A few years ago I received an unusual gift in my Christmas stocking: a vintage pack of Old Maid playing cards. Coming to me as if through a wormhole in Time, the deck originally belonged to one Dorothy Soames of The Rectory, Old Romney, Kent – she inscribed the lid with these details plus the year, 1924.
The game of Old Maid is believed to go back several centuries, but it was the Victorians who first manufactured and marketed dedicated packs. Simple enough for players of all ages beyond infancy, it’s designed for two or more people, their objective being to acquire pairs and be left with no unmatched card. Dedicated Old Maid playing packs contain several pairs of cards and one single, unmatched, Old Maid. The game can be played using an ordinary deck of playing cards, providing one of them – say a Queen, or a Joker – has been removed prior to the commencement of play.
My particular deck of cards, manufactured by Chad Valley games in Harborne, Birmingham, UK, offers a fascinating snapshot of working life in the early decades of the 20th Century. Each character portrayed is a tradesman or artisan of some kind, and each has a counterpart wife (who, naturally for the era, has no identity of her own apart from being her husband’s missus!).
Mr Bobby the Policeman directs an Edwardian motorist (flat cap, tweeds, goggles) while his wife is at home apprehending a burglar and his loot. Mr Slapdash the Artist daubs paint on a canvas whilst his wife daubs rouge on her lips. Mr Knockout the Boxer is poised with his gloves on, while his wife appears to mete out her own brand of violence with the aid of a red hot poker.
Meanwhile Mr Ikeymo, ‘the Old Clothes Man’, brandishes his own jacket whilst his wife (conspicuously bedecked in sparkling earrings) seems to be considering selling it. Nowadays, the appearance of this latter couple in the deck is problematic. Old Clothes Man was undoubtedly an occupation in the 19th and early 20th Centuries (and, indeed, probably earlier). The inference of their name, however, is unequivocal – ‘Ikeymo’ was a derogatory term for Jewish people, being a fusion of Isaac and Moses, two common surnames. It’s considered to be a racial slur, and is perhaps typical of the casual racism prevalent in Britain at the time.
Meanwhile, Mr Howlynn the Singer performs The Toreador (from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, first performed in 1875) in his best bib and tucker while, at home, his wife plays piano and the dog sings along. Mr Dooley the Hod Carrier climbs his ladder, clay pipe in mouth, while his wife rubs the laundry out at home. (Dooley being of Irish origin, there’s another stereotype in play here.) Mr Lugsail the boatman (literally, he lugs the sails – geddit) surveys the sea while his bonneted wife guards a basket of blankets as she gazes seaward to one of her husband’s vessels.
Then there’s Mr Italiano, the Ice Cream Man, who is depicted selling directly from his cart, while his wife – in traditional Italian dress – tends two caged birds. It’s worth pausing here to reflect on the rise of ice cream as a consumer item in Britain. In the 1860s Carlo Gatti, a Swiss Italian, first imported ice cream to these shores on a large scale. Gatti went on to open a chain of ice cream restaurants, and his success was later built on by numerous other enterprising Italians. The late 1890s and early 1900s saw the rise of the family ice cream business in British cities, some of the most famous including the Nardinis, the Morellis and the Minghellas. When Chad Valley chose to create the colourful Mr Italiano, the Ice Cream Man, then, they were merely reflecting a facet of everyday commercial life as it was back then.
An ice cream barrow belonging to Francesco Penna & Sons, Hull
Photo from www.hullccnews.co.uk
Other than the Old Maid herself, the final character in the pack is an intriguing exception to the Mr & Mrs rule: Mr Gutterman “The Hawker” has no wife. Perhaps he sold her? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a hawker as “a person who travels about selling goods, typically advertising them by shouting.” Other names for the same occupation include costermonger and gutter-man. Prevalent in Victorian times, the practice has largely died out in Britain, however it thrives in towns and cities around the world, wherever tourists are plagued by locals keen to sell their wares.
So that’s the set, but what of its original owner, Dorothy Soames of The Rectory, Old Romney, Kent? According to Wikipedia, Old Romney is a village and civil parish in the Folkestone and Hythe district of Kent, England. Its 12th Century church, St Clements, had a rector in years gone by, but to date I can find no reference online to The Rectory itself. I have, though, seen reference to a Rectory Lane. If anyone knows more about this address, or even about Dorothy Soames – who, we must assume, was a child in 1926 – I’d love to hear from them.
I wonder how many hands have dealt these cards in the last 94 years!
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