Newsletter - 2024-10-19

J. Millhoff & Co. Ltd [tobacco : London, England] "Famous `Test` Cricketers" (1928) 21/27 -  M699-160.a : M108-15.a

As befits our Australian theme this week let us start with our Australian Ace, William Harold ‘Bill’ Ponsford, who was born today, in 1900, in Melbourne. He was the son of a postman, but one with English lineage, all the way from Devon, whose family arrived there courtesy of the Gold Rush. 

Our man was a giant amongst cricketers, and during the decade he was playing he took almost fourteen thousand runs, at club level and just over two thousand in the various Tests. Amongst these totals are scores of triple centuries (four of those) and quadruple-hundreds (two of those). 

Oddly, when he was at school he was highly regarded as a baseball player, so much so that he was offered a place with the New York Giants. He did not take it up, though he did play, off and on, in Australia, and at quite a high level, right until the late 1930s.  

His break into cricket came courtesy of the First World War, when teams were decimated by men leaving to fight. He was actually fifteen when he played his debut for St. Kilda`s First Team, in 1916. Then, after the war, in 1921, he was given a chance to play for his county, Victoria, against England. He scored just twenty five, in two innings, but he was an impressive figure on the field, his presence enhanced by huge pads and a larger than normal bat. 

It was enough to see him captain of Victoria vs Tasmania at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in February 1923, and the selector`s faith was upheld when he broke the World Record for the highest score in a single innings, with four hundred and twenty-nine runs.

The following season he found himself selected for Australia, against the visiting England squad, and made a century. At the end of the Test he had a total score of four hundred and sixty-eight runs. There was no tour the following year but he was again selected to go across to England in 1926. He was one of the younger players, and surprised everyone by scoring a century in his very first innings at Lords Cricket Ground. However it was insufficient to win the entire Test, though we will never know how much of that was due to our man suffering tonsilitis and having to withdraw for several of the matches.

He retired aged just thirty-three, stating that cricket was no longer a game, but a battle - though he did play at club level until 1939, when he tried to enlist in the Royal Australian Air Force, only to be rejected on grounds of poor eyesight, specifically colour blindness.

Many feel that his experience in the infamous "Bodyline" tour the year before had soured him and led to his retirement, he was injured several times during it, and his hand was even broken. He did, however, continue to be associated with the Melbourne Cricket Club, behind the scenes, for thirty more years. And he lived on until he was ninety. 

As for cards, the Trading Card Database/WHPonsford has him on eighty-one cards. They feel his "Rookie" card was issued with "Pals" magazine, in 1923/4. As this mentions his four hundred and twenty-nine runs, taken in February of that year in the Victoria vs Tasmania match, I would tend to agree, though if you peer at the card it does say it was issued on December 1st, 1923, so there might be earlier, yet unseen. This was not the British "Pals" by the way, it was an offshoot, issued in Australia. 

The Database also proves that his cards come in three batches - the first one dates from the height of his fame, starting in 1923 and continuing until 1934 . Then there is a small selection of reprints which come from a book called "Classic Cricket Cards", designed to allow for the cards to be removed. After that, the third group, starting in the 1990s, are predominantly new cards using vintage images, but with new text, not straight reprints. I find these fascinating, and they are much more acceptable than a reprint could ever be. However I do, for the most part, find modern backs a bit uninspiring. What do you think?  

This set is described in our original World Tobacco Issues Index as ;

FAMOUS "TEST" CRICKETERS. Size (a) small, 66 x 35 (b) medium, 75 x 51. Black and white photos. Nd. (27). ... M108-14

This text is identical in our updated version, save for the fact that small and large are abbreviated, and that iit has a new code, of M699-160

You can see the two versions at the Trading Card Database, by clicking either small or large

Do note too that the image on our card is identical to that used on Ogden`s "Australian Test Cricketers 1928-29"

Sanitarium [trade : cereal : O/S - Australia] "Man Made Wonders of The World" (1987) 7/12 - SA2-87.2

So here is our beautiful building - and it is also another Australian subject, plus another card from our Weet-Bix makers of the week, Sanitarium.

Funnily enough this was not going to be the subject for today; I was going to do the first episode of "The Six Million Dollar Man" but then I discovered that this was incorrect, as I often do when I think I have a ll the subjects sorted - today was not the first but the second episode (though to be totally honest these were television films, not episodes). So I hunted around for something else and came across the fact that the Sydney Opera House was opened by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II today in 1973. Now this was a remarkable coincidence, as I had been sent this scan by Mr. Spender as a possible card of the day, but there was not space to add it in. So it all worked out very well. 

