We wonder how many of you were surprised by seeing the back of this card ? And we bet quite a few. For this is not the Franklyn Davey set that most of you would have thought, nor the Ogdens version. The main difference is that this Wills version of the set has no issuer name at the top, whereas both of those sets do.
So your clue here was the basic biological fact that it takes a mother to make a child, and that, also, commercially, children are the main focus as far as customers for Mother`s Day presents. This little girl is also the kind of idealised child that any mother ought to love - very girly, with her orange dress and bright orange bow in her hair. If I ever looked like that there are no pictures to prove it, but I seriously doubt I did, I was too messy and clumsy to be allowed a dress and a bow in my hair. I also doubt that the majority of American children looked like this either, it was probably posed in a studio. However the hair bow is rather a fascinating story which all started centuries ago, because the art of Ancient Egypt, Iraq, and Greece show men and women with ribbons in their hair. In Central America too. It has also refused to go away throughout those centuries, coming in and out of fashion, and developing a whole love language all of its own in the Victorian era, even as far as its placement on your head showing how you felt about who you were with. And in the case of the bow being at the very top of the head, well that meant the wearer was searching for love. That could make the truth behind this card a very sad one indeed.
Lets start our card chat, as I often do, with our original Wills Reference Books - though for the most part I use the combined volume, which has a hard cover and all the parts reprinted inside, purely because they tend to be interlinked and it saves having to go up and get another. Plus when they were reprinted in this volume, two tables of dates of issue, home and overseas, were added. And for this set it gives the date we use above, March 1925, which was taken from the London records of British American Tobacco.
The text for this set reads :
168. 50 Children of All Nations. Fronts printed by letterpress in colour. Subjects cut and perforated to stand out. Backs in grey, with descriptive text. Issued in New Zealand, between 1925-1930. Similar to series issued by Franklyn Davey, Imperial Tobacco Co of Canada, Ogden, and United Tobacco Co of South Africa.
That sends me to RB.21, the Tobacco War book. And entry 200-168 reads :
Series recorded in W/168 [the Wills booklet] and RB.15/58 [which is the original Ogdens booklet]. All the printings of this series are summarised below :
A - Wills overseas issue
B - I.T.C. of Canada issue, inscribed 7718
C - U.T.C. issue
D - Ogden`s Home issue
E - Franklyn Davey Home issuePrintings A - C are B.A.T. issues, printings D - E are I.T.C. issues. Printings A, D and E are cut outs.
The Ogden`s book, RB.15, is exactly the same text as in our Wills booklet except for the colour of the back, which is green (not grey). And at the end of the text it has been subtly altered, saying "Wills" where it formerly said "Ogden`s". That does actually make the list out of order, but the reason for that is almost certainly that these two changes, the colour and the issuer, were easily rectified by simply insetting new type in those spaces and reprinting. Whereas to move Wills to the end of the listing would have been a longer and costlier job. If this were done today with a photocopier we would simply print the two new words in the same way and stick them over the existing text, then copy the whole page - and nobody would be any the wiser.
Our World Tobacco Issues Indexes share the same basic text : "Children of All Nations. Sm. Subjects die cut to stand out. Nd. (50) See RB21/200-168A."