Wednesday 15 June 2011

Letter Lucky Dip 1


19th August 1941

Dear Stanley,

I was very pleased to have your letter this morning before I set off for business, and I am sure that you will appreciate the difficulties we are in visiting you on Thursday. I asked your Aunt Hetty to write you in the event of my not being able to do so by return, but i will take this home and include it.

On this very important occasion I should have been most glad to have given you our moral support, and our joint blessing. We trust that it will initiate a period of such happiness as is only known to perfectly matched couples, and if you will bear in mind the experience of your parents and ourselves, that the first forty years is the worst, you will overcome any trifling difficulties that will only add to your ultimate mutual happiness later.

In enclosing cheque herewith, I trust that you and May will have the joint opportunity of buying something suitable as a memento of the high regard in which we hold you and her, and your families.

Yours very sincerely,
Best Love Wishes
J B?eton



My dear Stanley,

Sorry we shall not be able to come. Uncle Joe is up to the neck with work with Sammy having been called up about a month ago, he is at Blackpool.

We do hope and trust you + May will be very happy + this dreadful war will soon be over and you + May will be able to settle down together.

Fondest love to you both. Love to all.

A Hetty + U Joe xx

Any Interesting Post?


All good things come to those who wait, this blog post hopefully being one of them. As I hang my head in shame at my complete and utter neglect of this blog, I can only plead for your forgiveness. To make up for such an indiscretion I have very exciting plans for this entry, so bare with me and I hope I can earn your forgiveness.
 

For me good ideas seem to come along like buses, positively Saharan for what seems like an eternity and then a flurry of them all at once. This was the case when I came up with my ‘Lost Voices’ project. At the same time I came up with two other ideas that I think have promise, one of which I shall tell you about now, entitled ‘Any Interesting Post?’. The idea grew out of the creation of my ‘Lost Voices’ photographic archive. Many of the images I found were photographic postcards that had a selection of fascinating messages on the back, words that were too important to ignore. The stories that unfolded on the back of these postcards were captivating and chimed with my passion for family history. I got to work straight away trying to find the authors in historical documents, creating family trees and placing what they had written in as much context as possible. Like the images of children I had been collecting, these words had been lost to history, separated from their intended and just floating around in the ether. To me this is what history is made of, the forgotten stories of the millions of ordinary people like you or me. With ‘Any Interesting Post’ I hope to change this, bringing these words back into the open again and allowed to breathe.

This project is still very much in its infancy, but has gathered some momentum over the last few days after a rather satisfying and painful browse through eBay, my purse is still recovering from all of the hits it’s taken. One purchase in particular I am more than a bit pleased with, a box of 100s of letters spanning 1940s-1960s. Having arrived this morning I am more than a bit excited about diving straight in and seeing what treasure awaits me. To share in this excitement I have decided to make a bit of a feature of this in my blog. Every month I shall be doing a sort of letter lucky dip, where I shall pluck one letter at random and share with you its contents and any other interesting information I have been able to discover about it. The first in this thrilling installment will be posted later today, I know you can barely contain your excitement!
 

I hope with this entry and the promise of things to come I have earnt just a smidgen of forgiveness for my tardiness.