1912-18 WW1 RNAS Autograph Album CJ Galpin Zeppelin L22 Wal Paget Signed Art

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1912-18 WW1 RNAS Autograph Album CJ Galpin Zeppelin L22 Wal Paget Signed Art:
$854.02

An Edwardian and First World War autograph album kept by one young woman from 1912 to 1918. Twelve original drawings and watercolours, four dated group signature pages, and one leaf that carries the signature of the man who destroyed a Zeppelin.

Collation
Size 160 mm x 100 mm. Limp red leather, "Autographs" in gilt on the front cover and on the spine, gilt inner border, marbled endpapers, coloured leaves in green, pink and cream. 105 pages in all: 27 carry content, of which 12 carry illustrations, and 78 are blank.

The compiler
The front endpaper is inscribed "Brenda Carstairs, with much love from W.H. and A.H.H., 13 August 1912". The 1911 census places her at Amenbury End, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, aged fifteen, daughter of Harry Stewart and Eleanor Carstairs, and born at Watford. The album follows her from a stay with a French family at Sceaux outside Paris in 1912, to Polperro in Cornwall in 1913, to Bembridge on the Isle of Wight in September 1914, and finally to the naval base at Gorleston in Norfolk in the summer of 1917.

Gorleston Naval Base, July 1917

A full page of officers and staff signing with their branches. Among them:

C. J. Galpin, R.N.A.S., D.S.O. Flight Lieutenant Christopher John Galpin. On 14 May 1917 he took Curtiss H-12 Large America flying boat 8666 out of the Royal Naval Air Service station at Great Yarmouth with Flight Sub Lieutenant Robert Leckie. They found Zeppelin L22 off Terschelling. Leckie dived, Galpin went forward to the twin Lewis guns and fired incendiary rounds into her starboard quarter, and the airship burned and fell into the sea. It was the first Zeppelin ever destroyed by a flying boat. Galpin's Distinguished Service Order was gazetted in June 1917. He signed this page at his own station weeks later, with the decoration written after his name in his own hand. He went on to command the Scandinavian Flight of 1919 and served as Deputy Director of Civil Aviation.

Lewis Austen Rees, R.N.A.S. His service record survives: born 1 January 1893, entered the Air Service in December 1915, Royal Aero Club certificate 2508 taken at the Grahame White School at Hendon, and postings to Chingford and Felixstowe, returning to Felixstowe in 1918 for Large America training. A second flying boat pilot on the same leaf.

Also signing: Alys B. Jones, Enid Boyde Siebert, Hugh Wilson R.N.V.R., R. W. Ireland R.N.V.R., O. G. Hodgson R.N. and Victor T. Hodgson, R. E. Loveridge R.N., C. Gordon Innes, Roger Lawson, Vera J. Copland, C. G. Holman, a Longstaff, and both Pagets. Great Yarmouth, immediately north of Gorleston, was one of the most important seaplane and airship stations of the war.

The Pagets, father and son

Wal Paget signs the Gorleston page, and elsewhere in the album is his pencil portrait of a young woman in profile, signed "Wal Paget, Yarmouth, July 1917". Walter Stanley Paget (1862 to 1935) signed his work in exactly this form. He drew 120 plates for Cassell's fine art edition of Robinson Crusoe and illustrated the first ten Henty novels. He was the publisher's original choice to illustrate the Sherlock Holmes stories for the Strand, and the commission reached his brother Sidney by mistake; Sidney is said to have used Walter as his model for Holmes, though the claim is disputed. It is a fine drawing, closely hatched, and the best piece of work in the book.

Tom Paget, R.N.V.R., signs the same naval page, and signs again on the Polperro page of August 1913. Walter Paget's son was Thomas Humphrey Paget, born at Watford in 1893 and recorded in the 1911 census at the family home in Finchley as an art student aged seventeen. He was later commissioned by the Royal Mint to model the obverse for Edward VIII, cut short by the abdication, and then alone for the George VI effigy of 1937, which appeared on the coinage of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and many other countries, was adapted for the definitive postage stamps, and has been called the classic coinage head of the twentieth century. He also designed the Golden Hind on the halfpenny, and signed his work "HP".

