No doubt in the early 1900′s she could have walked down to the shops and made all the purchases she needed to here in Coupar Angus. We are still quite lucky today. I know it was quite a shock to be deprived of any Sunday paper this week, due to the delivery lorries being stuck in snow and ice en route but normally we are well served. Since Sunday, the main road has improved so that lorries have been getting through. My own road is still snow and ice bound but where are the horse and cart when you need them?  Diesel engined cars which have been stuck here so long in temperatures way below freezing that it would be inadvisable to try starting them so no trip to the sales!. Nellie would have gone shopping locally in just the same way that I have over the last few days. She’d have wrapped up warmly and set off on foot for  George Street. No doubt she would also have put on a hat. When was it that a woman gave up the feeling that she always had to wear a hat when she went out? My own grandmother, born the same year as Nellie,  rarely went out of the house without wearing her “titfa” and even when the hat vanished, she would sport a headscarf. These conventions seem only to be continued by the Royal Family today.

So, Nellie sets off for the shops. She would have a list. No reminders on a mobile phone for her. She would probably be able to stop for a cup of tea while she was out, either with a friend, or in the building which now houses the dental practice! She would not go to a cover-all supermarket as we do today, but would visit a dairy, a greengrocer, the butcher and the baker. Coupar Angus must be quite unusual in that most of these individual shops are still available to today’s residents.

I’ve tried to research the actual businesses existing in around 1907, but at the present, I’ve not found much definite information except about the public houses and hotels. I don’t think Nellie would have frequented them. But where would she have gone for more specialised shopping? I know there was a bootmakers and a drapery here , but I’m sure a trip to Blairgowrie would have provided more choice.

So how would Nellie have travelled to  other shopping centres? I don’t think any of the new-fangled motor cars would have been available to the family of a small local jeweller and pearl fisher. A horse and cart?  Quite possibly. My grandfather was still using one down in the English midlands in the 1930′s. Far more likely would be the train You could get practically anywhere quickly and cheaply. I think that the station in Coupar Angus was near the Red House Hotel, which was the station master’s house. Sadly, I’ve not found a card to Nellie showing this, but they were of a type and the card of Kilbarchan Station must suffice. I’m thinking that Blairgowrie would have been a popular choice. The market would have been bigger, it was on the “tourist trail” even in Nellie’s day and still has a good selection of shops. (Ignore, please the all too overwhelming Tesco of today)

I do have a card showing the rail line just before it enters Coupar Angus from the Woodside direction. Even an incomer like myself will remember the old bridge. There’s not much left nowadays! So Nellie arrives in Blairgowrie.

This card of the square is recognisable, but of course the First World War would change the view from this street when the striking war memorial was set up, facing down to the river Ericht and the Angus Hotel.  Here the street seems to be mainly residential. There are people at the end of the view, outside what we know as Davidson’s. And looking over the road in the direction of the river we can make out the chimney stacks from the works down on the river. Nowadays we can go there for meals or visit Roy Sim’s antiques.  I found out there used to be thirteen jute mills by the river  . The noise would have been phenomenal! Nellie must have walked up to this street as the train station was down where Somerfield, the bus station and Tescos are now found. An enormous area, presumably because there would be many goods sidings.

I’m wondering if Nellie would have met any friend for tea here. I don’t think it would be coffee, though strangely the reverse is true today. There’s a card here of Perth Road , Blairgowrie which certainly suggests that Nellie had a friend there.

I wonder where she would have shopped? A drapery store for sure and a ladies outfitters. Sadly M and Co does not have quite the same charm. There is of course, a needlecraft shop  which a young lady who was working at a milliners would have been sure to visit . And then home on the train.

