A Happy New Year from Mary Evans. As we head into 2012, a smorgasbord of anniversaries and significant events await us. There will be particular focus on London and the UK with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee culminating in an extended weekend of celebrations in early June, and of course the London Olympic Games starting in July.

Other significant dates this year include the 100th anniversary of the death of Scott of the Antarctic, the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, and the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. We start, though, with a remarkable discovery related to the Coronation of King George VI, the 75th anniversary of which falls this coming May.

Airbrushing history

The Illustrated London News had a proud reputation for producing the most lavish commemorative editions for royal coronations, and in 1936 the accession of King Edward VIII spurred the magazine into preparations once more.

Artist Albert Collings was commissioned to produce a portrait of the King in his ceremonial robes which would provide a spectacular colour plate for the edition.

However, in December 1936 when the King abdicated to order to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, some hasty alterations appear to have been made. The ILN archive holds a rare, previously unseen, pre-press copy of the Edward VIII Coronation Number. It is filled with blank pages, awaiting photographs of the coronation ceremony that never happened.

Showing enterprising thrift, the ILN asked Collings to re-paint his original work. The splendid colour plate therefore also appears in the Coronation Number of George VI ... with a different head.

More remarkable is a recent discovery of a marked-up editorial copy, available exclusively through us, annotated with copyright holders’ details and fees payable to contributors. Collings’ image is complete with invoice, stating that on top of the £159 10s. paid for the portrait, the artist was paid an additional £21 for alterations to the head, showing that no matter how reverential the magazine may have been publicly, behind the scenes economics inevitably played their part.

As far as this Coronation portrait is concerned, Edward VIII was, quite literally, painted out of history.

Scott of the Antarctic

Although preparations for their journey of Antarctic discovery, and in particular the race to the South Pole, started in 1910, and the march south the following year, it was on 17th January 1912, 100 years ago, that Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and Evans, reached the South Pole. All cheerfulness and hope evaporated as the party realised that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian flag was already flying, and that he and his team had in fact reached the Pole more than a month earlier.

The return trip to base, “800 miles of solid dragging,” as Scott wrote in his diary, with hazardous conditions, blizzards, frostbite, falls and a rapidly diminishing food supply, was to prove fatal for all five men. Before Scott died, he wrote a number of letters, including a message to the public, defending his actions and explaining, “for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.” His words did much to seal his reputation as heroic to the last.

For a selection of images, please click here.

What the Dickens?

This year is also the bicentenary of the birth of Victorian novelist par excellence Charles Dickens, and we have already had a raft of new adaptations of Dickens’ novels, and programmes about his life and work. Dickens was born on 7th February 1812 in Portsmouth, though the family moved to Chatham in Kent soon afterwards. His father was sent to Marshalsea debtors’ prison in 1824, and this event and the poor conditions in which the young Charles worked to help support himself and his family influenced his later writing and his views on social reform.

His first novel The Pickwick Papers was published in 1836 as a serialisation, a form which Dickens helped to popularise and which in turn did much to attract readers eager for the next instalment of his work. Many successful novels followed, and Dickens achieved a level of popularity and fame in his own lifetime never before seen for a writer. Almost all of his works, from A Christmas Carol to David Copperfield have remained household names for almost two centuries and have never been out of print. To celebrate Dickens’ bicentenary, the Museum of London are staging a major UK exhibition on ‘Dickens and London’ which is on until 10th June 2012, while to view our own small tribute, please click here.

RMS Titanic

Another major anniversary in the tragic form of the Titanic arrives in April. On the night of 14th April 1912, 100 years ago this year, RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic and began to sink as water poured into the boiler rooms on the starboard side. The supposedly unsinkable ship, on its maiden voyage, lasted only 2 hours 40 minutes before finally disappearing in the early hours of 15th April. With the loss of over 1500 lives, it remains one of the world’s worst maritime disasters. Look out for more on the Titanic in our next issue of ME & You magazine which will be available to read on our website.

A selection of images about the Titanic, that fateful night, and its aftermath, can be seen here.

The Anniversary waltz

And finally, we know some of you like to plan well ahead, so to end this newsletter’s particular anniversary theme, we have a whole load of new anniversaries for the first half of 2013 up on our website Anniversaries page. They include the 150th anniversary of the opening of the London Underground on 10th January, and, the vertical opposite, the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Woolworth Building in New York on 24th April, at the time the world’s tallest building.

There are lots more interesting anniversaries to view here.

Let us know what you think

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Best wishes,

Mary Evans Picture Library