seems that he was quite successful because he has three branches of his business on Fenchurch St, sharing one of them with a hosier, Mr T L Blackmore, next door to the fibre merchants Taye and Bromely.  Just up the road are a clutch of wine merchants including Veuve Cliquot-Ponsardin and Haig - purveyors of champagne and whiskey, respectively; surely the area must have been quite upmarket. An inexhaustible compendium of  Old and New London, published by Cassell's in 1878, begs to differ, damningly describing Fenchurch Street as being 'another thoroughfare scanty in memories, and therefore still open for future fame'.

As early as 1866 Blanchet was cutting hair in Fenchurch Street because I discover him publicly dissolving a partnership with another hairdresser, Henry Mazet. In October that same year, Blanchet takes out an advertisement in the London City Press for his, presumably newly started, Parisian Hair-cutting Saloon, open from nine until seven in the evening at 134 Fenchurch Street. The advert modestly declares that Blanchet's 'celebrated Brilliantine à la Violette may be had in the smallest size bottles.' This is the first of many advertisements for his shop - the same advert runs and runs in the London City Press through till the end of 1867 with the exact same wording throughout the year.

Fast forward to 1870 and Blanchet is advertising in the Clerkenwell Times for a 'boy (respectable) of 18, with good reference' to work at his saloon. Six years later, in July 1876, he is after an extra barber or, as he describes it, 'a good gentleman's hand', putting an advert in the rather more upmarket London Daily News.

By 1886, a decade on, Blanchet's are still in business and Etienne and his hosier mate Blackmore are both paying land tax to the Cooper's Company for their Fenchurch Street premises.

Two years later and everything comes to an end...

Born in Tours in France in 1828, Blanchet and his English wife Marianne can be found living with a twenty-four year old niece and a twenty-four year old boarder (possibly their servant), at 50, Herne Hill Road, Camberwell in the census of 1881. Etienne, now 53, is easily identifiable - he lists his occupation as a hairdresser. There is no evidence of any children. Ten years earlier, in the 1871 census, the couple's names are both spelt differently - Ellien for Ettienne and Mary Anne for Marianne - and they are living in St Mary Newington with an 18 year old general servant. Again Etienne lists his occupation as hairdresser. No children once more so rather than them having left home by 1881 it appears that they didn't ever have any.

Etienne dies on the 22nd July 1888, aged only sixty. Recently, he had been living at 110, Lavender Hill where there is no mention of wife Marianne. Instead, the sole executrix of his will is named as a spinster, Mary Ann Watson...

Etienne leaves her £426 10s. The next person on the alphabetical list of wills of this period, a Norfolk farmer, leaves £37,673 1s and 3d - Blanchet's life savings pall into insignificance in comparison. But then again, after Farmer Blanchflower, poor Margaret Blanchflower from Chester is listed as having only the paltry sum of £30 to leave her husband...

And there you go. But for this framed piece of yellow paper (most probably dating from the late 1860s after Etienne had freed himself from Henry Mazet) there would be no physical evidence of the childless Etienne Celestin Blanchet. That is the magic of ephemera. With it, we can revive him, this thriving barber, who could give you 'proper attention' and turn your scarecrow hair-do into a coiffure worthy of a careful dab of violet-scented brilliantine. We can re-imagine him beavering away with his scissors in Fenchurch Street over a period of twenty long years, snipping, snipping, snipping, enticing people into his Parisian Hair Saloon with each click of his scissors.

Today, in 2017, ten doors down from Blanchet's nineteenth century premises, at 141, Fenchurch St, there is a barber's called Bolatti - 'a fine gentleman's barbers in the heart of the City'. So it goes on, now as before, immigrant hairdressers plying their trade, grooming the fat cats and champagne guzzlers of the City of London. Long may it stay thus, say I.

Collectables 2: Carr's Ink Stoneware bottles

Daniel and I bought these two stoneware ink bottles in Risby at one of the monthly fairs held in the Village Hall. It is rare to find ink bottles like this with their labels intact, and even rarer to find two the same.

As the label proclaims, Carr's were based in New Southgate in London. So I thought I would do some digging and see if I could find anything out about them - and, sure enough, there they are, listed in the Post Office London Directory of 1914 as a blacking and leather polish manufacturer, still in business thirty years after they began production of our ink bottles.

Blacking was essentially shoe polish which came in either liquid or paste form and was first manufactured for exclusive use by the British army. It soon caught on amongst the general populace and blacking manufacturers proliferated, making products for use on saddles as well as shoes.