What would have been her reaction if the afternoon post had brought a card from one of the exotic locations visited by her beau, David? The pictures certainly impressed me . Indeed, watching one of the films offered by the BBC  as suitable Christmas entertainment, I was sure i had seen the dramatic views of China on one of these cards. Sadly I have not yet found one. There’s the chance that one of Nellie’s albums was uplifted by another relative when the family home was cleared. The film did make me think of the young Scotsman, who ended up all over the world, in his naval career.

The film was “The Painted Veil, based on a tragic love story by W. Somerset Maugham. I thought I had a copy of it, but could only find a collection of short stories, many of which deal with similar themes of love and lust in exotic locations . The film seemed deserving of far more praise.Not just for the devotion shown by the director, J. Curran , in bringing the story to life, but also the talent shown by the actors playing the tangled lovers. Edward Nolan,Naomi Watts and  Line Schreiber. Even  a cameo performance by Diana Rigg as a perceptive Mother Superior . somehow conveyed the atmosphere of Shanghai.

I checked a movie site, and the film was the first to be shot in China with the cooperation of the  Chinese Film Board. The fantastic views of the Li River in Guangxi Province may well have once graced a postcard which arrived in Coupar Angus. You’ll have to make do with a card showing  a Chinese temple, similar to buildings shown in the film, but this one is in Hong Kong!

This Sunday, I had a cat who was rather reluctant to move any further than the pathway cut by my partner into our four inch snow covering. She sat amidst the snow, looking cross. No snowballing for her!  The mad Hungarian puli had no such doubts but bounded out, snuffling the clean white covering and wading through to the road, with the snow up to the tops of his legs. Obvious joy!

I went to Nellie’s collection, wondering whether she would come up trumps with a suitably snowy scene. Yes, there were a couple. Did the postcard man rush out at the first snowfall with his camera? Or were there always cards available for any season? If you think of modern day Christmas cards, there are always some snow scenes available, whatever the type of winter we have. There are aolsos coy shots of robins too and I could provide plenty of material for that sort of card at the moment. The bird sits on the bird table practically with a menu in hand!

As you see from the following cards, they are fairly anonymous and could be of any where. They do seem to have been sent in the winter though. Of course, we are led to believe that winters were much worse then and we do not know what winter is like these days due to global warming. How long a period are these propositions based on? I can remember in the winter of 1963, when I lived in the Midlands a Land Rover was driven up the middle of a frozen Grand Union Canal , with no apparent danger

In 1981, when I had just moved within Perth to a tenement flat in Craigie, it was a different story, probably because by then I was a householder, with a mortgage and a job to get to . Then the water drain pipes from the flat froze, as did any water intake. Ironically, the only place with running water was the Abbotsford pub, from which most local residents obtained a bucket or two of water each day for whatever minor ablutions could be achieved. We even collected snow to use in the toilet’ with some success. Fortunately the showers at my workplace were still operational. So what’s a bit of snow? A minor inconvenience as long as you do not have to actually go anywhere. I’ve given up on my granny’s old maxim that the last frozen snowfall was just waiting for another one to take it away. It just doesn’t seem to work.

What about Nellie? The first card is a suitably anonymous shot of a lane and a snow draped birch tree. Even the message is equally anonymous, sent from one person in Coupar Angus to another. Apparently it was the fashion for girls to collect these postcards, presumably gaining kudos dependent either on how many they had or what exotic scenes they showed. We know that Nellie, with family who visited many places in Scotland and an admirer who was in the Merchant Navy, the collection might seem quite exclusive. So Nellie’s friend just asks if she likes the card. I wonder how long it took to travel within Coupar?

The second scene, though equally snowy, is a view of Inverness. I don’t know where these islands are, or even if, with the changes made to so many rivers by hydro electricity, whether they still exist. It’s intriguing that the sender had to wait rill she got home to Kingskettle (I think ) to post it.

Yesterday, I had not found an actual Christmas greeting to Nellie. Possibly because this sweet, padded ,velvety pansy is not the image we would use today. The greeting is obviously that intended for sweethearts, and sure enough, it is David sending the loving greetings. I think the pansy just means that he is thinking of her. Postage on this card is different. Perhaps he thought he’d better put a penny stamp as he’d waited to Christmas Eve to post it. I bet it arrived in time!

