postcard.co.uk

I've been collecting "military Wiltshire" postcards for 26 years and when looking through dealers' stock and eBay listings used to disregard all those countless cards of Stonehenge - until I realised that a very few published in the 1920s showed the wartime airfield and its large bomber hangers in the background. So I had to start examining Stonehenge cards.

The same has just happened with all those cards of Figheldean ("Filedean") and its smithy, several miles away. About 20 are currently listed on eBay, and surely most dealers have some among their stock. Very late in the day, I've discovered that many WWI soldiers, especially Australians, based nearby, wrongly thought that the smithy and its "spreading chestnut tree" had inspired a famous poem by Longfellow - a notion encouraged by local postcard publishers whose captions mentioned the imagined connection.

So I've just looked at those eBay listings and realised that about a third of the used examples have comments from soldiers who visited the village (and left graffiti there, some of which is still visible).

Incidentally, this is another good reason for eBay vendors to show scans of both sides of their cards. I've mentioned before how when I've received a card there's been a message or postmark that wasn't shown in the listing and which enhances the value of the card. This happened again last week.

It's happened again. Just received two cards whose fronts had been scanned for eBay, but not the backs. One had a contemporary annotation on the back noting that "x" indicated two key personalities at the event (whom I wouldn't have otherwise spotted), the other had a reasonable example of a postmark that on its own was worth £10 or so.

At least the eBay vendor had resisted the temptation to ask the prices pencilled on the back by a previous seller, which were a little on the high side.