Naylors of Bakewell Glass Dish

Can a piece of glassware be regarded as ephemera? The advertising on this little glass tray seems to make it so. The gorgeous hand rendered text - which on its own is a joy to look at after the eye has been  numbed by the vulgarity of digital type - and the red on white demand attention by default. Even the cheeky everso slightly creepy humanoid-porcine face looks directly at you from within the litho. It's not often that you get the animal's face on the advert for the meat it belongs to these days.  Supermarket packaging seems to assume we don't want to associate the animal with the food as if it will somehow make it distasteful.

Naylors of Bakewell Glass dish 12 x 9 cm C. 1950-60's maybe later.

By its nature an unbroken glass object is potentially ephemeral. It's always poised to become changed and fractured yet still recognisable in parts as its original self. Bakewell, the small Peak District town from where this dish originates is much the same. I spent many childhood summers in and around Bakewell, blissfully unaware that as time and progress advanced the place would change so much from the way I knew it.

The Bakewell of the 21st Century is a pastiche of the place I knew as a little girl. Doubtless the Bakewell of my Childhood in the 1980's was a different one to that of my Father's or Grandfather's and indeed my Great-Great Grandfather who farmed in the area, but I can't help feel that things have changed just a little too far beyond reasonable progress. The life blood of the place has been let, and what remains is a pale mirage amongst the ruins of the original. Although there is still a cattle market every Monday and a traditional Lammas cattle fair in the guise of Bakewell Show, the redevelopment of the market square and the placing of a supermarket in the heart of the farmer's exchange somehow seems to sum up the slow exsanguination of this ancient working rural town.

I've never worked out if this dish was intended to be an ashtray, or simply just an object with an advert on it. Naylors the butchers is long gone from Bakewell, but it's good to know that local butchers in the area still go to market every week and pick the finest beasts for their handmade pies and sausages.

Woman's Weekly Muppets / Rupert Knitting Pattern

As a big Rupert fan I'm thrilled to have in my collection this pull out knitting pattern from a 1980's edition of Woman's Weekly. A Great-Aunt of mine used to get WW and she used to knit me some of the toys or jumpers that often featured as part of the magazine. Indeed the knitting patterns were no doubt part of the selling point of the magazine ( along with no small thanks to Roger Royle and the Robin Family ) It's something to note that you might be hard pressed to find a knitting pattern of any description in a contemporary general interest magazine aimed at the modern woman - even in perhaps the publications such as Prima that push the craft lifestyle choice to the reader. People just don't knit anymore - any why should they even bother to learn when it's cheaper to buy a mass produced garment shipped in from China.

Anyway, I do remember this knitting pattern at the time of publication. As to the date I think I must have been just a little over the age for wanting to sport a Rupert or Kermit jumper despite a continued but perhaps more closeted love for Rupert as teenage years loomed. So I think perhaps Circa 1987 for this pull out. There is some comfort that the Muppets and Rupert still endure and delight as the years pass but almost as certain as the absence of knitting patterns in current woman's magazines I can bet that if someone were to knit these jumpers up today they would cost a pretty penny in such fashion emporiums aimed at the youth and would be sported with much confused post modern irony down Brighton's Laines and beyond. Or maybe I'm projecting a little here . . . .

Rupert and Collecting

In the early 1980's my Grandmother used to cut out the Rupert panels from the Daily Express and save them for me. She also saved for me PG Tips tea cards, stamps and other various items of interest. I had many of these Rupert cuttings but throughout the years of desk culls and sorting through drawers only a treasured few remain in my collection.

Daily Express Newspaper Clipping Circa 1983

As with all good newspaper ephemera, they exhibit tiny gems of information from the time of print. Rupert, of course, transcends any age, he will always live innocently in the fabled world that many Express or Daily Mail readers wail over as a lost paradise, all the more enchanting to right wing idealists because it never really existed. On the reverse are listings for ITV's "Duty Free", the sitcom based on the Spanish package holiday boom that reached glory days in the '80's. We also get a snippet of the dining experiences on offer to the average tabloid reader - Beefeater Restaurants. Breaded mushrooms remained a staple of '30's built mock Tudor dining establishments well into the mid 1990s ( I served hundreds of thousands during a 3 year stint as a Sous Chef at a Tetley restaurant pub) More associated 1980's content in later posts.

Daily Express Newspaper Clipping Circa 1983 - reverse

Back to our little bear friend. As a vehicle for narrative, illustration and storytelling, Rupert is about as pure and as delightful as it gets. I was a big Rupert fan and still am when it comes to the original drawings. I'm not enamoured by current responses to the Rupert brand and if anything sums up the perils of being tied to the renderings of the digital age than this.

On the presumption that this site is an on-line content response to a client's brief, I still find the style garish and unsophisticated and as a result patronising to the developing child. I don't lay the blame on the designer completely. I've worked with many clients who think they know what children want, but are instead obsessed with what they think children want and as a consequence create a sterile response to what should be magical and inviting. The pure beauty found in the original line drawings has been squashed and overwhelmed by the solid pre-school block colours and crude shapes. I'm protective over the original Rupert charm, but nostalgia for my own childhood put aside, I really don't like this "modern" update.

I'm quite sure that all of the client's boxes were ticked - all but the "retain original charm and magic" requisite. Rupert doesn't need re branding for younger children of for any stage of a child's development. The original format panels show how the rhyming couplet caption translates the story perfectly for the younger child. They are captivated by the illustrations and the verse before they progress to the lengthier text, and when they are able to enjoy the text their experience continues to be enriched by the illustrations.

It's not all bad for Rupert. Some older animations of the franchise held close to the beauty and charm of the original line drawings. Geoff Dunbar's Frog Chorus  holds the essence of the original Rupert drawings enhanced via the animation process with empathy and skill. Nostalgic or not, that can't be denied.

When I handle the Rupert clipping I occasionally wonder if I would have had the same love of ephemera if I had been born later. Children growing up now find themselves forced into an age of instant gratification of information and virtual visual reward . If I was a child now, would my grandmother have sent me - in place of saving a clipping from the paper -  a link to the Rupert Eco Explorer's site, which I would have bookmarked and, 25 years later would I think to retrieve the link and imagined my grandmother clicking on the send button? I'd rather have my cut out yellowed newspaper clippings with the edges made by my grandmother's scissors, rendered jagged by the slight tremor that she had in her later years.