Finally today, quite unrelated to the festive season, one of my favourites. We know how much Charles Rennie Macintosh’s designs have infiltrated our times, on tea clothes and china, jewellery and wrapping paper. Here before that master of the Art Nouveau had even designed Glasgow Art College. is art nouveau for the ordinary folk on a very Alphonse Mucha influenced design for a card.

David complains that the indented design is very difficult to write on. He says that it is meant to be the latest design and makes a little pun about Nellie keeping things in her head. She seems to have been learning to play the piano,, probably the battered and out of tune instrument which malingered in my mother-in law’s-home, unplayed by anyone!

Obviously, Nellie’s postcard collection could do with some updating. She was receiving and sending cards from here and nearby Woodside in the Edwardian period. Some historians have tried to make out that this was a golden age, a lull before the carnage of the First World War, but for everyday people, life was probably not that much different from ours. Yes, they communicated by postasrd not mobile phone, but it was still fast and used its own strange language. Some of Nellie’s cards have words like “Mizpah” or simply initials and an “x”. Some similarity there then! But they were concerned with their holidays, their days off work and what to have for tea. Just as we are, even if we find out about them rather differently .

So, what would be featured on the modern postcards, for 2010? The newly revamped Larghan Park is my first choice. Then the greatly improved shops. So, they are supermarkets, rather than family businesses. But there is still room here for the local butcher, Morrisons and the quirky shabby-chic gift and furniture shop. The pictures of these would be very like some of Nellie’s collection. Would such postcards sell? Who can tell. I know that I have been a grateful customer for the hand -made greetings cards now available here.

Nellie too had her greetings cards. I looked for a Christmas card, but so far have not found one. Here though is a pretty birthday card with a secret message in the flowers. Forget-me- not is easy, but what does the clover with its four leaves suggest? Good luck, I suppose. The message on the back about dividing plants and sending some to Nellie’s mother in Hay Street is more prosaic. I’m not even sure if the house exists as it was then. I’ve never checked the numbers when I’ve walked up there, perhaps I should.

I did find three cards apparently specifically for New Year which seems quite topical. The first is a view little changed since the time of posting. Indeed, I found a modern day photograph of the scene on an American’s blog.( She also showed shots of the abbey ruins) Nellie’s card was sent by David, her husband to be, in 1907. The massage was solely his initials and an x. You can just make out the railway line to Blairgowrie, but the cotages seem to have changed a bit. Was there maybe some sort of works near the bridge? A pity the train link has gone. It might be easier to use just now hen the roads are treacherous. I believe the last train was in 1967 and of course, various stretches of the embankment have gone back to fields now, never mind the track. Good old Doctor Beeching!

The second is of Coupar Grange. It has a slightly different greeting, which presumably was just added to a standard postcard shot.   Both cards have a Coupar post mark.

What do our letters get stamped with now?  Is it not Edinburgh? The message would work today though. I think the building shown has changed very little. Indeed, through the wonders of YouTube, I have just had an aerial tour of the River Isla fishings at Coupar Grange today, when the snow and ice certainly discourage me from walking there! And of course, Culross the printers , who produced these cards,is still in the town.I found out that not only have they been in business for over a hundred and seventy years but that they also still produce postcards. These are seen as a publicity tool for businesses like hotels. And there, on  their web site, was a view with which Nellie would have been very familiar, the old steeple which adjoins the print works.

The third and final greeting card is also at first glance intended for New Year with its mention in rhyme of friendship and memories. Not many of us would regard a full snuff pot as good fortune today  I think! Then, on turning over the card you discover that it was posted in August 1916. More than ten year gap from the last card and in the midst of war. I found the faint writing and large Glasgow postmark made deciphering the second part of the message impossible, so apologise for the quality. There seemed to be no mention of the hostilities and yet we know that many men from around here, like many other country areas, were being slaughtered. This was the time of the Battle of the Somme.

