Five Years Old!

Yesterday, 7th February, it was five years exactly from my first blog post! To celebrate, I have been thinking about a giveaway - then I read Anna-Maria's post sharing the winners of her 8th blogiversary giveaways, where she mentions legal issues .... so I am still thinking about whether to do one or not.

So, for now, I will share with you some paintings by a distant cousin of mine. Cicely Elmslie Shand was born in 1898, in Newcastle, Northumberland, in England. (She was my second cousin twice removed - my maternal grandmother's second cousin.) She painted designs for postcards and greeting cards during the 1930s. She had married a naval officer, Cecil Sheppard, at the age of 18. We don't know much about this period of her life - where she and her husband were based, for instance - but we do know that they did not have children. Cecil Sheppard would have been at sea for much of the time - perhaps she painted then. Like many professional women of the time (Georgette Heyer and Marjorie Allingham spring to mind), she worked under her maiden name.

I was lucky enough several years ago to buy some of her original paintings for cards, on ebay. 'Welcome', above, is dated 1938. 'Acceptance', below, is dated 1935.

A fan of her work has created a website showing all the cards she published. These designs are not shown - perhaps they were not all published, although I do have a card of Acceptance. She was also included in the lovely book Postcards from the Nursery, by Dawn Cope and Peter Cope (although unfortunately, the description of her family mixes up the generations,  naming her grandfather William (my great-great-grandfather John Shand's younger brother) as her father, and her father Hinton as her uncle).

To Greet You With Joy, original artwork by Cicely Elmslie Shand for a greetings card, undated.

I would like to take the opportunity of my 5th blogiversary to greet all my followers and readers with joy, and to welcome my new followers. I hope we all have lots of fun with our collections in the year to come - I enjoy sharing mine with you, and seeing and reading about yours!

Toys, original artwork for a greetings card by Cicely Elmslie Shand, 1934. Image from ebay seller apb113 (Peter Haddon); sadly, I was outbid on this painting.

Bridal Fashions

My blogging friend CM, of MyRealitty and Leftcoastmini, is going to be the Mother of the Bride this month. She invited me to take some photos of my bridal pairs - you might remember Bridezilla from the second pair, who was determined to win the game of musical chairs at the fancy dress party last year!

Several of my Erna Meyer dolls are getting married:

18th century style

1950s or early 1960s

1970s

Thinking about bridal fashions made me think of the wedding photos I have of my parents, grandparents, and earlier ancestors.

The earliest wedding photo I have is one of my great-great-grandparents. They were both Scottish, although one was born in Jamaica and they lived in India; they married in Munich, in Bavaria (Germany), in 1859.


While this bride opted for the full white silk and lace deal, her daughter, my great-grandmother, had a rather different kind of wedding. My grandmother described it like this:

“My mother was married in her best green costume to her cousin Henry Dunlop one day in 1895, with no-one knowing. She went out for the day, came home as usual; a week later her mother found a note in an empty room saying - “I have gone to America with Henry; Gracie”

Not surprisingly, I don't have any photos of the best green costume!

My grandmother (this great-grandmother's daughter, and my mother's mother) also had a slightly unconventional wedding. Neither the bride's parents, nor the bridegroom's, were present; the bride was given away by her brother. I only discovered some photos of the wedding among a distant cousin's collection inherited from my grandmother's father - my grandmother didn't keep any.


Here they are in 1927, cutting the cake - I believe the dress was pale pink.

My mother had been a bridesmaid at several weddings:

1941

ca 1945

1955

But when she herself got married in 1961, she chose a nice gingham frock for her wedding dress. Like her mother, her brother was present but not her parents, but she refused to be given away, saying she was a person not a present.

That's Mum and Dad on the right, with my godparents on the left.

Here's a photo of my father's parents on their wedding day:

Casino, NSW, Australia, 1935

I've already shown you my maternal grandfather's parents' wedding, in Calcutta in 1903:


Another white lacy wedding dress! This is my Californian great-grandmother, who married an Englishman; her father refused to attend the wedding, so only her mother was present. (Both the groom's parents had already died.)

