The Empathy Podcast with Oisin Lunny

I can’t recall exactly how or when I first met Oisin Lunny – it was through digital media/multiplatform circles. But I do clearly (that is, as clearly as was possible in the circumstances) recall listening to his band in a rowdy basement in Watermint Quay, Hackney on big nights among the London Irish Murphia – they were called Marxman, a pioneering Celtic hip-hop band that used the bodhran, the traditional Irish drum, for their beats. The band was on Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud label (alongside the great Young Disciples among other footstomping acts which defined the 90s). They had the distinction of having their first single banned by the BBC and their third one performed on Top of the Pops. Oisin making his marx in music is no surprise given his heritage – his da is Donal Lunny, Irish producer extraordinaire and member of seminal bands Planxty and Moving Hearts (with the likes of Christy Moore). Oisin has moved the family on from the bouzouki to all things digital and mobile (but with a healthy respect for the bodhran and the Irish songbook).

Oisin in Marxman (left)

Among his digital marketing related activities Oisin produces a podcast about Empathy called The Empathy Podcast. He recently recorded an episode with me in which we discussed the relationship between Empathy, Creativity, Connection and Networks. Here is the programme [Running Time: 22 mins].

Another Marxman on Simple Pleasures.

Marxman with Sinead O’Connor:

“Ship Ahoy” by Marxman from Oisin Lunny on Vimeo.

The Casting Game No.s 102 & 103 – Triple Frontier special

 

Charlie Hunnam

as

Jonny Wilkinson

and

Oscar Isaac (in Third Frontier)

as

Ian McShane (in The Battle of Britain)

The Casting Game No. 101

Dean Martin

Dean Martin in Rio Bravo (1959)

as

Victor Mature

Victor Mature in My Darling Clementine (1946)

understudied by Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester Stallone in Rambo V: Last Blood (2019)

 

The Casting Game No. 100

Eric Ambler

played by

Michael Caine

Lost Postcard No. 5

The last of the re-found batch of postcards as explained here.

This one is the most impenetrable. Very few clues. I can’t even tell if it’s a mass-produced card or a one-off/short run for a family or individual. The girl looks pretty young – perhaps 16 or less. No clues in her clothing – a simple white smock with a little detail or perhaps piece of jewellery centrally at the neck.

On the reverse the printed words are: Post x Card, Correspondence, Address Only. No stamp. In the stamp space a logo: TIC in a horseshoe.

But thanks to the internet, it turns out that actually enables us to date the card. TIC stands for Thomas Illingworth & Co.

On vintage British postcards the postage stamp square is where the manufacturer would commonly place their brand mark or logo. Thomas Illingworth & Co. were a paper manufacturer founded around 1904. TIC manufactured the Horse Shoe Brand of photographic paper in London NW10.

The large photographic supplies company Ilford bought a controlling interest in TIC in 1919.  The business was fully absorbed into the Ilford Group around 1930. During this period (1919-30) date coding appears on TIC Horse Shoe postcards. A conscientious, dogged amateur, Geoff Caulton from Norfolk, had a stab at decoding these symbols around 2010. Here’s what he worked out:

My card has a single tiny X between the words Post and Card. So 1920 by Caulton’s calculations.

The Norfolk man explains: “I have included the Horseshoe brand in this decade because after checking hundreds of dated photographs with this mark I have yet to see one dated outside the twenties.
Correction ‘except one or two dated 1919 and one or two dated 1930’.
Unless there is evidence to the contrary I would date any card with this mark to the 1920s.”

Caulton surmises that these date marks serve a quality control purpose for the photographic paper/card on which the postcards are printed.

Parenthetically, my maternal grandfather, Ian Harris, would love this one – he was a scientist who specialised in printing photographic images. He worked for Picture Post and Metal Box among others. His Picture Post story is covered here. I have memories of him using Ilford products.

Caulton’s theory is this: “All Real Photographic postcards started life as a pre-printed sheet of photographic sensitive card. Each photographer’s stock of photographic paper postcards had a shelf life.
If you look between the two words POST and CARD on a T.I.C Horseshoe card you should see a symbol. These symbols could be taken as typographic decoration. However I believe they have a purpose in what would now be called quality control. I suggest they represent the manufacturer’s date of production, possibly a span of six months.
There is an identifiable pattern. For example in my own collection of T.I.C horseshoe portraits I have four unrelated portraits, each dated 1922. All four have the ‘double dagger’ symbol between the words Post & Card. This cannot be chance or coincidence.
I would not be bold enough to suggest that a card can be precisely dated using these symbols but they can certainly be batched into early, middle and late twenties. I have extracted the dated portrait cards from my collection and found a very significant clustering of dates for certain symbols. There are of course stray cards which were probably inscribed many months after they were printed and other inscriptions may be inaccurate but there are enough clues to indicate there is information of value here.
My instinct tells me that a single symbol represents the first half of a year and a double symbol the second. It is only a theory but the evidence is strong and I am convinced I am on the right track.”