That seems to be a rather gloomy note on which to finish. We know however, that although casualties were printed in the press at those times, there is nothing like the moving image for bringing home the reality of war to the general public, as it does for us.

As I began with new hope for the town, let’s finish on an upbeat note. The citizens of Coupar Angus can take a pride in their surroundings, just as Nellie did all those years ago.

Unlike my grandmother , down in Warwickshire, Nellie did not tell tales of the naughty antics of  Bertie, later Edward VII. Granny, who worked for a Lord and Lady Wiseman, claimed that they entertained the prince down in the country and one of his alleged mistresses, Lily Langtry. I wonder if Lily read about the theatre stars in the Dundee Courier? Nor quite the same as the magazines like “Heat” that my colleagues scan for gossip about contemporary stars! It did cover the Antarctic expedition made by the Dundee ship, the Discovery, under the command of R.F. Scott. That must have been a big news story.

I had a quick look on the web, and though I found that two film stars had been born in Blairgowrie, I think it unlikely that Nellie would ever have heard of them even though one began his career before the talkies. He was called Andy Clyde. Both my husband and I would have been interested in his later career as an old man in the “Lassie” t.v. shows. One probably watched them, the other always became too worried that Lassie would be hurt, to cope! The second, George Anton is a modern film and t.v. actor so not much likelihood of Nellie seeing him.

What about poor old Coupar Angus? Has anybody famous come from there? Not that I’ve found so far. I’d quite like Nellie and her postcard collection to be better known, but I realise there are hundreds of other blogs out there dealing with our cult of the ancestor. We do have a star living locally who seems quite amenable to adding a bit of glitz to local events. All right, so I’ve never seen her and I don’t watch her television programme , but my partner reports that he’s been in the co-op around the same time. Unfortunately, he is completely disinterested in the cult of celebrity, so it didn’t mean much when some-one said, “Do you know who that was who just walked out? That was Lorraine Kelly!’

I think you might meet more famous Scots if you walked through Regent Street or Soho on a visit to London. Maybe this Burns homecoming, for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth will bring the celebrity Scots back to the country of their birth. I think the Scottish government is hoping for visitors whose ancestors came from Scotland to return. That way there would be a very welcome boost to the Scots tourist trade. Any foreign currency coming in to our cash strapped nation would be good. As an aside on this, I put on a new shirt this morning, snapped up as a bargain reduction in that hated shop, Tesco. I would usually pay this amount for a charity shop purchase but the shock came when I looked at the original price tag. £15 or €22:50. Less than a year will have passed since the product went into the shop, and now we have parity with the euro! Nellie had none of these worries. Her stamps for the postcards remained at that halfpenny rate for years. The post office then did not have to bother with commemorative stamps. Nor would they dare to force you to buy extra stamps to obtain the Burns commemoratives, illustrated here.

The cards for this blog feature the wide variety of holiday destinations chosen by Nellie’s correspondents.As usual at this time of year, the weekend papers and colour supplements tantalise us with stories of exotic holiday destinations. Or perhaps not so exotic this year! Nellie lived long before the rise of the package holiday and never possessed a passport. Strange when you consider how far her husband and only son would travel in the navy. My own maternal grandmother was the same age as Nellie and contented herself with coach holidays to the south coast of England: Folkestone, Clacton,Margate and their ilk. She became more adventurous in the 1970′s,after I moved to Scotland. There were two coach holidays up here .On one of these she actually stayed in the Angus Hotel in Blairgowrie, lomg before we moved out this way. She was a game old bird though, for on one of her southern jaunts,she acquired a British Visitors Passport ( no longer needed now we are in the E.E.C.) to go across to France. By coach of course ! On her return journey, other members of the coach party “persuaded” her to hide some of their illicit cigarette purchases  in her capacious bag. (This usually contained a small bottle of whisky for emergencies!). The eighty or so year old cannot have looked so innocent to the customs men. Her bag was searched, the booty found and a reprimand issued. I don’t think Nellie had quite such naughty tales to tell, but the cards certainly take us on a trip round Britain. I’ve never really understood the obsession Perth folk still seem to have with Blackpool as a favoured destination. For Nellie and her friends, I think trips across to the west of Scotland were more popular. I’ll let the cards speak for themselves.

