Saturday 15 March 2014

Ripley, Surrey, 1913 & The Strange Obliteration of Ruth Hill

Ripley, Surrey, 1913. These postcards, all photographed and published by W. H. Applebee of Ashford, Middlesex in 1913 show various views of Ripley, a village near Woking. If we study the first image, Ripley Court WHA 6, we can clearly see a young lady. She has been identified as Ruth Lydia Hill, born 1898, granddaughter of Alfred Hill, a 'bootmaker, clothing and draper'. A later version of the same postcard, Ripley Court WHA 3946 shows the same image, but poor Ruth has been crudely obliterated by the photographer, scratching her out of the negative.
The next image, Rose Lane Ripley WHA 4 shows Ruth on her bicycle next to a boy. Again, a later version of this postcard, Rose Lane Ripley WHA 3944 shows her to have been obliterated from the negative. The boy is still there.
Another image, Fire Station, Ripley, WHA 7 shows Ruth again. Though I do not possess it, there is surely a later version of this image in the 394x series showing the same view with Ruth having been obliterated.
Finally, an image of Rose Cottage (WHA3948) with a tell-tale obliterated person. I do not possess the original, but I am keeping an eye out for it, we all know who will be behind the scratchy lines.
It has long bothered me why Applebee, a fairly well known postcard publisher in Middlesex and Surrey would want to obliterate a 15 year old girl from a postcard. Initially I had visions of Mrs Applebee insisting her husband do this because of an insane jealously for this girl half her age. But there is no evidence at all to suggest this. Mrs Applebee was utterly devoted to her husband and when he died in 1915 she remained a widow, never remarrying. She died alone in 1972. Another, much more sensible scenario has recently occurred to me. I think the original postcards featuring Ruth were commissioned by her grandfather, Alfred Hill, to sell in his shop. Another establishment in Ripley asked for some postcards to sell so Applebee thought to sent them these. However he realised they might not want to feature the daughter of another local businessman so he simply just scratched Ruth off the negatives and renumbered them. Simple!
Click the postcards to enlarge. I've also included a couple of close-ups of Ruth.
For more old images have a look at the Sepia Saturday blog.




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14 comments:

  1. A curious mystery, Howard, that is worthy of a classic detective story treatment. It must have been quite the treasure hunt to find the different versions of the photos too.
    I wonder if she might have died and WHA removed her from the picture out of some odd idea of respect for the dead? Or the original commission was not paid in full and WHA scribbled her out to resell as a postcard.

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  2. What an extraordinary set of postcards, and how clever of you to have solved the mystery ... well more or less solved. I've never come across anything like this in postcards of that era, but now I'm going to be on the lookout for spurious bushes. Good luck with finding the missing two scenes - I presume you have an eBay search alert out?

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  3. Your solution to the mystery seems the most logical but I hope poor Ruth didn't mind being eradicated so many times. I had a friend, an architect student at UC Berkeley, who was studying landscaping & needed someone to go around campus with him to stand beneath trees he was taking pictures of for his studies so he could estimate how tall they were. At first I just stood there, but after a while I got bored and started posing in all sorts of silly ways. Imagine my surprise and not a little embarrassment when I found out he'd had multiple copies of those photos made to share with fellow students for their studies. In that case I would have welcomed being scratched out of photos!

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  4. Amazing, and very cleverly done, without the digital help we have these days if we want to remove someone. There is probably another postcard of Ruth to match that last one.

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  5. Too bad Applebee didn't have Photoshop.

    I wonder if scratching people or objects out of negatives was a common practice for commercial purposes.

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  6. How interesting and poor Ruth, being scratched out. Fantastic series of postcards, good luck with finding the missing ones.

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  7. Most peculiar, I have never seen something like this before. Especially the second scratching (the photo with her bike) is very rude, I guess such a postcard would be hard to sell. It's also striking not much has changed in Ripley (luckily). I looked up the Rose Cottage location and although the view is obstructed by the plants and trees it is still the same house.

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  8. I always like how you do this, and I'm amazing at how so much (like the firehouse) remains nearly the same!

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  9. I think that this is fascinating and probably just a modesty thing if that makes sense. In those days, acting was seen as a not very honourable profession so perhaps posing on a postcard wasn't seen as a thing for a "good" girl to do.

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  10. Curious! I hope the story has a mundane reason rather than a tragic one.

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  11. How strange that they obliterated Ruth. She makes the cards more interesting. Maybe she complained. I always prefer cards with people, but cards today eliminate people and just about anything recognizable. It seems to be because of fear of lawsuits.

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  12. Very interesting cards. I enjoy what you do with "then and now shots".

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  13. Well, enjoyed both sets , with and without Ruth....

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  14. Fascinating! Don't you love the mysteries that come up through postcards? Really enjoy the research you put into these posts.

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