The Postcard
A postally unused carte postale that was published by Neurdein et Cie of Paris. Although the card was not posted, someone has used a pencil in order to write the following on the divided back of the card:
"Wishing you a Merry
Christmas and a Happy
New Year.
From Uncle Philip
20-12-18."
Uncle Philip was probably waiting to demobbed back to Great Britain after the Great War which had ended 40 days previously. Transporting all those men back to England was a huge logistical task, although the great majority had returned by the end of 1919.
Menton
Menton is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region on the French Riviera, close to the Italian border.
Menton has always been a frontier town. Since the end of the 14th. century, it has been on the border between the County of Nice, held by the Duke of Savoy, and the Republic of Genoa.
It was an exclave of the Principality of Monaco until the disputed French plebiscite of 1860 when it was added to France.
It has been always a fashionable tourist centre with grand mansions and gardens. Its temperate Mediterranean climate is especially favourable to the citrus industry, with which it is strongly identified.
The Christmas Uprising
So what else happened on the day that Uncle Philip wrote the card?
Well, on Friday the 20th. December 1918, Montenegrin nationalists known as the Greens led by Krsto Popović and Jovan Plamenac began to rebel against the Podgorica Assembly of Yugoslavia.
They were protesting against what they perceived to be a forced merging with Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia.
Tomáš Masaryk
Also on that day, Tomáš Masaryk returned to Czechoslovakia after years in exile in the United States in order to formally accept the position of the first president of the newly formed nation.
Canadian National Railways
Also on the 20th. December 1918, the name "Canadian National Railways" was authorized for use to refer to the collection of railway companies that formed Canada's national rail system.
Joseph Payne Brennan
The day also marked the birth of Joseph Payne Brennan.
Joseph was an American writer of fantasy and horror fiction, and also a poet. Of Irish ancestry, he was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he lived most of his life in New Haven, Connecticut.
He worked as an Acquisitions Assistant at the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University for over 40 years.
Brennan published several hundred short stories (estimates range between four and five hundred), two novellas and reputedly thousands of poems.
His stories appeared in over 200 anthologies and have been translated into German, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish. He was an early bibliographer of the work of H. P. Lovecraft.
Brennan's first professional sale came in December 1940 with the publication of the poem "When Snow Is Hung", which appeared in the Christian Science Monitor Home Forum, and he continued writing poetry up until the time of his death.
As a fiction writer, Brennan started out writing western stories for the pulps, then switched to horror stories for Weird Tales in 1952.
He began publishing his own magazine Macabre, which ran from 1957 to 1976. Several of his short story collections concern an occult detective named Lucius Leffing in the vein of Carnacki and Algernon Blackwood's John Silence.
His 1958 collection Nine Horrors and a Dream, containing the stories "Slime" (which has been reprinted at least fifty times) and "Canavan's Back Yard", is celebrated in an essay by Stephen Gallagher in the book Horror: 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman.
Stephen King has called him "a master of the unashamed horror tale".
Don D'Ammassa considers that:
"His stories were noteworthy for their
effective development of suspense
and terror without the excesses of
violence which characterise modern
horror fiction".
Brennan's personality was described in an interview as
"Reserved: he is friendly but not flamboyant.
He is most comfortable with his wife (Doris)
and his dog (Chaucer).
He is a gentle, soft-spoken, modest man.
But beware, for beneath that ordinary exterior
lurks the mind of a modern master of fright."
Joseph died at the age of 71 on the 28th. January 1990.
Silk O'Loughlin
The 20th. December 1918 was not a good one for Silk O'Loughlin, because he died of influenza at the age of 46 on that day.
Silk O'Loughlin, who was born in 1872, was an American baseball umpire who officiated at five out of the eleven World Series from 1906 to 1917.
