In this guest post, Roger Penny looks back at his work in The Postcard Museum, Holmfirth, West Yorkshire.
After seven years as a Librarian with the County of Avon, I joined Kirklees Cultural Services in November 1988 in the new post of Community Officer. This post had responsibility for managing the Library, Postcard Museum and Civic Hall in the Pennine town of Holmfirth, home of the popular TV Series Last of the Summer Wine and of Bamforth & Co. Founded in 1870, Bamforth & Co became best known for their ‘saucy’ seaside postcards through to the 1980s. They were also one of the first companies to make silent films as well as magic lantern slides and sentimental postcards. The Postcard Museum had opened several years earlier after being planned and displayed by the Museum Service working closely with Jane Helliwell, Kirklees Local Studies Librarian. With a museum shop on the ground floor, the first floor gallery featured displays of magic lantern slides and a selection of sentimental and comic postcards by Bamforth & Co. On the second floor there was a seated area where visitors could watch early silent films by Bamforth & Co.
Visitors to The Postcard Museum came mainly by coach on Summer Wine pilgrimages from across the Pennines. People living in Holmfirth seemed to have lost interest in the Postcard Museum. After one visit there was little reason to come for a second look unless you were a Bamforth & Co enthusiast. One of my agreed goals was to encourage people to come again through putting together a series of temporary exhibitions of postcards, enhancing their experience when watching the silent films, and organising events. Over the next three years, we put on a series of temporary exhibitions of postcards in display cases on the landings before you entered the first and second floor galleries. Keep Smiling: Picture Postcards of World War 11 was the first temporary exhibition, followed by Fancy Ladies: Picture Postcards of Society Women on the Edwardian Stage by Bamforth & Co. I was fortunate to receive the continuing support of Jane Helliwell, who looked after and maintained the collection of Bamforth & Co postcards.
For Keep Smiling I wrote an exhibition brief that identified my target audience and marketing strategy, the steps in sourcing and displaying the objects to be included in the exhibition, and the budget. The postcards seemed to fall into three categories: The Home Front, Patriotism and Propaganda, and Humour. There were also photographs of the artists Douglas Tempest and Arnold Taylor. I had already been given leave to write my own press releases and was very encouraged by the level of interest shown by the Huddersfield Examiner and Radio Leeds. I was blown away when I was invited by BBC Look North to do a television interview in the museum about the Fancy Ladies exhibition, which was broadcast after the early evening news. To launch Keep Smiling, we held a 1940s evening with the staff serving a homemade supper to everyone who came, using authentic wartime recipes. A local community theatre company set the scene and led a sing-along.
After having gained some prior experience of working with video, my interest was aroused when I heard tell of a pianist accompanying the showing of silent films at a film festival in Leeds. He readily agreed to be recorded playing along to the Bamforth & Co silent films in the museum. I was fortunate to secure additional funding to pay the Production House in York to produce a new series of videos with dubbed piano soundtrack, which encouraged visitors to the Postcard Museum to extend their visits and watch the films. I undertook a second silent film project after the retired company secretary at Bamforth & Co handed me several reels of nitrate film that he’d been keeping in an old tool box in his garage. After having them collected by the National Film Archive, I eventually received back videos of lost Bamforth & Co films, including a procession by trades unions and churches through the streets of Holmfirth around the end of the Great War. A silent film evening was held to show the new films to local people and invite their comments as to the significance of the procession, which had culminated in a gathering in the local park.
One last area in which I made a particular contribution to the Postcard Museum was in respect of the museum shop. This had tended to sell confectionary and some Bamforth & Co postcards still in print to generate income and help balance the budget. After approaching the Managing Director of Dennis’s of Scarborough (the company that had bought Bamforth & Co in the 1980s), he agreed to reprint two sets of historic comic cards from Kirklees collection so they could be sold through the museum shop. I had the fun task of choosing the twelve cards, which became best sellers in the shop. Another commercial project was undertaken with the help of the Holmfirth Choral Society which recorded a music cassette for sale in the museum shop, featuring some of the songs featured on Bamforth & Co’s sentimental postcards.
Roger Penny was Community Officer for Holmfirth, and subsequently Marsden as well, from 1988 until 1993. He was Hon Publications Officer of the Association of Assistant Librarians and President of the AAL in 1990.
CILIP Local Studies Group 