Finally - the Happy Thoughts Tobacco sign on High Street Thornbury

I've been meaning to post this for a couple of weeks - the first decent uncovering in quite a while. (I've had issues with my phone not being recognised by my new computer...)

The Happy Thoughts Tobacco sign has recently been revealed in High Street Thornbury - an area of northern Melbourne that has taken the mantle of the latest hipster epicentre. And so it's not entirely unrelated that this part of our city is now "apartment development central", hence the tearing down of the building that has hidden this sign for nearly a century.

You can see the sign was painted by the Hancock and Taylor firm:

 A quick search on Google shows that Happy Thoughts was produced by a local company called Dudgeon & Arnell Pty Ltd. These guys had a knack for kooky promotions it seems:

But Happy Thoughts was not their only product. This site devoted to tobacco tins has photos of a large number of tobacco brands made by the Dudgeon & Arnell company, including others with names also straight out of a motivational thinking seminar: Perfection; Triumphant; Grenadier; Harbour Bar; Phoenix; Sweet Memories; Darnel; White Heather; Censer; Sport; Silky Oak; Patrol; Sunday Best.

It turns out that the company goes back a long way to Melbourne's colonial origins - see this blog. Co-founder John Dudgeon apparently arrived here in 1850 and died in 1884 (ironically of lung cancer) after having partnered with Charles Carty Arnell for some 20 years. He'd done OK with his tobacco empire, having apparently left 80,000 pounds to his wife and children.

The author of the useful blog is someone whose great great grandfather worked for the company. The blog has a number of entries from 2013, but nothing since. It states of the company's origins::

"Dudgeon & Arnell evolved from a tobacco manufactory started by Gideon Heard in the late 1850s. There are some hints that he may have been involved in the tobacco business even earlier in Sydney or Adelaide (although the Sydney reference is likely to be a confusion with the large American company “Messrs Heard & Co” of Augustine Heard which operated out of China and had a large Asia-Pacific presence at the time). Gideon Heard’s company became “Heard, Owen & Dudgeon” in 1862 and then “Owen, Dudgeon & Arnell” in 1864 before settling on “Dudgeon & Arnell” in 1876."

The blog also mentions that the Dudgeon & Arnell factory was located from the 1930s in River Street, Richmond, neat the corner of Palmer Street. It then says that "Dudgeon & Arnell operated from this location until 1953 when they were taken over by Dobie, George & Son before that in turn was absorbed into the Phillip Morris conglomerate."

You have to love the internet, at least sometimes :)

A few from France and Germany

It's been a while! I've just returned from a quick and intense family trip to France and Germany and managed to snap a few signs in passing. I actually saw a lot more than shown here: some were impossible to photograph from high-speed trains (including some great wall-sized signs in Paris' outer suburbs) and others were encountered when my phone had run out of power. C'est la vie. So here are the few I did manage to snap.

 Montmartre, Paris:

 Rouen:

 Somewhere in the north of Paris:

Strasbourg - only just got the building side in time in this bad shot:

Berlin:

Look what arrived in the mail today...

This:

Finally, after three years from idea to completion - the world's first scholarly book on ghost signs is in my grubby little hands. Inside its pages are 22 chapters about ghost signs from Australia, the UK, US, Belgium, Peru and Vietnam, by a great group of academics, sign painters, historians, conservators, marketers and psychologists around the globe. It's been an enormous amount of work and to be honest I'm very glad it's all over - but also very glad it's here too.

The official site is here: https://www.routledge.com/Advertising-and-Public-Memory-Social-Cultural-and-Historical-Perspectives/Schutt-Roberts-White/p/book/9781138934689

It describes the book as "the first scholarly collection to examine the social and cultural aspects on the worldwide interest in the faded remains of advertising signage (popularly known as ‘ghost signs’). Contributors to this volume examine the complex relationships between the signs and those who commissioned them, painted them, viewed them and view them today. Topics covered include cultural memory, urban change, modernity and belonging, local history and place-making, the crowd-sourced use of online mobile and social media to document and share digital artefacts, ‘retro’ design and the resurgence in interest in the handmade."