The building of this Opera House did not always work out so well. It started simply enough though, as the idea of a performing arts hub. This, which had been talked about for many years, without action, was seized upon by the English composer Sir Eugene Goossens, newly relocated to Sydney in 1947 as the conductor of their Symphony Orchestra, and not too happy to find that this was based at the Town Hall, rather than at a specialised concert venue.  

By 1955 a site had been found at Bennelong Point. This was, and some feel remains, Aboriginal land, so to this day there is much controversy.

The design of the building was to be chosen in open competition, heedless of the country from which the architect came or now resided. It cost ten Australian pounds to enter, and there were, in total, two hundred and thirty three entries, from twenty-eight different countries. 

One of the forms found their way to Copenhagen in Denmark and the office of Jørn Utzon. The competition had been going for a while when he found it, and he only just managed to beat the deadline for entry. There are plenty of stories about how his design came to be chosen, but it was radically different from most of the others, sweeping and modernist and it aimed to be spectacular from which ever part of the surrounding area you viewed it. It also took inspiration from the sails of the boats which passed it both now and long ago, and paid homage to those whose port of entry to their new life in the new world was Sydney Harbour, however long ago that was. 

The problem was that it was only a drawing, and making it work more of a struggle. It took three years just to build the roof, but longer even before to work out how, and even if, it would remain in the air. And all the time the costs were mounting. In 1966 things came to a head and Mr Utzon left, some say forcibly and others that he had simply had enough. He always hoped that he would be asked back, but never was, for in his place came Australian architect Peter Hall. He was asked to take over, and to his credit, refused to do so before he had cleared it with Mr. Utzon. Which he did, only to find that there was almost nothing in place, no plans, or drawings, all of which had been removed. Despite this he struggled on, and the building was completed today, the 20th of October, in 1973.

Strangely it appears on very few cards, only four, according to the Trading Card Database/Sydney Opera House. However I can add a few more, namely :

• 1964 - Shell Petrol - "Project Cards - Citizenship Series", where card 55 may be entitled "Architects" but they are looking at a model of the Sydney Opera House (SH6-1.1)
• 1965 - Milkana cheese - "This Modern World" (card 21) - which says "this fantastic building is still unfinished after ten years, and the cost will now be over £30 million. 
• 1996 - Tuckfields - Australian Heritage Card Series` "Famous Places" subset, card 96

Our card is too modern for our original Australian and New Zealand Index, for it was issued in 1987, and the last set in there is from 1982; rather pleasingly, that one is also the final set we featured this week, as our Friday Card of the Day for the 18th of October 2024. Our card does not appear until part II of that work, where it appears under New Zealand Issues, as : 

1987-2 Man Made Wonders of the World. 97 x 75. Nd. (12) ... SA2-87.2

Topps [trade : bubble gum : O/S - USA] "Star Wars" third series (1977) card 152.

Now a while ago I briefly touched on today`s StarWars Star, and so here is a chance to flesh it out a little, For today in 1956 was born the leading lady of the original Star Wars films, Carrie Frances Fisher.

Now maybe I was too young, but when I saw Star Wars I had no idea of who she was, and it came as a surprise to learn that she was the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and the singer Eddie Fisher. She was only two years old when her mother and father divorced, and her father married Elizabeth Taylor. A year later her mother also remarried. 

When she was three she appeared on screen for the first time, in a documentary about her mother. Ten years later she was in a second, similar, show, called Debbie Reynolds and the Sound of Children. But it was not until high school that a chance came to try out for a musical, all on her own, on Broadway. This was the spark that kept the flame alight, and she moved to London to study drama.

Her breakthrough was a film which is often, wrongly, quoted to be her first time on screen. This was in 1975, and the film was "Shampoo" starring Warren Beatty, who also wrote and produced it. Amazingly, her next appearance was in Star Wars. She suited her part very well, the feisty princess who was rather a tomboy, and enjoyed the adventure as much as the men did that she fought beside. The fame of the film led her into other roles, but also brought her heartache, and her off screen life and romances were often not a success. If you want to read about that sort of thing it is widely available online. I am not so keen, I believe that everyone has a right to privacy, and it is kind of nice to allow them that.

She remained fond of Star Wars, and appeared in many of the later versions. She had just finished filming on "Star Wars - The Last Jedi, in 1916" when she died, aged just sixty. The film therefore became her posthumous tribute, though she also appeared in the 2019 film "Star Wars - The Rise of Skywalker" which was made using unreleased footage from "The Force Awakens", which had been made in 2015.