So the album records a professional illustrator visiting his serving son at a naval air station in July 1917, signing the base page, and drawing while he was there, in the same weeks that station's own Zeppelin killer signed the same leaf. Both families were Hertfordshire families, Brenda Carstairs and Thomas Paget both born at Watford.

The other artwork

"Hubert Latham (Pilote civil et militaire) et les Oiseaux de France", pen caricature signed "Roger D" and dated "8bre. 1912", that is October 1912. Latham was the Antoinette pioneer who twice tried to beat Blériot across the Channel and was the first man to land an aeroplane on water. He died in Chad on 25 June 1912, so this is a memorial drawn four months after his death, and the cigarette in his hand was his personal trademark. The artist is Roger Dupommereulle, who signs the Sceaux page elsewhere in the book.

T. Carstairs, January 1914, pen and watercolour of three fairies blown through the air among falling autumn leaves, in the idiom of Arthur Rackham and Ida Rentoul Outhwaite. Delicate and complete.

"The Curate in Charge (with apologies to Lawson Wood)", pen, ink and wash, a knowing homage to one of the best known comic illustrators of the day.

"The Dance", 20 September 1914, by Lance Charleton, who signs the Bembridge page four days earlier: harlequins, pierrots and dancers drawn in a ring around a cut out photograph of a girl dancing.

"Une Sirène à la Mode de Paris", pen and ink with blue wash, a bather on a landing stage in the Vie Parisienne manner, signed D.P., 1912.

"An anxious moment", watercolour of a batsman at the wicket with the slips appealing behind him, signed "Love from F.A.W., 29.1.13".

"Destroyer off Bembridge", 1914, pencil, monogrammed.

A pencil study of a standing woman, competently drawn and clearly by a trained hand, signed simply "Tom." More than one Tom appears in the album, so this drawing is offered as unattributed.

Also: a watercolour of three babies in laundry hampers by Molly Blake, 1913; a Mr Beetle cartoon by Rhoda F. Blake, 1912; three miniature caricatures drawn in violet ink on torn scraps of French newspaper; and a pen and ink of a fat angler on a jetty.

The other signature pages

Sceaux, 2 Rue des Clos St Marcel, c.1912: the Dupommereulle family, Philippe Capet, the de Jankowskis, Douglas E. Watts, Jeanne Prévost and others.

Channel View, Polperro, August 1913: H. S. Carstairs, E. Carstairs annotated "Mum", Tibbie Carstairs, Tom Paget, May Savill, Maud Dounsfield, Maurice Stacey and others.

Channel View, Bembridge, Isle of Wight, 16 September 1914: Eleanor, Brenda and Tibbie Carstairs, Evelyn M. Paget, Lance Charleton, and the Higgins and Dounsfield families.

Also present: Chaucer's Legend of Good Women copied out in January 1914; Eugene Field's "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" written out by Winifred A. Higgins in 1912 with a pressed leaf laid in; an E. Nesbit poem copied by E. A. Blake; a long original poem of love and loss signed "Russell 1915", facing a pasted in Islington Cemetery grave card; and comic verses signed "John, 1918".

Sold whole
The Gorleston leaf carries Galpin, Rees and both Pagets, and it is an integral leaf of a sewn book. It is what dates and explains the Paget drawing four leaves away. The album is offered entire and will not be broken.

Condition: good. The binding is sound and the album opens flat; the leaves are clean with strong unfaded colour to the artwork. Some leaves are loose. Chipping to the leather at the head of the spine and to two corners of the front cover, cords visible at the gutter, light foxing and spotting to a few leaves, minor rubbing overall. Please see the photographs, which form part of the description.

Measurements: 160 mm x 100 mm.