From one 16 to another.

I will leave you to work out what you are looking at.

Crossing the Thames at Henley

 

  With the River Thames running so high this is a difficult bridge to negotiate for the tall masted boats and with the load restriction on the carriageway of the bridge it is a potential bottle neck for traction engine drivers.

Passport Portraits of Yesteryear no. 41

Continuing the series of passport portraits in my collection.
Peruse and wonder.

Rafael Turina is a 37 year old marine engineer. He was born in Slovenia which is now part of the new Jugo-Slavia created by the Treaty of Versailles drawn up after the Great War.

It is March 1932 and he is on his way from Belgium to Italy where he leaves his ship at Venice. He stays in Italy and in the August of the same year he obtains a British visa in Trieste to permit him to join the Lloyd Triestino liner S.S. Wien in Cardiff, Wales.  He takes the train through Switzerland and France and disembarks from the packet boat at Folkestone in England on 4th September 1932.

The ship he is joining is a 7,700 ton liner, built in 1911. At the outbreak of the Great War it was requisitioned for wartime use by the Austrian government. On 1st November 1918, it was sunk by the Italians and after the war, raised by them and recommissioned as a liner. This is the ship that he is joining. Ironically, in the Second World War the liner was requisitioned for war use by the Italian government and sunk by British bombers off the coast of Albania on 4th March 1941.
 

High lorry, low bridge.

Wincheap, Canterbury, Kent. Tall lorry. Is it going to pass under the bridge?



 

No, it is not. It has hit it.

How to buy a valid Swiss passport.

Just search on eBay. 

This passport is still valid. It expires in 2028. 

Now what kind of person would pay £480 to acquire a valid Swiss 

passport do you think?

eBay say that all official documents for sale on their site must be at 

least twenty years expired but when I brought this to their attention with 

three days' notice they failed to remove it. 

But then, had they done so, they would not have earned £48 would they?

Dead leaves in Cirencester.

A very big Penny Black

No, I am not talking about a large lady called Penelope Black. Those of you who collected postage stamps in your youth will all know what a Penny Black is. It was the invention of Rowland Hill. 

He revised the complicated, inefficient and expensive postal system in Britain and introduced a standard letter charge of one penny throughout the land. The black one penny postage stamp was stuck on your letter to prove that you had paid the fee. It was the world's first adhesive postage stamp and was introduced in 1840.

The system was clever and innovative but the stamp itself had one very serious flaw. It was black. When the Post Office endorsed an inked stamp on it to cancel it after use, the cancellation was difficult to see and this tempted naughty people to try to use the stamps more than once. Thus, the following year the stamp's colour was changed to red and it became known as... the Penny Red.

I have just given a talk in Kidderminster Town Hall and standing outside the  venue is this statue to Rowland Hill, who was born in the town. What is interesting is that the subscriptions came from all over the world to recognise the revolutionary postal system that he had put in place. Even today, I marvel at the tremendous value of a postage stamp. I can write a letter, stick a stamp on it, and the Royal Mail will carry it hundreds of miles and deliver it to the address I have given them. To do that myself would cost me hundreds of pounds and I acquire this service for a fee measured in pennies.