That’s what’s great about the Web. It gave birth to an age of the Amateur, in the true sense of the word, “a lover of something”. True expertise lies in such people as Caulton in the Internet era.

Thomas Illingworth, founder of Thomas Illingworth & Co. Ltd., was the son of a photographer also called Thomas Illingworth,  whose firm was based in Halifax, Yorkshire and also eventually had studios in Huddersfield (Bradford Rd.) and Bradford (128 St Stephen’s Road, West Bowling). Thomas Illingworth Senior was born in Oldham in 1838. He learnt the photography trade in the studio of his maternal grandfather, John Eastham, who was based in St Ann’s Square, Manchester.

Bear in mind that the first photograph (i.e. the earliest known surviving photo made in a camera) dates from 1826 or 1827 so Eastham is pretty early to the business. Eastman took Daguerreotypes and was a “Photographer to the Queen” (Victoria).

Here’s that first photo – taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the view from an upstairs window at his estate, Le Gras, in Burgundy, France.

Thomas Illingworth Snr. married Amelia Oates in 1859. They had seven children – Thomas Jnr. was the only boy, born in 1867.

Snr.’s studio work

Jnr. went to London aged 19 and set himself up as a photographic printer and dealer at 38 Sherriff Road, West Hampstead. That’s four and a half miles from where I’m writing this (at home).

Two years later he moved to larger premises at Ruckledge Avenue, Willesden. Then in 1896 he opened a showroom at 5 Soho Square (or Street), W1. In Willesden he got increasingly involved in the manufacture of photographic paper.

The catalogues of the annual exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society (of which my Picture Post grandfather was a Fellow) list addresses for Thomas Illingworth & Co.:
1898 – 5 Soho Street; and Oxford Street, W. [a route I take often to cut through Soho Square to Frith, Greek and Dean Streets]
1900 & 1901 – The Photo Works, Willesden Junction, N.W.

His business continued to thrive so moved to a new factory in Cumberland Avenue, Park Royal. The foundation stone was laid on 4th September 1912. Between 1911 and 1914 the Manufacturing department trebled in size.

Jnr. married Marta Ann Midgely in 1891. They had six children. Their eldest son, yet another Thomas Illingworth (Thomas Midgely Illingworth), took over the firm when Jnr. retired in 1922, going to the big dark room in the sky in 1923, three years after my postcard. Jnr. Jnr. (i.e. Thomas Midgely Illingworth) took the business closer to Ilford until it was finally amalgamated, with him becoming a Director of Ilford in the process.

I’ve found a few other Horseshoe cards online:

The date code (1922)

The logo

Blank reverse of a TIC card (1919)

Front (1919) – not my one

Is the dark shadow at the bottom some kind of modesty? or a mistake?

Back to my card…

On the reverse of mine is a short lightly pencilled message:

Doff

With fondest

Love

Danny

So from meagre clues we have come some way. Who Doff, Danny and the girl on the front are, we’re unlikely ever to know. But who knows – this is the Internet…

1928 (reverse of tennis portrait below)

from http://www.cabinetcardgallery.com

another pencilled message

I found a fascinating collection of 67 TIC cards here https://www.flickr.com/photos/alwyn_ladell/sets/72157645197389979/ gathered by Alwyn Ladell. He has captioned this one: Women’s Ward, Boscombe Hospital, Shelley Road, Boscombe, Bournemouth, Dorset
T.I.C. (Thomas Illingworth & Co.) Bailey, 228a Old Christchurch Road, Bournemouth.
Postally unused (c.1923).

 

 

Quote of the Day: Going Gaga

Today the Internet Association (UK), as led by my former Channel 4 colleague Daniel Dyball who spoke for them on BBC Radio news this morning, is presenting to the UK Parliament their suggestions for regulation of social media from the big tech firms including Facebook and Twitter.

On Sunday night Lady Gaga performed an intense version of what proved to be the Oscar-winning original song, Shallow from A Star is Born, with Bradley Cooper.

 

Lady Gaga said of online rumours of a love affair between herself and her co-star based on the performance:

social media, quite frankly, is the toilet of the Internet

Nice, concise turn of phrase.

In full: “…social media, quite frankly, is the toilet of the Internet. I mean, what it has done to pop culture is abysmal.”