Imagine a time and place where there were six or seven postal deliveries a day; where postboxes were emptied every hour; where using the post was very cheap; and where you could send a postcard at 11 a.m. saying: "I'll be over this afternoon", and be confident the addressee would receive it in advance of your visit.
That, according to Mr Brian Asquith, postcard specialist at Phillips auction house, is an accurate description of the London postal service at the turn of this century. "They didn't need email or faxes" and, priced at only a halfpenny, the postal rate was "cheap, even for those days".
But if cards and stamps were cheap, some postcards posted at that time have since considerably appreciated in value. Mr Asquith has sold a single postcard at auction for £1,450 sterling. Posted in Cobh, county Cork or Queenstown as it was then it had been written by a passenger on the Titanic.
It was inscribed: "This is the ship we're sailing on and we haven't been seasick yet."
It could have fetched even more had not someone, at some stage, defaced it. Mr Asquith explains: "Some idiot had tried to take the stamp off but you could still read the date and time of posting." To hammer home this salutary lesson regarding leaving stamps on old postcards, he adds: "If it had been intact, I reckon it would have been worth £2,500."
Such was the size of the market for postcards at the start of the century that photographers produced them at an impressive pace. "Virtually every village had its photographer," says Mr Asquith. Photographs of accidents were sometimes posted on the day they happened.
In Ireland, the 1916 Easter rising was, of course, photographed. If these were posted at the time of the rebellion, a "killer canceller", that is, a temporary undated postmark, had to be used because the GPO had been burned down. (A "dumb canceller" is if the place isn't indicated on the postmark.)
Mr Asquith says 1916 postcards with the killer canceller postmark should fetch "£50 or more" each, depending on the condition of the card. But he stresses that, with postcards, condition is very important.
Although there are valuable postcards, he cautions that most "have almost no value". "The vast majority of them are worth pence rather then pounds. There's got to be something different about them. Of 250 cards, there might be only 10 that are good 95 per cent of postcards are worth nothing."
Postcards are more likely to be of value dated from before 1918 or, better still, before 1900. "Irish cards are popular because you've a big audience in America and in Britain," he says.
In the main, collectors like postcards which are real, glossy photographs (rather than printed) where there's a lot of activity in the street. "Churches, where nothing is happening, may only be worth £7 for a 1,000 postcards virtually nothing." But, says Mr Asquith, "people like disasters".
A postcard of a motor smash could be worth about £40. Floods, depending on where the flood is, can be worth £20 to £25 per postcard. Pictures of fires tend to fetch £20 to £30 a card.
And, yes, pigs are popular. He had one of pigs in the parlour a sow and seven piglets in the parlour of a pub as part of a lot which fetched £300 sterling in his last auction. One collector was prepared to pay £250 for that card alone.
Mr Asquith is happy for readers to send him photocopies of any unusual postcards, but please do not send the postcards themselves. Write to: Mr Brian Asquith, Phillips, 101, New Bond Street, London W1Y OAS.
