Monday 22 October 2007

1939 Ramsgate new Holiday Recipe Book


















1939 Ramsgate new Holiday Recipe Book

This marvellous Ramsgate guide from 1939, now 68 years ago, produced as a parody of a cookery book encapsulates the atmosphere of the period. You will notice that the cover shows girls in bikinis, these had just started to appear in America on models and film stars although were not common until after World War 2 although you will see a few adorning the bolder lasses in the photographs in this guide.

The French obviously had some catching up to do with Ramsgate, they claim that the bikini was invented by French engineer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946 and first appeared on July 25 of that year at a fashion show at Piscine Molitor in Paris.

Miss Joydays who shows us many of Ramsgate’s attractions and is something of an attraction herself, looks to be about 20 so if she is still alive today would be in her 80s or 90s I would of course be pleased to hear from her or anyone featured in this guide or their relations.
In the spirit of this guide I have added the picture below showing Ramsgate’s carnival queen for 1938 Miss Ethel Todd with her two assistants Miss Joyce Allen and Miss Joan Gibbons I hope you will agree with me that this is an important addition.











I have started an interactive website or blog where people who feature in or are interested in a particular book can communicate with each other, so if you go to the michaelsbookshop.com site and find the pages where this book is advertised there will be instructions about how to use this facility.

Reading this book with its optimistic text it is hard to imagine that on August 24th 1940 Ramsgate would be the first town to be blitzed, looking at Dave Richards book about the raid these two aspects of our history, seem now, incredibly incompatible.

As always with this type of guide the advertisements are equally valuable to those of us interested in our history, helping us to identify past uses of Ramsgate’s buildings and the past occupations of our residents.
As far as the book production goes, the original was A5 format however the pictures have benefited from enlargement to this A4 format, should any of you think it useful I would be happy to produce an A5 edition.


Click here for sample pages from the book


7 comments:

  1. Holy bathing suits! I'd be the first to come to Ramsgate for my hols if they were all smashers like that!

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  2. And after the third image, headlined NICE, you see the word "refulgent". This blog is already worth its weight in gold if you can bring us words like that. Now I just need to work it into everyday conversation and see if I can get away with it...

    From dictionary.com (I had to check): "adjective - shining brightly; radiant; gleaming: Crystal chandeliers and gilded walls made the opera house a refulgent setting for the ball.

    Presumably the recipients of the 1938 booklet were expected to know words like this - cue some discussion on modern education, sigh.

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  3. Sorry, I meant 1939, not 1938.

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  4. Zumi I fink it woz 1938 Miss Ethel Todd wot done it

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  5. Richard been working all day on a book about Ramsgate’s civil defence sirens, one of the chapters called “save the wail”

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  6. Does anyone out there have footage of the 1938 carnival where Miss Ethel Todd, Joan Gibbons, and Joyce Allen are crowned? I would like to obtain a copy, as one of them is my relative. Much appreciated. Thanks. kimberley.maher@gmail.com

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.