|
|
The Black and White Budget, 21 October, 1901
The contests that take place on the Serpentine on a good many
Sunday mornings during the summer months, in connection with the
Serpentine Model Yacht Club, always attract great interest, and
one cannot but admire the ingenuity and perseverance which competitors
must display to bring their tiny vessels to such admirable perfection.
One of the most ardent and active members of the club is Mr T
Winter, an officer of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, who makes
all his own vessels and wins a good many prizes with them. Mr
Winter, who because of his predilection for this form of recreation,
has been christened 'The Admiral' by his comrades, is naturally
very proud that at a contest which was organised at the Crystal
Palace recently for model yachts, he carried off the Silver Challenge
Cup with the aid of his splendid vessel Ladysmith.
|
I bought this image on Ebay for a modest sum. The Black
and White Budget was a general weekly in founded London 1899 and appears
to have had only a short life. I don't know what other material it might
have carried, except that the British Library included its issues for
February 1901 in a collection of representative magazine coverage of
the death of Queen Victoria in January of that year. Nor do I know why
they chose to include this image and text. Possibly the initiative came
from Winter himself, proud of his success in the Crystal Palace competition.
It is interesting that a fire officer should in 1901 have been a leading
light in the Serpentine club, which twenty years before had been a distinctly
upper class group, with Baronets and Guards Colonels among its officers
and Patrons. Though an eminently respectable member of the lower middle
classes, Winter would have been out of his league in such company. This
suggests that the club had moved down the social scale by the end of
the century. Possibly its upper class members had moved to the London
Founded in 1884 on the Round Pond and a consciously superior group of
model yachtsmen.
It is notable that the club seems to have sailed on a Sunday. This
must have been unusual in the Sabbatarian atmosphere of late Victorian
society. Disputes over the propriety of holding National championships
on a Sunday arose in the 1930s and even as late as the 1940 clubs in
Scotland were debating whether to move to Sunday sailing and risk losing
the financial support of their patrons
Russell Potts
|