Charles Dickens, at the age of 12, worked in a blacking factory owned by two brothers, Thomas and Jonathan Warren, which they'd founded at the end of the eighteenth century. The factory was based in "a crazy, tumbledown house with rotten floors and a staircase” near Hungerford Stairs, close by the stinking Thames. For ten hours a day, six days a week, Dickens pasted labels onto the individual pots of blacking. In return for his efforts he received six shillings per week, about £12.50 in modern currency. This is how miserable he was:

“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into the companionship of common men and boys..The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in…was passing away from me, never to be brought back, cannot be written.”

The Warren company's biggest competitor was Day and Martin of High Holborn and sometime in the 1830s they were taken over by them. (Dickens had left by now, escaping his drudgery soon after it began in 1824). Day and Martin was in turn bought out by Carr's, the makers of our bottles, in 1923.

So, in effect, Charles Dickens worked for the company that made our ink bottles! If only he'd continued hanging out with those 'common men and boys' instead of becoming a celebrated novelist it could have been him slapping on our labels...

It turns out that Carr Day and Martin are still active - as manufacturers of leather care products including saddle soap, polishes and oils. Or, more poetically, Canter Mane & Tail Conditioner, Gallop Shampoo and Vanner & Prest Hoof Oil. Here is their website:

http://www.carrdaymartin.co.uk/

It seems they no longer make ink now that they are catering to an important and, no doubt, lucrative equestrian niche - considering the downturn they must have experienced with the advent of the motor car in the early twentieth century it is rather encouraging that they have re-invented themselves in this way.

In the twenty-first century it is ink that has become redundant, along with the cart horse. Here am I, tapping away at my keyboard as opposed to scratching away with my quill or my Parker pen...

Carr's have another interesting link to Dickens. The protracted law case at the heart of Dickens's Bleak House was directly inspired by the blacking company he used to work for. Charles Day (of Day and Martin, now Carr Day and Martin) died in 1836 and the court examination of his will went on until 1854 - for nearly TWENTY years. Dickens refers to the case directly in his preface to the novel:

At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. 

There must have been some money in that blacking business...

The labels on Carr's ink bottles tell us that the ink initially appears bright blue but quickly darkens to a deep and permanent black. This seems quaintly exciting but also rather pointless.

As there are entire books written solely about Ink Bottles - which were often made of glass rather than stoneware - I won''t pretend to any great knowledge here except to say that these, I have learnt, are called master bottles. In other words, they are large rather than small. They date from around 1885.

Collectables 1: Black Forest Clothes Brush Holders (in the form of an owl).

In every room of The Pink Pig Farm, including the larder but excepting the understairs log cupboard, there is a brush holder in the form of an owl. Daniel began this 'project' shortly after we moved in and, within six months or so, owls were everywhere. Now, guests can play 'find the owl', downstairs and up.

Each owl is almost identical except for its colouring so they were obviously mass produced, probably in the 1930s. Daniel has always had a penchant for Black Forest carving and these have to be the most basic example of that art there is. Unfortunately,  good Black Forest objects from the nineteenth century and early twentieth - bear chairs and coat stands, stag heads, clocks - are now extremely sought after and vastly expensive. We did contemplate a bear bench once, a snip at £8,000. An owl clothes brush holder on the other hand ranges between four and ten pounds on ebay...
 

 Some of the owls no longer have their clothes brush tucked inside so I have stuffed them with feathers: pheasant feathers from our garden, barn owl feathers from a corpse I found balanced on a fence near the graveyard in Freckenham, and tawny frogmouth feathers I picked up on a walk in Sydney six years or so ago, again plucked from a rather fresh-looking corpse. I also used to collect feathers as a child and I still have a box of everything my family and I found on our walks so have brought some out from their thirty-five year reign of obscurity. I remember imploring zoo keepers to go into cages at Whipsnade and London Zoo to pick up feathers that lay on enclosure floors and have parrot, flamingo and stork feathers as a result of their efforts.

Others are serving as candle holders...

The odd thing about Black Forest carvings is that they have nothing to do with the Black Forest of Germany. Rather they are made in Switzerland where the tradition began in the town of Brienz, situated slap bang in the middle of the country. Perched by a lake at the foot of a mountain, Brienz is beyond picturesque - archetypally Swiss. As a tourist hotspot in the early nineteenth century it began to cater to visitors' insatiable demand for souvenirs and thus, the Black Forest carving industry was born.  By 1910 there were 1,300 carvers beavering away at their craft - and presumably one or two of them, no doubt apprentices, specialised in owl clothes brush holders...

 Even within the limits of the very basic carving of the owls, some are decidedly better than others. Their individual characterisation relies on the shading of colour and when this is done badly they fail to come alive at all. But as I lie in bed of a night listening to the shrieks of barn owls and the twit twoos of tawny owls (actually only the males twit twoo) I can see the outline of an owl on the top of our bookcase and sometimes, just sometimes, I'm almost convinced its real...