I've been collecting ephemera for years, and I bought these Christmas cards recently. They were sent from Richard Ellis Roberts, author of The Other End, to Vera Carr between 1904 and 1912. There was more than one gentleman called Richard Ellis Roberts knocking about at the beginning of the twentieth century, but luckily these cards have the writer's address in London printed on the inside.
Three of the cards (the ones with colour illustrations) were produced by Cuala Press, an Irish private press run by Elizabeth Yeats, the sister of William Butler Yeats. The monochrome card was produced by the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, and that one is signed on the back (see below).
I couldn't help wondering who Vera Carr was, so I began digging about. There were quite a few ladies about with that name, and with nothing but the name to go on I thought I'd never find her. But then I came across an article written by Richard in the Pall Mall magazine in 1910 entitled 'How to Make Interesting Pictures: "The Little Monks" '... 'illustrated from Photographs by Sydney H. Carr'.
Sydney Herbert Baker Carr was a Lincoln-born artist who moved to Penzance in Cornwall in the 1880s. And he had a daughter: Vera. When Richard sent the earliest of the cards, in 1904, she would have been fourteen years old. At that time, her family was living at a house on Albany Terrace in St. Ives. By the time Richard sent the last of these cards, her family had moved to Arkleby on Talland Road.
Vera married in 1916 and moved to Bristol. She died in 1983 and was buried in Arnos Vale cemetery, a place I used to pass every now and then when I lived in Somerset. It's a small world.