The travellers would have made their journey by train. I wonder how many carriages there would be on a Glasgow bound train in 1903? Nowadays it seems rare for there to be more than four carriages. Nellie would have watched the goods trains pass through Coupar Angus station while she waited for her westerly bound service. They took local produce down south such as potatoes, soft fruit and game. Somehow this arrived fresh and undamaged. Could we do the same today? Certainly not by train. Ironically, some of these edible goods from Scotland would have been part of my wild grandmother’s life. She was ” in service’” at a big house in Warwickshire at this time. The name Draycote Manor sounds right, but I’m not sure. She told me that her employers would come to Scotland for the shooting, and that their catch would arrive at Rugby station, ready to be prepared in the big kitchens of the manor. Another tenuous link between my family and my partner’s.

Back to the holiday jaunts. I thought ,in these times of political uncertainty, it would be good to include a London card. I found two of the same view of the Houses of Parliament. One, from Nellie’s future husband, just has the enigmatic message “Lest we forget”. Forget what? I trust Nellie knew. I choose to put a romantic interpretation on it. This was 1907, long before the phrase would be applied to those fallen in the war. On checking up, I find that the phrase dates from an 1887 poem by Rudyard Kipling , written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.” Recessional” is a fairly heavyweight work about the Empire which I would not dream of studying with my classes at school and yet here are two Scots , educated locally, able to exchange lines of poetry. Not an easy poem either. I wonder where David learnt of it? I believe he was educated at Perth Academy. Could it have been there, or was this hugely patriotic and jingoistic poem featured in the newspaper?

The other card with the same view across the Thames, is more prosaic, asking how Nellie is getting on and claiming for themselves “a good old time”. I think it also says “cor blimey” but with the r and the y missing, so as not to offend I presume. Anyway, Nellie received this one two years before David’s. Strangely, both cards conclude the address with the letters N. B for North Britain, I presume. Apparently, this was widely used on mail to Scotland in the nineteenth century until the post office itself requested writers not to use it to avoid confusion with addresses in London. Here it was, still being used in the twentieth century.

I said that the west of Scotland seemed to be a favourite destination in Nellie’s day. A card from 1908 reminds me of other faintly known details of Nellie’s life. It is addressed care of the watchmaker in Coupar Angus. I presume that her father was at this time running the jewellery and presumably watchmaking business in Hay Street which later caught fire. Was Victor’s jewellery shop the link with modern times? It was not of course in Hay Street. The card is from that well known holiday spot, Dunoon. A fine looking esplanade isn’t it and look at the pollution from the steamers! The sender just hoped Nellie was well.

Today if you asked a young woman or teenage girl if she collected anything, she would probably laugh at you. She might say handbags, or i-tunes or even jewellery but she would certainly not say what my next card tells us about Nellie. It’s a card from another popular west coast holiday destination, Saltcoats. I wonder why the sender chose to write the message on the front of the card? Obviously, Nellie had let it be known to friends and family that she was collecting postcards . My own grandmother must have had the same idea, though her collection was much smaller and less extensive. I think the people of Warwickshire may have been less affluent than Nellie’s friends and family. They certainly did not stray far from Shakespeare’s county – many of my family are still there! Collecting postcards must have been fairly cheap, though, for both girls in their different parts of the country. A couple of old pennies for the card and only a ha’penny for the postage. There’s inflation for you. I’ve seen Colin Baxter views of Scotland for a pound and we pay 27 new pence for a second class stamp stamp. Saltcoats looks more attractive on the card than I remember it from visiting my parents in Ayrshire a few years ago. I think we walked our dog on the beach there or at Ardrossan. Views of Hamilton Street on the web now look far less grand and spacious than this view too.