We have mentioned Star Wars and its variations before, and I admit that I am a fan, especially of the three original films. However we have not shown this card. The home page for the Star Wars sets is actually our Card of the Day for the 1st of May, 2024, simply because it shows a blue bordered first series card, and it houses the listings of all the sets. Though it does need a bit of a reworking, I freely admit. Now there is another reason to choose that as the home page, because the only sets that appear in our British Trade Indexes (or the ones issued so far) are the first, blue bordered, set and the second, red bordered, one. It does not even mention the stickers. 

So here we have series three. It was not expected that the film would be such a big success as to need a series three and you can tell that because the blue bordered set was numbered 1-66 and the red bordered one was numbered 1A to 66A. That meant that they faced a dilemma with our set. Oddly they chose not to make them 1C to 66C, but instead to number them from 133 to 198. There were also stickers accompanying this set, with black borders that look like film cells, identical to those from the fourth fifth and sixth series stickers which followed - and you can see the fifth series ones as our Card of the Day for the 30th of April 2024.

Guerin Boutron [trade : chocolate : O/S - Paris, France] "La Navigation Aerienne" / "Aerial Navigation" (1907) 18/84

Leaping onwards, our Planned Plunge celebrates Monsieur Andre Jacques Garnerin, who, today in 1797, made the first parachute jump in Paris. So it is especially thrilling to have a card which was issued in Paris too.

He had been born on the 31st of January 1769, also in Paris. We know little about his early life, only that he had a brother, three years older, Jean-Baptiste-Olivier Garnerin. There is also a suspicion that our man changed his christian name in honour of his teacher, Jacques Alexandre César Charles, who was an inventor, scientist, and most importantly the launcher of the world`s first hydrogen gas powered balloon  in 1783. It also appears that both brothers studied under the same teacher, for they worked closely together on their own balloons and experiments. However only our man was considered as the Official Aeronaut of France. 

But enough about balloons, for there was another string to our man`s bow, and that was the idea of flying a man safely to earth. The two, of course, were connected, for ballooning was risky. He had lots of time to toy with his ideas, in his head at least, for her was captured by the British during the French Revolutionary Wars, which had started in 1792, and he was not released until 1795. We can tell he was thinking in this way because almost immediately he started to put those plans both on paper and into action, and he had learned sufficiently enough to demonstrate one, today, in 1797. This is said to have been very similar to an umbrella, but if we are being honest it was more like a parasol, for it was silk, strengthened.

The event took place in Paris, at Parc Monceau, and it seems to have been quite a spectacle, for he climbed into a small basket which was suspended beneath a larger balloon by means of a rope. Then, about three thousand feet up, he theatrically cut the rope. The parachute was, until then, concealed, closed up like an umbrella, in the small basket in which he sat. And as he plunged to the ground he opened his device and his plummet was slowed, a bit. He had underestimated the fact that the basket would travel so fast, and there was a bit of bouncing along the ground when it landed, but he survived, and that was a miracle in itself. 

He repeated this performance, regularly, hoping to attract fellow enthusiasts to join him in his experiments. However in 1798 he caused a minor scandal by announcing that a lady would join him in a future experiment. This horrified everyone, and he was hauled up before the police, who quizzed him as to the effects of flight on the female body, and the morals of being together, unobserved, in a pretty tight fitting basket. The flight was therefore forbidden, but it was later allowed to go ahead. 

The woman was known as Citoyenne Henri, which is an odd name, especially as little is known of her, save records that she was born in 1777, so she was twenty-one. Citoyenne also translates to citizen, a strange choice for a christian name - and Henri is a man`s name. Some even say she may have been a man, in woman`s clothing, which is a very interesting thought. But moving swiftly on from that, several women had flown in balloons already so there was no reason for deception, if one indeed took place. Other records say she was young and beautiful. Anyway the flight, to me, seems a bit of a disappointment, because all they did was fly the balloon away, to a distance of about twenty miles, and then land it. I presumed that she too would use a parachute, and I imagine that the police thought this too, hence their concern.

Then the most curious thing happened for she seems to have faded away and left no other record. Not only that but a short while later another woman joined our man in his basket, and then he announced she was to become his wife. So I have to wonder as to why this woman did not make that first trip with him? To me this is all very odd.... 

This set is also odd for it is quoted to have been issued in a whole range of years. However as it is quite a scarce set i think that this is misinformation, and has been taken from the date on the card, which is actually the date that the event shown took place. I have found the latest date do far to be 1908, card 80, which shows a Zeppelin. I imagine that perhaps later numbers may show later craft, so do let me know 

Topps [trade : bubble gum : O/S - Brooklyn, New York, USA]  "Gee Whiz Quiz" / "Isolation Booth" (1957) 37/88 

Our Whirling Wind turns out to be tumultuous indeed, for this is an unusual card, which I have much enjoyed researching - and it also has many layers.

