In this, our first round-up of 2010, we bring you a taster of ME & You, the new Mary Evans magazine. To follow we have a menu of picture delights from Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s news photographs to workhouse images from the Peter Higginbotham Collection, via some charming children’s illustrations from the pen of Charles Robinson. Read on for these and other Mary Evans’ morsels.

ME & You

This month sees the first edition of our new 8-page magazine, ME & You, designed to bring you the best of Mary Evans. With this thrice-yearly publication, we aim to present aspects of the collection in more depth and to offer entertaining and relevant snapshots of history as seen through the lens of Mary Evans. The first issue, which is sent out this week to our clients, is even embellished with a £100 prize crossword.

If you would like a copy and haven’t received one by 15th January, please email me&you@maryevans.com.

Sueddeutsche Zeitung

Our association with the archive of Sueddeutsche Zeitung in 2009 steps into the new year with the captioning and uploading of 1000 new images to our website. Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which began publication in October 1945 and was the first newspaper to receive a licence from the post-war US administration of Bavaria, is now the largest German national daily newspaper with a readership of over 1 million.

Subjects covered in this latest batch of photographs include the Berlin Wall and life in East Germany, images of two world wars, and stars such as Elvis, Gloria Swanson and Alfred Hitchcock.

For an edited selection, please click here.

A book of shops

Charles Robinson (1870-1937), brother of ‘Gadget King’ William Heath Robinson, was also a prolific artist and illustrator, and we are proud to represent work by both creators. We have just added a series of delightful pictures that Charles Robinson completed for ‘The Shopping Day’ by Clare Bridgman, published by Dent in 1902, part of the Bairn Books series. The illustrations show young girls and boys paying visits to various shops and learning about what they sell, including the fishmonger’s, the haberdasher and the stationer’s, wherein may be bought “copy-books, pencils, ink, quills, pens and stick-phast.”

Click here to see the whole series.

In the workhouse

The subject of the workhouse is a perennially popular one. We seem drawn to its bleak, forbidding history. Although workhouses in Britain date from the beginning of the 17th century, it was in 1834 with the Poor Law Amendment Act that the image of the chilling, austere workhouse as represented in such novels as ‘Oliver Twist’ lodged itself in our collective consciousness. The threat of the workhouse was intended to act as a deterrent to the able-bodied poor. It was not until 1930 that the workhouse era officially came to a close.

Social historian Peter Higginbotham has long been collecting images of workhouses. His collection, which we are pleased to announce we are now representing, includes vintage photographs and prints, ephemera related to workhouse life and modern photographs of surviving workhouse buildings.

To view a selection of those we have online, please click here. We’ll be adding more images over the coming weeks so do check back.

Monochromatic mastery

The Mary Evans calendar this year features images by photographer John Gay, whose work was left to the National Monuments Record managed by English Heritage, upon his death in 1999.

We’ve recently added over 800 more images to our site, scanned and ready for download. These latest photographs are mainly focused on London in the 1960s and 1970s: a rainy August in 1962 as people come and go from Piccadilly Circus underground station while a news headline proclaims ‘Marilyn Suicide Inquiry’; shoppers in a busy Carnaby Street in 1971; grimmer scenes of Kentish Town and Camden or new estates with their Brutalist architecture.

Please click here to view some of these valuable additions to our English Heritage/John Gay collaboration.

Who do you think you are? LIVE 2010

The UK’s biggest and most comprehensive family history event, Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE is nearly upon us, and once more Mary Evans Picture Library will be taking part. The show is on at London’s Olympia, from 26th to 28th February and will be featuring exclusive seminars, workshops and unrivalled expertise from a raft of speakers and exhibitors. In addition, Kate Humble and Esther Rantzen will be taking to the stage to talk about their Who Do You Think You Are? experiences.

We have a 2 for 1 ticket offer for you which runs until 19th February. Call the ticket hotline on 0871 230 5596 or visit the website and quote EX241.

Parisian deluge

With December’s cold weather across Europe following hard on the heels of the UK’s wettest November on record, it seems an apposite time to remember the 100th anniversary of the Great Flood of Paris.

The few months leading up to January 1910 had seen extensive rainfall in northern France, saturating the ground to capacity. By January 21st the River Seine had begun to rise at an alarming rate, bursting its banks and flooding homes, roads, railway lines, and Métro tunnels. Over the course of the following week, thousands of Parisians had to evacuate their homes and set up temporary shelters in churches and schools. January 28th saw the Seine’s highest water level, which at 8.72 metres was some 6 metres above its normal level.

The Illustrated London News of January 29th, 1910 reported with consternation the fears that the Pont de l’Alma with its four great stone figures of French soldiers (of which only the Zouave now remains) might have to be blown up to prevent it acting as a dam. Water levels had reached the shoulders of the Zouave; today the river is considered unnavigable when water reaches the statue’s thighs. To continue moving around the submerged city, police and residents travelled by raft and boat or across a series of wooden walkways hastily erected above flood waters. The financial cost of the damage was estimated at 400 million francs, almost a billion pounds today. For a waterlogged selection, please click here.

Let us know what you think

We welcome your feedback about this newsletter or any aspect of the Mary Evans Picture Library. Please write to us at pictures@maryevans.com. If you'd rather be unsubscribed from our mailing list, please click here.

Best wishes,

Mary Evans Picture Library