I’ve mentioned the railway several times in this blog. It’s difficult for children born later than Dr. Beeching’s savage cuts in the rail network of Britain to realise how far reaching the train service actually was. The motor car may have been invented in Nellie’s youth, but they were extremely expensive. unreliable, slow and only made in small numbers. A plaything for the rich and something to be feared by the general population, not something you aimed for on your seventeenth birthday as we do today. The only alternatives to train transport then in the early nineteen hundreds would be horse drawn or possibly dog powered! So here is a reminder of those days when the train was king. There’s no identification on it and the postmark is just Glasgow, but it is a reminder of how things were. It also seems to be a double exposure of some sort.

A view down the street in Blairgowrie , towards the street where Woolworths once traded

For Nellie in Coupar Angus there would have been a range of shops. No doubt a local farmer would deliver milk and I know that Nellie’s family had connections going on for years with the Balgersho estate and farms. Probably they would have bought their eggs and fruit and veg. from one of these farms. No need to go to town then. Coupar Angus itself was of course a burgh in its own right. Even up to the nineteen eighties, there was a town council with a provost. (Scotland’s equivalent of a mayor). When we moved here at around that time, there were still many small shops in the old streets at the centre of town. A drapers. Most youngster won’t even know what that means! It comes from the French for cloth. There the shop stood, with a strange mixture of wools and threads. Buttons and ribbons. And presumably at one time before the old fashioned stockings and knickers took over, also fabric. Today it is boarded up, awaiting rather slowly, redevelopment into flats.

An unidentified local draper’s shop

There was a shoe shop in this wee town too, selling workaday shoes and boots. The name Catt can still be seen over the window. There still is an exceedingly old-fashioned greengrocer’s and strangely, three hairdressers. I’m sure when all the ladies had long hair, there would not have been a call for these, though the fairly recently opened barbers still seems to do a good trade in short back and sides. Where Would the men of Coupar Angus have had their hair and beard trimmed at a barbers in Nellie’s day?

 Where would Nellie’s family and friends have bought all the picture postcards they sent her? Many of them were printed by Valentines of Dundee, now sadly a victim of the trend for American style supermarkets selling everything all under one roof. Nellie would probably have gone to the small grocery shops where things were still cut and measured for you while you waited. As a teenager, I would holiday in a small Welsh hamlet, Y Fan, near Llanidloes, where the cheese seemed to taste slightly of the parafin sold over the same solid wooden counter. Those were the sort of shop which always featured a bentwood chair for the shopper to rest on while her shopping list of groceries was made up. Such shops have almost completely vanished everywhere now, long before our collapsing banks destroyed our high streets.

Like the previous street scene, hardly changed by time

Talking of which, two of the grandest buildings in Coupar Angus are still those occupied by The Bank Of Scotland and The Royal Bank. They date from Nellie’s time, but for how much longer will they remain.? Just a little further down Union Street, stands the glory of a Scots Baronial style town Hall. This, built in 1887 at a cost of £4,000, would have been one of the grandest buildings Nellie would know. As a small girl, she would probably have attended the local school, built at the same time to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. In these times of recession , when our schools are running out of money for books and paper, one can only marvel at such munificence. Presumably the local merchants and mill owners would have set up funds for this building.

