Finding Eva Morganti

I've always had a soft spot for sending and receiving postcards, but until recently I'd never collected any vintage ones. In the past year I've been sending local postcards to random strangers through the website Postcrossing, and receiving cards back from other random correspondents around the globe. I've also been enjoying listening to the odd episode of Tom Jackson's postcard podcast Postcard From The Past, in which two guests, often writers or comedians, are invited to share their personal collections of postcards and their associated personal connection. I've always loved the idea that a small rectangle can flit its way from the other side of the world to a friend or family member's letterbox as a small way of sharing the joys of travel and to indicate that in some small way the recipient was being thought of, far away.

While I've sent plenty of postcards over the years, and received a few too, I'd not purchased anyone else's postcards before my visit to Cambridge (the Waikato iteration) in early March. There in Colonial Heritage Antiques on Duke St one particular card took my eye and became the first in my collection. I prefer postcards that have been sent with a message, rather than the more common unused postcards. And this one was a real beauty.

The postcard depicts Edwardian stage siren Gabrielle Ray (1883-1973), who was one of the most photographed women in the world at the time. Indicative of her star power at the time were the performances she gave in 1907 at Daly's Theatre just off Leicester Square, as Frou Frou in 'The Merry Widow', in which 'Ray's dance number, complete with handstands and high kicks, all performed on a table at Maxim's held head high by four men, was a show stopper'.

Miss Gabrielle Ray, 1906 postcard

The postcard was sent from a Peckham postmark in East London on 27 July 1906 to the far side of the world: the isolated colonial town of Westport on the South Island's West Coast. On the day he sent the card, the Times in London was advertising on its front page the famed Hippodrome spectacular 'The Flood', a twice-daily inundation involving '300,000 gallons of water' (which doesn't sound very environmentally sensitive). Madame Tussaud's was promoting its star attractions: a 'realistic tableau' of the Burning of Rome ('Mr Beerbohm Tree in the character of Nero'), and a 'lifelike portrait model of the late Sir Wilfred Lawson', who had only died on 1 July. The day's Court Circular recorded the Prince of Wales' (later George V) planned visit to Aldershot to inspect 3 Battalion, King's Royal Rifles. And the Times theatre correspondent was positively irritated by the Garrick's production of the 'coster story' 'Down Our Alley', adapted by Arthur Bourchier from an original by Anatole France, 'Crainquebille'.

New Zealand in the Edwardian age was awash with postcards and other forms of written correspondence. As recorded by the 1906 official yearbook, at the end of 1905 there were 1937 post offices in the country, which translates into one post office for every 486 people, given the estimated national population of 942,533. The postal services in 1905 dealt with over 69 million letters (74 per capita), but also 3.6 million postcards (3.9 per capita), a 58 percent increase on the year before. The postal rate within New Zealand, and for many Imperial overseas messages, was set at one penny from 1 January 1901, which had led to a rapid increase in postal traffic, including the newly popular postcard medium. Robinson's A History of the Post Office in New Zealand records (p.184) that between 1891 and 1911 the number of postcards sent in New Zealand grew at a rate even faster than the growth rate of letter traffic:

	1891	1911	Incr %
Letters	23,745,462	99,307,587	+318%
Postcards	991,065	5,425,914	+447%
Telegrams	1,746,115	8,268,340	+373%

A colourful May 1906 article in the New Zealand Mail, a Wellington weekly paper established in 1871, described 'the post-card craze', and mistakenly claimed that it signalled 'letter-writing [was] in its death throes'. The author describes the avidly-followed pursuit of collecting postcard correspondence, including ones similar to my 1906 card:

In Wellington there are hundreds of young girls struggling with the fever of post-carditis, who have written to and received signed post-cards from the leading lights of the British stage, and who on the least provocation will exhibit them proudly to others who might not be up to the dodge.

The author proceeds to interview a newsagent engaged in the profitable postcard trade, who corroborates the collecting craze:

The message on the Ray postcard is brief, written in not entirely confident penmanship, from a would-be suitor to an unmarried young woman. Romilly St and Fonblanque St are still a part of the Westport town grid.

Note the oblique angle of the stamp placement. This is probably a secret postal code between courting couples, or at least from a potential swain, welcome or not, to avoid parental scrutiny: at this angle the stamp code is 'Accept my love'.

Miss Morganti (for 'Stannie' seems to have spelt her name wrong) may not have been that impressed with her correspondent suitor, because the Norsewood Cemetery online records indicate a different fate for her. Born Genevra  (or perhaps Genever) Katherine (or perhaps Catherine) Morganti on 16 September 1887, she would have been 18 going on 19 when this postcard was sent: prime marriage material in Edwardian New Zealand. Two years before she had experienced family tragedy, when a relative - perhaps an older brother? - sadly drowned off the rocks of Granity, a small village 28km north of Westport: 

On Sunday morning a young man named Antoni Henry Domini Morganti, aged 20 years, was drowned at Granity. He was fishing off a rock with two brothers, and one of the lines becoming snagged Morganti went down on a ledge to loosen it. The two brothers later missed deceased, and a search being made they recovered his body, but life was extinct.

- Greymouth Evening Star, 19 January 1904

I can find no record of Miss Morganti marrying until 12 September 1921, when aged 33 she wed Claude Raymond ('Ray') Redward, an Ormondville farmer and member of the Rechabites and Order of St John. Ray appears to have served in England and France in the Great War, and at that time his home address was recorded as 'Ivy Hill', PO Box 2, Ormondville. He died in 1973 and Eva died in 1980, and is buried in Dannevirke Cemetery. While I know little about her life, I love the fact that she decided to keep Gabrielle Ray's charming postcard portrait, and that her memory and Stannie's message live on as a result.

See also:
History: Early overland mails between Auckland & Wellington, 23 March 2019
History: NZ postal rates 1936, 1 January 2018
History: The arrival of an English mail, 26 January 2015