Unfortunately I haven't currently got the scanned photographs from my families' Victorian photograph album to illustrate this post... One day I'll get round to getting it professionally done. Several of the photographs in the album show my great grandfather Albert Wallace Linford (1861-1913) with his flute. There are other people in the album with instruments so I can only assume that he was in an orchestra. As my big brother played the flute himself for several years he has inherited the original one. I wonder if my nephew will ever decide to follow in the family tradition?
Albert's daughter Madeline (1895-1975) was a very talented journalist as well as a novellist. Her career blossomed when she reported from a post war Europe in 1919 having originally been a secretary. In 1922 she was asked to begin a Woman's Page in the Guardian newspaper. She talked about this with Mary Stott in 1963:
“…My briefing was lucid and firm,” she recalled. “The page must be readable, varied and aimed always at the intelligent woman… I saw her as an aloof, rigid and highly critical figure, a kind of Big Sister, vigilant for lapses of taste, dignity and literary English.”
This was a a whole new area and she ran it for 31 years a great achievement. She also found time to write some novels and a biography of Mary Wollenstencraft. One of her novels had a fabulous dust jacket which the V&A has a copy of on its web site as a fine example of 1920s art:
Have you got anyone in your family that had a great talent or was famous in their field?
I love having the geneabloggers prompts at hand to get me through creative slumps ;-)
ReplyDeleteI can usually look at the prompts and something I recently researched will fit right in.
Cheers,
Theresa (Tangled Trees)