The saddest thing for Nellie later in the town’s history, would have been the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914. Like my own grandfather, Nellie’s husband would have been in a reserved occupation. My ancestor was a Metropolitan policeman. Nellie’s would presumably have helped to bring goods into the country on the merchant ships in which he sailed. But at the end of the war, this young couple, now with two young daughters to look after, would have witnessed the erection of a strange memorial to those of their peer group killed in the war to end all wars. Coupar Angus gave an elegant gateway to their school, up the pillars of which are inscribed the names of so many young Scots from round here, killed needlessly. By a strange quirk of fate, my partner , visiting some of the battlefields and memorials to the First Worlrl War in France and Belgium found a local Coupar Angus name on the huge memorial at the Mennen Gate. His name is duplicated on our school gateway. Nellie must have known this local lad. Indeed, the family is still in the town. How did the local people  cope with their losses? Far more moving than a few billion lost from a bank! Along the street  from the  town hall  of course, those fine banking buildings are still in daily use. Perhaps when they were built, the bankers paid the bills as they progressed. I can’t imagine that huge newRoyal Bank building on the edge of Edinburgh , for instance, can have been cheap. Is it paid for?

I began this page mourning the loss of local shops known to Nellie and shown on some of her postcards. As February approaches, let’s end on a more cheerful note. The last card has a distinctly romantic air. Could this be from one of Nellie’s admirers? We’ll never know. No doubt our world will still be full of romance on Saint Valentine’s day this year and we can put aside financial worries for a while.

Nellie seems to have been making her postcard collection from about 1903 to 1906, when she was a young woman. The term teenager had of course yet to be invented. She may have been living in Hay Street in Coupar Angus at this time. Certainly this is the most common address on the cards, usually with no street number. The postie would have been local, probably familiar with both sender and recipient of many cards.

Unlike her future husband, there is no evidence that Nellie travelled outwith Britain. In her life, she moved home at least threee times, but never further than Glasgow. The father ran several small shops, including a jeweller’s in Coupar Angus and a general store in Woodside.He had links with the pearl fishers on the River Isla and a hideous carbuncle of a pearl ring is still in family ownership. Supposedly he taught one of the famous pearl fishers of the region, Bill Abernethy.  I believe this shop was burnt out. The old Co-op building may be quite near the site of the shop After his death, the family decamped to Perth, yet fot three generations hankered after Coupar Angus and its environs. In her nineties, Nellie could often be found in the long corridor of her big flat in Perth , coated and be-hatted, asking family members the time of the bus to Woodside. All of her five children seemed to share its nostalgia, regularly making trips out to the country to local events. Nellie’s son learnt to drive late in life, but the winding roads around Woodside, Campmuir, Kinrossie and Coupar Angus itself were his favourite drives, right up until his death , a decade ago. But both Nellie’s husband and this only son would travel thousands of miles around the world as ship’s engineers.

Here is one of Nellie’s British cards, from the man I suppose regarded as her gentleman friend. As you can see, the card shows a view we could still see. but the message is fascinating. What’s even more intriguing, is the casual reference to David’s journey home to Coupar Angus. It would still be a long and time consuming drive from Weymouth today, but David was able to travel home all the way by train! I know that the track and embankment leading to Coupar Angus was only ploughed up in the last decade or so . I have even been told that a train came into town in the 1970′s. So much for Doctor Beeching.

Postcard franked Fortuneswell. Portland July 9th 1906

Apart from the disappearance of the railway, Nellie would probably still recognise much of her home town. There have been changes certainly. Probably the biggest was the construction of the by-pass in the 1990′s. This at least has meant that the town is quieter, without the constant stream of heavy traffic. There have been a few housing developments, the biggest probably being the council estate centering on Strathmore Avenue in the seventies. The bungalow developments opposite the church and centred on Grampian View have not altered the heart of the town, which still has narrow winding streets and quaint cottages. Some of these were built during Nellie’s time here but she would surely recognise the Red House Hotel (formerly the station master’s house I believe.) Even in their sadly dilapidated states, the other two hotels have hardly changed. Would Nellie have ever entered either of them? The old barracks is surely still much the same too and of course the churches. What is about to change is the park. Here is an interesting shot of it from 1903. Is this the main road to Forfar?

