Postcard Friendship Friday

Are you considering when to put in your first early potatoes?  Has the ground warmed up yet?  Well apparently Crome and Taylor's manure is the thing.  From a small basket to a HUGE pile, they will increase.  At least that is what my Great Grandmother Winifred Swindlehurst says on this card.  The family farmed at Hazelslack Tower and she says "I have been a customer of yours for many years and I am able to state that the Fertilizers I  have bought of you, from time to time, have proved most beneficial in their effects. This year I have had a splendid crop."

I wonder if they were provided with a lot of these cards for this one was sent to my Grandmother, also called Winifred, from her sister. The family consisted of 11 girls and 1 boy.

 It was posted on January 5, 1912 and it says "Dear Winnie, Just a card to tell you, to let me know, what day and what time you land at Arnside, then I will try to meet you, from your affectionate sister Lucy".  Lucy is probably referring to the nearest railway station to Milnthorpe which would be Arnside.  I don't know what my Grandmother was doing in North Rode, which is a village in Cheshire, about 100 miles away, perhaps working at The Creamery, she could turn her hand to anything, and would be about 20 years of age at this time.

I think Crome and Taylor were a large fertilizer company but they no longer exist, according to Company House, being dissolved in 1990.

but large crops were their selling point, another of their cards, but with the eulogy on the back and a man surveying his crop. I also found on the web one of their invoices from 1900

Look at that heading paper.  Nowadays if someone was selling fertilizer it would probably portray some rural idyll but for Crone & Taylor it was the chimneys of industry that denoted progress and the scientific basis of their fertilizer.


Happy Postal Friendship Friday, the meme is in full swing over at The Best Hearts are Crunchy.