What’s popping out of copyright on 1st January 2025? In the UK, authors who died in 1954. Among scintillating titles such as Clog Dancing Made Easy and Shell Collector’s Handbook, I spotted a few local items. The book Birth Of A Spitfire: The Story of Beaverbrook’s Ministry and its First £10,000,000 (1941) was an accessible but detailed hymn to popular national…
mass production, in which the product, the Spitfire, is “the people’s plane”, owned by the nation who paid for it through personal subscriptions [… the author] frames the narrative of industrial production with the human [angle …] one pilot remarks “we’ve got a plane paid for by girls in shops”
Who knew the Spitfire was crowd-funded? Not me. You learn something new every day. Sounds like there’s potential for a graphic novel adaptation of this well-written popular book, I’d suggest. Perhaps mixing in a little of the biography of the Stoke-on-Trent man who made it, and some memories from local lads who flew it in combat.
I also spotted the historian and artist Louis Mellard (1873-1954), whose 1920s books included the intriguingly titled Lost Romances Of The Midlands (I assume this would be mediaeval romances, rather than Mills & Boon ‘mooning and swooning’), Tramp Artist In Derbyshire, and others.
He was born in 1873, and thus would have come of age at the height of the Empire in the early 1890s. Evidently he was a Nottingham man, as a letter in Boy’s Champion Paper for March 1887 has him at 24 Curzon Street, Nottingham. A later Notes & Queries letter of November 1893 shows he was still living in Nottingham at that time.
By the mid 1920’s he was at 9 Watcombe Circus, Carrington, Nottinghamshire. At that time he produced Historic Nottingham (1925) for the city’s Museum & Art Gallery, plus a pamphlet on Nottingham in the days of Dick Turpin. He wrote articles on local history for the Nottingham Evening Post. It therefore seems safe to say he was an East Midlands man, of Nottingham.
Still, he also knew Derbyshire. Both the landscape and the history — as well as Tramp Artist In Derbyshire (1923) he also wrote An Historical Survey Of Derbyshire (1925) and contributed some illustrations to another county history.
Along with Lost Romances Of The Midlands (1921), I’m guessing there might also be a smidgen of North Staffordshire interest in his Sporting Stories Of The Midlands (1926). In the 1890s he had written on dog-racing circles, for Collier’s magazine, so evidently he was familiar with the popular sporting scene and its characters circa the 1890s-1920s. Tramp Artist In Derbyshire (1923) might also be of interest if it was illustrated with pen drawings and he had also strayed down into the Staffordshire Moorlands? Again, just a guess. Sadly, his books and articles appear to have vanished without trace.
Almost without a trace. Nottingham Special Collections has one packet of his papers, which includes the possibly unpublished essay “Some lost dramas and romances of medieval Nottingham”. Which suggests his Lost Romances Of The Midlands (1921) was indeed about mediaeval tales and folk-plays, but I’d guess that it was tilted towards his own East Midlands.