Postcard stamped Dundee Sept 2nd 1903

 If you drive past Larghan Park this afternoon , not  only will there be traffic, but the peace and tranquility suggested in this photo has been quite destroyed by the heavy diggers which have dug up the park in order for it to be re-developed. You will also pass the most recent change in the town, the estate of houses by Scotia Homes, for which several fine trees, some of these maybe, have been felled.

When Nellie and her family moved just down the road to Woodside, the family had a shop on the main road. The house pictured has scarcely changed at all since those days. Nellie could probably almost see it from her home further into the village. The tree on the left in this image has now become a stunning topiary feature in the form of a bird. It is nearly as high as the house. What strikes me as strange, from a standpoint one hundred years later, is how we would feel if our homes became postcards, published by a local firm for all to see. Where is your privacy law? Nellie must have known the occupants of this house. Did that make it more attractive for her collection?

Franked twice May 21st 1906

The cards that always interested my partner most as a child were the ones his grandfather had sent to his lady friend (the future grandmother) from the many exotic places he visited. Sometimes the stamps have been steamed off for the sort of collection a child of the fifties and sixties would make. Today we think a holiday in Florida is something different. Yet David was visiting places which must just have been dots on the map to Nellie. She would have had no thought of visiting them, nor desire. This was David’s work, ensuring that goods exported from Scotland arrived in their foreign destinations safely. How things have changed. Here is a card from Egypt. How unlike the high rise hotel developments which now surround the Red Sea!

Franked Plymouth April 9th 1906

 I promised in my title that this would be a seasonal selection. The last card today is a Christmas greeting, featuring exotic embroidered flowers. No Santas or robins for Nellie!

Postmarked Loch Awe December 24th 1906

 So the cards fall into markedly different categories. There are the local ones, messages about the day’s visit or the tea the correspondent would have with Nellie. Then there are the wider Scottish cards, probably from friends and relatives. Remember, many of Nellie’s peers would probably be in service around the country. Then we have the wider sphere created by travels around Britain made by Nellie’s girlfriends and family. I know people still, living locally. who have never been to London. Yet Nellie had cards from the capital . They show us the traditional sights there. Then there are a selection of views from other tourist spots in Britain. Places like Bath and Cornwall. Some of the cards carry a little tale, almost saucy for the early 1900′s of courtship and love. Finally there are the cards from Nellie’s male friends, and there seemed to be several. Strangely these were sent to a variety of addresses locally. Was Nellie operating some kind of secret relationship? Was that why some of the cards were sent neither to her home nor her place of work?

Nellie seems to have been apprenticed to a milliner in Coupar Angus. Some of us may remember that for women of Nellie’s generation it was de rigeur to go out wearing a hat. Nowadays of course, it is really only for weddings that most of us will buy one. There are famous milliners, like Phillip Tracey, of course, but his expensive and exotic designs are worn only by the rich and famous. Princess Anne’s daughter for example.

So what to do with Nellie’s collection? The little intimate messages no longer matter. Everyone concerned is long since dead, though Nellie herself lived to 99. The current trend for genealogy could mean that the cards were useful to a family member. No-one has yet seemed to want to investigate the families involved. As a snapshot of life  at the startof the last century though, the cards seem to have much to say. Not the handwritten messages, which after so long mean very little. No . The pictures seem to speak. Some local views have hardly changed in a hundred years. Other places , often further afield are unrecognisable.

Can a blog show this snapshot of a life so different? Were the intimacies exchanged on these cards any different from the links shown on Beebo or Facebook? Do you want to see them?

Here we are, in the early part of a different century to the one she received her cards in. Back then she could have friends send postcards in the morning from Burrelton informing her of their arrival that afternoon. Now we have email and a postal service that will struggle to get a card from Burrelton to Coupar Angus the same week. That’s progress, I suppose.