Introduction to the old postcard archive

A short history of postcards

Although plain postcards had been around for over twenty years, it wasn’t until 1894 that the Post Office gave the go ahead for picture postcards to be sent through the mail, with the earliest picture postcards showing town and seaside views. This was followed in 1902 by the divided back format, where the view was printed on one side of the card and the plain back was divided into space for both the name and address of the recipient and space for a message.

The U.K. was the first country to bring in this innovation. The success of the picture postcard, the text message of its day, was dependent on:

• The speed and efficiency of the post (there were up to seven deliveries of post a day in the U.K.),
• The reduced postage rate for postcards,
• The continued fashion to ‘take the sea air’ that started in Georgian times, and
• An efficient railway service that transported increasing numbers of not only the upper and middle classes but also the working class to the coast in search of sun, sea and relaxation.

The picture postcard was the ideal way to express a bit of ‘one upmanship’, after all you could afford a holiday by the sea!

To give some idea of the scale of the picture postcard industry, in 1904 Raphael Tuck had 15,000 postcard designs in print, and as picture postcards became more and more popular, it became fashionable to keep your postcards in albums, after all they were too good to just throw away, and some of these early collections form the basis of our archive.

Just as some people were exploring the seaside towns such as Brighton, Blackpool, Scarborough and Morecombe, all within easy travelling distance from a big city, so others were discovering the countryside. Cheap, efficient rail travel meant that holidaymakers could transport their bicycles by train and then spend their holidays cycling from village to village visiting places of interest en route. The countryside was never far from the city by train. Sometimes these cycling holidays might be to visit churches in the various villages the holidaymakers travelled through, they might be sketching or water colour painting holidays but suffice it to say, in every small village there would be a shop or post office where picture postcards could be bought and sent to friends and family back home.

The golden age

The years before the First World War were the ‘golden age’ for picture postcards, and the messages on the cards in our archive have an added poignancy in the light of the fact that many of the writers would within a few years be caught up in the carnage of World War 1. The advent of the telephone in the years following the First World War, coupled with the fact that the production of most picture postcards had centred on Germany, signed the death knell for the picture postcard in the U.K., the picture postcard industry never really recovering from the declaration of hostilities in 1914. The ‘golden age’ was over.

Postcards as a resource for family history

The early picture postcards that survive form a rare resource for family historians and some of these cards appear in our archive, we hope you enjoy both the pictures and the messages.

You may be looking for old postcards showing the town your forebears came from, the church they were baptised in, married or buried from. Perhaps the place where they spent their honeymoon or went on holiday. The appropriate image can add another dimension to your final research.

Sometimes it is even possible to find the street where they lived or worked. Additionally, you may wish to check to see if our archive contains an old postcard sent to one of your forebears or to someone bearing your family name. Our database allows you to do all these things.

The postcards in the Digital History archive are from a private collection started many years ago when a postcard album was given to my grandmother by her sister. In turn my grandmother passed the album on to me when I was a teenager. This ignited my intrest in Edwardian postcards and gradually more and more postcards were added to my collection. Today some of these cards are extremely rare and it's good to be able to share them with a wider audience.

All the images on this web site are reproduced from old postcards originally produced from photographs taken between approximately 1890 and 1920 and you can view both the back and front of every card. I hope you obtain as much pleasure from the images of the postcards as I have done over the years.

The images on this web site are for viewing purposes only and do not portray the quality of the finished item.

You can browse the old postcard database by town or search for a specific family name or simply search by postcard type.