So let us start with the first one, the "Isolation Booth". A lot of collectors, and dealers, think is the title of the set. However that is just a coincidence, it is just that on the back of every card the sign of the Isolation Booth appears at the very top. Whereas the packets call it "Gee Whiz Quiz".

Now an Isolation Booth basically means any place where one person can be apart from another. The original meaning was medical, to prevent the exchanging of disease. However at some point, during the rise of the quiz shows which gripped America in the 1950s, it was realised that by placing one of a two person team inside a booth where the isolation was by silence, they could make two people answer the same question. The most popular of these, at least at the start, was NBC`s "Twenty One", which started in 1956. That ties in very nicely with our cards, and if you look at show footage their isolation booth is very like the one on the cards, tall and straight sided, a bit like a walk in shower.  Twenty-one was the number of points that you could get if you were clever enough to know all the answers - or not, as it was discovered that the show was technically cheating. This tarnished the fun and it was removed from the schedules in 1958. Quiz shows took a long time to recover as well - and this stayed in the memory of many people, which is how we came to have a cinema film called "Quiz Show" in 1994 that was based on the saga of "Twenty One". In fact that showed it to have been more tarnished than most people had thought, as right from the second episode the answers were given to many of the contestants, and they became more like actors, delivering the lines as they were provided, missing some answers, too, in order to make it seem all above board. It all came to a crux with college professor Charles Van Doren, who was brought in purely in order to remove a contestant who knew most of the answers on his own, and did not want to play the game under the network`s terms. Professor Van Doren was fed the answers, and instructed that he had to get some wrong even if he knew them off his own back. Eventually he became the champion, in 1957, but things started to ooze out of the woodwork, helped along somewhat by the defeated man, and the programme was eventually one of the several tainted quiz shows brought up before the grand jury in the Autumn of 1958. Once this was underway, several other former contestants stepped up to the confessions plate and that was pretty much the end of the show. Now the oddest thing of all is that the last episode ever to be screened was on October 17, 1958. And it is Thursday October the 17th today, as I write this....

Next to the tornado. The one of which our card speaks was the Tri-State Tornado of March 18th, 1925, which killed almost seven hundred people and injured over two thousand along its two hundred and nineteen mile trail of terror. It lasted for three and a half hours, sweeping through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, hitting wind speeds of three hundred miles an hour, and at some places it was a mile wide. It also spawned other tornadoes as it went along, and at one time there were twelve some spinning near and some spiralling off across the country. There is a really learned treatise on this event at weather.gov/25Tornado.

That tornado, on this card, however, is but a tangent for our event, which marks one that swept through Lincolnshire, in England, on this day in 1666. Now this was very interesting to me as people always talk of the Plague and the Great Fire of London, but here we have something equally unusual at the same time which seems to have been forgotten.

Our tornado started in Welbourn and it was accompanied by a huge storm, with thunder and large hailstones, about nine inches in diameter but not spheres, much less shapely, and jagged. Welbourn was pretty much flattened, lots of trees were torn from the ground, and one child was killed. It then hit Willingmore, which is no longer on the map, again houses were flattened and two children killed. It seemed to lose a bit of its strength then and merely skirted a place called Nanby, which again has faded from the records, and just hit a few houses on the outlying parts. However in Boothby Graffoe it removed the steeple from the roof of the Church of St. Andrew, and damaged the building severely in the process - it had to be rebuilt, and in those records it mentions that an earlier Church was "destroyed during a storm in 1666"; the only survivor being a tablet which bore the date of 1626. However on the town website it states that "the church is the third on this site, the first, mentioned in Domesday in 1085, demolished by a hurricane in 1666"

Strangely, even at the time it was reported not to be of great width, but just swirling round in a moving circle. Estimates today put it at sixty yards across.

Its next port of call was Sherwood Forest, in Nottingham, where it pulled up many trees. Then it raged on to the River Trent where small boats were pulled from the water and plunged to the depths. 

Curiously this is not an isolated event. Great Britain usually has between twenty-five and fifty tornadoes every year, the highest number of any country other than the Netherlands United Kingdom experiences around 30–50 tornadoes per year on average, but the number can vary from year to year. That is more than in America. 

Our set was almost certainly issued to tap into the great enthusiasm for quiz shows, hoping to enlarge the audiences under the guise of education. The cards are brightly coloured and fun, and the questions are designed to intrigue children. You can see a checklist of the titles at the Trading Card Database/IsolationBooth.

