Ivory Pawn

Discovered a few hours ago, underneath a bridge over a river two miles from my house:

This ivory Victorian chess piece. That particular bridge was notorious in my book for housing an old dump underneath it, in a little passageway just off from the river's edge. The ground there is littered with broken glass, china, shotgun shells and metal rusted beyond recognition, and in the past I'd found a small number of intact bottles and pretty shards of teacup shards, so I make an effort to go back there every so often.

When the river's high it washes through this passageway and exposes more findings - at my visit the river was exceptionally low, due to the dry weather, and rather stagnant. There were very poor pickings - tens of broken bottles, Victorian and Edwardian era medicine and lemonade vessels, exactly what I was desperate to find, intact that is... just a load of necks and sides and bottoms scattered about, some of which I could match up, incomplete, so sad. Just rubbish back then... probably still rubbish now...

Pictured are these two shards, one of which interested me because it had a crown on it, and the other was just nice colours, and what I thought was a plastic modern chess piece (I almost left it there!). Upon getting home mum informed me that it was bone or ivory, and after cleaning it up I could see on the underside that the pillar had been slotted into a round hole into the base, whereas a modern piece would have been cast in a mould. Certainly one of the quaintest little things I've discovered...

The letters on the china shard read 'oseaawn', as far as I can tell. The letter before the O may be a capital R... I'm about to Google it...

Happy Families

While rootling in a drawer for some incense sticks, my mother happened upon this treasure left behind by my departed German grandmother, who most likely afforded it the same amount of disinterest as her daughter-in-law:

I don't know precisely when this dates from; in my mind it could be anything backwards from 1940. It's complete, as far as I know, with nine idiosyncratic respectable families each with a husband in trade, a wife either cleaning or sewing, one blonde daughter and one rotund son each happily engaged in activities relating to their father's profession. What the game would be like if it was made today I don't honestly know. It would probably involve more cards.

Many of the cards have sadly outdated professions; turncock, beadle, and the children are nostalgically enterprising. I particularly like Miss Silence the Usher's Daughter, who is grinning and holding a decapitated doll and its head in the other. Master Chop the Butcher's Son, on the other hand, is standing in the street bawling his eyes out because a dog is running away with his string of sausages. I'm sure there's a hidden message in these cards, but until I do the tarot reading I won't be able to decipher it.

I don't know if my grandmother particularly prized these, and this is why they're in a reasonable condition, or whether she didn't much care - my mother is sick of the sight of them and familial connotations and was going to flog them on eBay. Let the irony of this post's title sink in a minute there.

New Finds...

Down the tip, for less than pence:

A beautiful vintage pram, not in the best of condition, as you can see it has a mysterious hole on the side, below a shaped dent which suggests someone prised off a logo of some sorts. But that's not the end of it's suspicious injuries...

Weird slashes in its bonnet and inside make for a rather horrific mental picture... but surely its history can't have been as vicious as it seems?

A slightly more jolly footnote is that today I attended Maiden Newton at War, and along with all the ladies in fantastic get-up they were also pushing quite a few vintage prams about, not a few of which looked like this one! It's always nice to see something like this in context, even if you can't go back in time completely!

Although I have been able to find very similar looking prams on the Internet, they all seem to be of different names, so please if you know what this exact model is I'd be very interested to know...

Discerning readers may note that I have not put a baby in it, as it was intended, simply because I do not have one nor the intent to create one in the near future, also the condition of the pram is wholly unhygienic. At the moment it houses one top hat, one straw hat, a broken umbrella and some spare clothes.

Lastly, but not least:

Spotted at the local YMCA, hand-painted, I don't know what sort of age it is but it looks wonderful. If I had a spare £60, I would have wheeled it down the street myself.

The Death of Childhood

"Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?"

-Charles Lamb
"Great Thoughts From Master Minds", 1899