So, two of these brides went for the white silk, satin and lace - the others were dressed in green, blue, pink and (I think) brown & white. Some were solid colours, one flowery and one check ... Really, based on my family's traditions, I could photograph any of my nicely-dressed dolls as bridal couples!

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas, dear fellow bloggers, followers and readers! I hope that all of you have a safe and peaceful Christmas, whether you are spending it with family, with friends, or alone.

In previous posts, I have mentioned the scrap albums which were either made for me, or passed down in the family. The images in this post come from a scrap book which my English grandmother made for me - probably when I was about 5 years old. I don't remember exactly when she sent it, but it contains a lot of Christmas images, so it may have been a Christmas present.

She also included lots of images of northern hemisphere winters, no doubt so that her Australian granddaughter could become familiar with them.

One thing I love about this scrap book is that I could run my finger over the pictures and feel them. The robin at the front of the stove here was cut out of a card and pasted on to the larger picture - and on a lot of pages my grandmother had built up a picture this way, making a very tactile scrap book, as well as one that is visually stimulating.

Love and hugs to you, dear fellow bloggers - see you after Christmas!

Bliss in Winter

During the last couple of weeks, I was visiting my mother in Bathurst, NSW. It's winter in non-tropical Australia, and the temperatures in Bathurst went as low as -4°C overnight, to 11° or 12° during the day. Not as cold as many places in winter - but compared with Darwin (22° overnight - 33° during the day, and not much variation over the year) - bliss! I do like rugging up in winter woollies, and snuggling under warm blankets and doonas at night - and we went to my favourite cafe, with an open fire, and drank hot chocolate and tea - and I picked violets and jonquils for my bedroom. Definitely bliss!

I didn't take photos of that kind of bliss, but I did photograph another kind: the Bliss furniture which my grandmother collected.


My Realitty has been posting this month about her Bliss house, and she has many of these same pieces of furniture too.

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of Bliss Toys and Dollhouses (Dover Publications, 1979) at a secondhand bookshop in Sydney. This tells me that the R. Bliss Manufacturing Company of Pawtucket, Rhode Island (US) was founded in about 1832 by one Rufus Bliss. He started out making wooden screws and clamps for piano and cabinet makers. Bliss' nephew Albert Bullock joined the company, and then Alva Bullock and Edwin Clark formed a partnership, but the company kept the Bliss name, even after Rufus Bliss' retirement in 1863 and several changes of ownership. 'Bliss Piano' and 'Bliss Doll House' do have a different ring to them than 'Bullock & Clark Piano', etc!

It seems that their first known dolls house was advertised in 1889, long after Rufus Bliss had died. So he certainly didn't design the dolls houses and furniture that bear his name.


This set of wooden furniture with paper litho designs of children and the letters of the alphabet probably dates to 1901, according to Antique and Collectible Dollhouses and their Furnishings. Each piece has a different picture of children engaging in various activities. The sofa - A B C D E and P and Y on the arms - has two children playing with a doll on the back. On the seat, a boy is lying on the ground. He doesn't look very happy - has he been making sandcastles and fallen over?

The alphabet continues on the chairs - I have G/L, H/M and J/O. My Realitty also has I/N. I think we are both missing F/K.



On G/L, we seem to have a depiction of a youthful sailor farewelling his sweetheart, who is then shown weeping. H/M has the interesting combination of a little girl looking at a tea table, and a policeman directing traffic. J/O has a young tailor measuring his equally young client, and a girl in an apron carrying a basket.


The table which goes with these chairs does not show any letters, just some children cooking:



so which pieces completed the alphabet? I can see in Antique and Collectible Dollhouses and their Furnishings that the piano stool, which I'm missing, had T U V, but I don't know where Q R S and X and Z appeared. On other sets, the piano showed QRST (and the stool UVW), but as you can see, the piano in this set has no letters either:



Very appropriately, the children on the piano are playing musical instruments - perhaps in a military band, as the top of the piano shows 5 little soldiers and their tents.

There were several sizes of furniture available, but even within a set, you can see that the scale varies - the chairs are larger in scale than the sofa, table and piano. I have the piano, the sofa and the table, which are in 1" to 1' (1/12th) scale in the nursery of my Lines No 17. The chairs are too big though - they are 5" tall, and more like 1 1/2" to the foot (1/8th scale).


