Now here we have a last minute card, as I was running very late on Tuesday night - but it turns out to tell a fascinating tale.
Our lady, Grethe Hansen was born on the 12th of December 1911 in Dublin, Ireland, and died on the 14th of March, 1939, in London, aged just twenty-seven. This is obviously nothing to do with the Second World War, so it is very intriguing why she died so young. I`ll find out though...
She is chiefly remembered for a film called "After Dark", released in 1932, a very short one, of less than an hour`s duration, in which a man on a boat has a group of emeralds stolen by a fellow passenger, and then tries to recover them. However she was also in another film, "Britannia of Billingsgate", in which the daughter of a family of fish traders dreams of becoming a movie star when a film crew arrive on site. This picture is from that film, and we know that because this image also appears on a postcard by Raphael Tuck, which comes in two versions, one with the name of that film on it, and one without.
John Mills was also in the film, but today it is really only spoken about because of its connection to sport - part of it being filmed at the speedway track at Leyton, with several top riders of the time, which, oddly, was also the home ground of Clapton Orient F.C. How they got around that, apart from the fact that the two sports were never held simultaneously, was that the speedway track was around the edge of the football pitch. Most curious of all though is the fact that the speedway was there first, from 1928; Clapton Orient did not start to play there until 1930.
She does not appear to have any biography online, but the back of this card tells us that she was "one of the winners of a Film Training Scholarship at the Gaumont British Studios, where she has a contract as a "Baby" star." It also gives her place of birth as Dublin, and tells us that she had been on the stage, in "White Horse Inn at the Coliseum" (which started in 1931, and was the first proper musical at the London Coliseum, in Charing Cross, before that it had been a variety theatre. However I have not found her in the cast list, so it seems likely she was just in the background). Then the card cites her first film "Love on Wheels", with Jack Hulbert, which was released in 1932, but again I cannot find her, so it seems likely she was one of the dancers, etc.
This set is described in our original World Tobacco Issues Index as :
BRITISH FILM STARS. Sm. Dark brown. Nd. (25) ... C82-35
It is exactly the same listing in our updated version except for a new code, of C504-425