The Postcard
A postcard bearing no publisher's name that was posted in Croydon on Saturday the 9th. March 1907 to:
Miss Chapman,
'Rougemont',
Hornby Road,
Blackpool,
Lancashire.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"c/o Mrs. Laurie,
4 Bingham Road,
Addiscombe,
Surrey.
I came here on Thursday
with Annie. I shall be going
home on Monday and
taking Hettie back with me.
The doctor said I should
come for a little change.
Mother still keeps about
the same.
Pollie is with Mother along
with the Nurse.
I am just going out for a
short time.
With lots of love and all,
Your loving friend,
Jess".
Grant Brothers Department Store
Note the department store on the left next to the tram.
Grants department store was founded by Mr Richard Grant and his brother Mr William Grant in 1877, as a modest drapery business at no. 17 Croydon High Street. The business grew until the store had over 60 departments, including Hairdressing Salons, China, Glass, Hardware, Restaurants, and outside catering.
Richard Grant died aged 75 in January 1924, and William Grant died on the 3rd. March 1931 aged 79. William and Richard left behind 3 sons between them, R. Donald Grant, W. H. Goss Grant, and Sidney T. Grant, who all ran the store together after their fathers' deaths.
In 1960, when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited Croydon, the Grants store provided the afternoon tea, which was hosted by the mayor.
The Grant family sold the store in 1983, and it finally closed in 1987.
Frederic Stephens
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, the 9th. March 1907 was not a good day for Frederic Stephens because he died on that day.
Frederic George Stephens, who was born on the 10th. October 1827, was a British art critic, and one of the two 'non-artistic' members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Stephens was born to Septimus Stephens of Aberdeen and Ann (née Cook) in Walworth, London and grew up in nearby Lambeth.
Because of an accident in 1837, he was physically disabled and was educated privately. In 1844 he entered the Royal Academy Schools where he first met John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.
Frederic joined their Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, often modelling for them in pictures including Millais's 'Ferdinand Lured by Ariel' (1849) and Ford Maddox Brown's 'Jesus Washing Peter's Feet' (1852–56; Tate, London).
There is a pencil portrait of Stephens by Millais dated 1853 in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
Frederic was so disappointed by his own artistic talent that he took up art criticism and stopped painting. In later life he claimed to have destroyed all his paintings, but three of them are now in the Tate Gallery, London: 'The Proposal' (1850–1), 'Morte d'Arthur' (1849), and 'Mother and Child' (circa 1854–6), along with a pencil drawing of his stepmother Dorothy (1850), a study for an oil portrait he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852.
He also exhibited a portrait of his father (1852–3) at the Academy in 1854. A large pen-and-ink drawing illustrating a subject from Geoffrey Chaucer's 'The Pardoner's Tale', 'Dethe and the Riotours' (1848–54), which he gave to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1854, is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
