Fowler’s Album

My interest in vintage postcards started sixty or more years ago when, as a child, I would be taken to visit my mother’s Uncle Fowler. Whilst the grown-ups talked, I would look through the album of old picture postcards he had. When he died, the album came to my mother, who – knowing my interest in it – passed it on to me. Those old postcards, collected by Fowler in the early 1900s, became the core of what became a larger collection, as I added postcards I would find in second-hand shops over the years. It is time, I think, to try and bring the collection back together in digital form. Fowler is pictured above – a photograph that was stuck in the back of the album. The postcards were in no particular order in the album, nor will they be in this digital collection.

For much of the time that Fowler Beanland was collecting old postcards – the first decade of the twentieth century – he was living in Longtown, Cumbria. He had moved there following the failure of the short-lived business he had established with his father and elder brother in his home town of Keighley. He was a spindle-maker and iron-turner by trade, and he may well have been employed in that capacity in the Longtown area.

The card had been sent to Fowler at his address in Longtown (48 Swan Street) and it came from someone else in the same town. The message – even when turned around by 180 degrees – is curious in the extreme.
“You was doing it fine on Sunday thought no one ___ you, A Looker On”What the missing word is, I have no idea!