There was also another element, for the back poses a question which is only revealed by a piece of magic red paper, actually cellophane, which, when placed across the back of the card made the hidden answer appear as if by magic. The cellophane sheets, sadly, are seldom found - they were used and lost or found their way into the rubbish. 

Nabisco [trade : cereal : O/S - Australia] "United Nations in Action" (1969) /24 - NA2-17

Our Plan for Peace is another change from what I originally wrote down now. I did intend to continue the story of the Armada, for there was another, that met its dismal end wrecked off Cape Finisterre in 1596. However I could find no trace of any cartophilic record of that one.

So instead we are moving to a more peaceable event, and to United Nations Day, which, oddly, is another card issued Down Under in Australia.

This set appears in our original Australian and New  Zealand Index, RB.30, issued in 1983, as : 

United Nations in Action. 71 x 60. Nd. (24). Australian issue, 1969. Back "Wall maps at 15c ... Nabisco Office in your state" ... NA2-17

You can see all the cards in this set at the Trading Card Database/NabiscoUN, and it is amazing what they do, a lot of which goes completely unnoticed by the world at large. 

They began as the Second World War was drawing to a close and most of the World that remained wanted peace. So in June 1945 fifty countries sent a person to San Francisco, and a conference which was hastily called the United Nations Conference on International Organization. This attempted to listen to every one who had made the journey, and to set up a framework of how to move forward, which became the U.N. Charter, today in 1945. 

Next year they will have been in existence eighty years, However, and sadly, many of their aims, as of then, are still not solved as of now. There is still no sign of international peace, people still do not feel secure in their homelands, there are constant claims for humanitarian aid, human rights even the most basic are not being provided, and many international laws are broken on a continual basis. Where one of these is solved, another breaks out elsewhere, and sometimes just around the corner, almost immediately. 

We may think they do little - but it is only by a miracle they manage to do anything at all. They go in to places that we dare not, and they often, too often, give their lives to protect people they do not even know. Maybe this is the way that angels walk amongst us on the Earth.

Upper Deck [commercial : cards : O/S - USA] "Heroes" (2009) 341/416

To close, then, let us speak of art, and of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad María de los Remedios Alarcón y Herrera Ruiz Picasso - who was born today in 1881, and was a Cubist Character indeed. The Ruiz was his mother`s maiden name. 

Had he been born earlier he may not have had such success and worldwide fame. His art appealed to the world as it struggled and grew and most of all rebelled against what it was told to consider of as art. He was an artist above all, in many materials, etching, painting and sculpting, making ceramics, writing prose and poetry, and most of all being open to the enthusiasm of life. He had four children, two wives, and many lovers. He touched on many styles of art and influenced many more. And he did it all through the turmoil of a Civil War and two World Wars, whilst not being afraid to tell the truth and stand up against many of the things that made him outraged.

His father was also an artist, and a teacher at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where Pablo was also taught. Yet he admitted his inspiration did not come from schooling but from life, his techniques being honed by examining other artists` works in galleries and museums, and adding his own unique spin. 

He, and his art, appears on quite a few cards, starting with, according to the Trading Card Database/Picasso, the 1962 set of Lyons Maid "Famous People". What you may not knoYou w about that card is that the painting shown is an actual Picasso, painted in 1938, and known as "Candle Palette Head of Red Bull". This is in a private collection, somewhere. 

We are working on a link to an earlier set though. This was issued by Nicoty of Berlin as part of the set called "Wer Ist Wer" - and was sold at Loddon Auctions a while ago. We will keep you updated with this story

Now our set is very confusing, for it is called "Historical Heroes" on the card, but that is but a sub section of this set. However, the only packets I have managed to find are named as  Football Heroes.

The cards begin with NFL Heroes, which cover the first three hundred cards, then card 301 starts a variety of Sports Heroes, beginning with the figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi. Our card, number 341, of Picasso, begins the section of Historical Heroes, all manner of them, including a card of the Woodstock Festival. Card 361 starts Rock Heroes, with Pete Best, the original drummer for the Beatles (and, Beatles fans, he appears on four cards in this set, 361 to 364 inclusive). As for  cards 400-440, these are again Football Heroes. Pablo Picasso pops up again as card 441, which starts Historical Heroes all over again. Then card 471 to 489 are known as Football Doubles, for two players appear on each card. 

This brings me to the most confusing thing of all about this set, because quite a lot of numbers were not issued. You had probably noticed this already from the fact that there are four hundred and sixteen cards in the set and the last card numbered above is 489. I do not know why the cards were not issued - so if anyone does, please tell us!