(This photo shows an earlier arrangement, before I added the Bliss table and replaced the black tin piano (hardly visible on the left) with the Bliss piano. At the moment, all the furniture is wrapped up, so I couldn't take another photo (and last time I photographed the other rooms in this house, all the photos I took of this room were out of focus!)

GranJean's Gallery, Unicorn Cottage

As I've mentioned, two of my dolls houses (the Cupboard House and the Lines Country Villa (and the Lines Letchworth which is my sister's) were gifts from my grandmother. She began collecting dolls houses in about 1964. I'm not sure exactly how many dolls houses she had in her collection, but here are some of her others.


I'm sure many of you will recognise these - at the left, there is a Hobbies house, and next to it is a Triang Princess dolls house, which was available from about 1932 to 1957. On the far right is a Triang No 50. The one in the middle looks familiar, but I don't recognise it - can anyone help?

My grandmother kept her dolls houses and dolls in a bedroom at the end of a corridor in her house, Unicorn Cottage. We called it GranJean's gallery (one of my cousins christened it). I don't know if there are any photos of it, but I've just found a clipping of an article about it that was published in the Cobham News in 1972.

In the article, my grandmother said that she was still working on furnishing the Princess dolls house, and wanted to make it homespun with a Welsh flavour. Did she ever do this? I don't remember seeing the inside of this house, so I don't know.

Today, these four houses sit on a high shelf in the Brighton Toy & Model Museum:


UPDATE: Annina has visited the museum and taken much better photos of the Hobbies house and Triang Princess, as well as some other wonderful exhibits! Thank you, Annina :-)

This museum also houses her antique French school, which I remember clearly from GranJean's Gallery:


and also some of her dolls ( I don't think all of these were hers):


I wish I had photos of the dolls house room. The article says that "she has a modern doll's house complete with all electrical mod cons, its plastic glasses contrasting with those of fine Bristol glass in the oldest house." I remember a plastic house with a swimming pool - perhaps it was a Lundby house? Also, according to the Cobham News, there was "a special little doll's house where [children] can touch and play as well as look, and she has peopled it with mouse-characters." I do remember the mice - but I thought they lived in the room across the corridor ...

My grandmother sometimes showed her collections, and I have some photos of her dolls on display.



These photos were taken in 1960 and 1964, before she really started collecting dolls houses, so they show mainly her international and antique dolls.



Also, on a chair in the drawing room, her bears and her doll Bambina - Bambina is a Martha Chase doll, but had a wig added. (My grandmother is standing in the photo on the left; the two women in the photo on the right are my mother's governess and her sister.)

The beginning of my collection

My dolls house collection started when I was a baby. My grandmother, who lived in England, had many collections - fans, miniature ivory figurines, Japanese prints, antique dolls, dolls from around the world, and vintage and antique dolls houses. She named one house Redfern, where we lived when I was a baby; one Roseville, where we lived when my sister was a baby; and one for where my only girl cousin lived when she was a baby. These were 'our' houses, but they stayed at my grandmother's house, where one room housed the dolls and dolls houses. When we visited, my grandmother carefully showed us through this room. A wooden jumping jack hung on the door, and we had to pull the string to make his legs and arms move before we went in. My grandmother carried a small lamp with a shade on one side so that we could see inside the dolls houses.
After our visit in 1972, my grandmother bought another dolls house for me. Both this house and the two named Redfern and Roseville were freighted to Australia, with their furniture and inhabitants, before my grandmother died. Although we set them up, and enjoyed looking at them, it was some years before I really became interested in finding out more about the houses, furniture and dolls, and adding more contents to those houses, and eventually more houses. Those three original houses are still in my mother's house - she lives in temperate NSW. The others are squeezed into the main bedroom of my terrace house in Darwin - although there's also one in the living room, and others in their boxes in cupboards.
I enjoy looking at websites of other collectors' dolls houses, so I am going to gradually post pictures of my dolls houses - as they are now, and as I furnish and decorate them. I hope you enjoy seeing them.