As a hardback academic book with a limited market it's also very expensive - but it will come out in paperback in 12 months or so. Also, Google Books has some snippets if you'd like to peek inside :)

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=iuLLDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

A few Hurstbridge signs

It's been a while since I've posted here - life's kinda got in the way of late :) So now I've got this ridiculous backlog of ghost sign pics...will try to clear it over the next little while. Stay tuned.

But first, some signs I snapped the other day in the main drag of Hurstbridge, including a fabbo Nestles sign uncovered by a billboard removal on an old grocery.

Oh, and PS: After over two years of work, WE'VE HANDED IN THE FINAL PROOFS FOR OUR GHOST SIGNS ACADEMIC BOOK!! It should be out soon...the blurb is here: https://www.routledge.com/Advertising-and-Public-Memory-Social-Cultural-and-Historical-Perspectives/Schutt-Roberts-White/p/book/9781138934689

Note that it will be only available in ridiculously expensive hardback for the first 12 months, then out in more reasonable paperback after that.

Two Melbourne cafés with ghost signs attached

Melbourne is well known for its coffee culture and its ghost signs, so it's not that much of a surprise that the two have met in recent years.

At least two cafés are operating in premises that have uncovered ghost signs on their walls - and have left the signs there to their advantage.

In fact, one, Mr Morse - just next to the railway bridge in Johnston Street, Abbotsford, has named itself after the large early 20th century Mr Morse's Indian Root Pills sign uncovered on a former external wall:

This sign is part of an intense marketing push by the Australian purveyors of a snake oil remedy originally from the US - as seen by many other large cobalt blue Indian Root Pills signs around the district, including the famous chicory kiln in Bacchus Marsh (below) and various other Root Pills sign uncoverings (see: http://findingtheradiobook.blogspot.com.au/search?q=root+pills). And for more details on Dr Morse's elixir, see the great Melbourne Circle blog for a fascinating history of the Indian Root Pills brand: https://melbournecircle.net/2015/05/09/layers-of-ghosts-on-abbotsford-street/

The second café is in Lower Heidelberg Road, Ivanhoe. Signwriter Larry Stammers alerted me to this great place after we met at a State Library talk recently. Funnily enough, when I went to take these pics recently, Larry was there having lunch. Again, the sign was painted on a former external wall. We wondered what oat company it might have been - possibly Uncle Toby's - there's a large faded ghost sign in St Georges Road in North Fitzroy that though very different in other ways has a similar curved swirl (any suggestions?)

This wall has an extra level of political interest too. Public external walls were used in much the same way that billboarders use construction sites and derelict buildings today - places to publicise events with posters. (See here for another example of posters being uncovered through building works: http://findingtheradiobook.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/spectacular-lewis-skinner-uncovering-in.html). This wall has a spectacular trace - a 1934 election poster for a candidate for the United Australia Party, the predecessor to today's Liberal Party. It's been nicely preserved on the wall:

New article about a ghost sign project in Ballarat

"COOPED up in her magnificent 19^th century “office”, artist and researcher Amy Tsilemanis loves nothing more than researching Ballarat’s antique advertising signs and brochures.
Based in the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute library, Tsilemanis’ goal is to bring “old things to life in creative ways”. She is currently working on a project about the city’s “ghost advertising” on the sides of buildings – faded ads from the past."

http://www.thecourier.com.au/story/3855834/new-life-for-ghost-ads/

Modest uncovering in a tradionally immodest St Kilda street

This old real estate sign was recently uncovered in the heart of St Kilda's former centre of sin: Grey Street. Of course, it's rapidly gentrifying - as evidenced by the flash new apartments being built on this former down-at-heel site:

Online video of my recent talk on the Lewis & Skinner archive at the State Library of Victoria

If you've ever craved information on ghost signs, elephants, tea, online archives and mouldy documents, come and take a look here.

The videos by SLV Fellows are on the right hand side of the page: http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/library-fellows

Brilliant Nugget shoe polish sign on an old shop window in Middle Park

Drove by this on Canterbury Road the other day. What a beauty - and great that it's been kept:

This find reminded me of my earlier encounter with the remnants of a Nugget sign in Carlton that had been photographed years before by ghost sign aficionado John Hunter: http://findingtheradiobook.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/a-nugget-shoe-polish-sign-old-photo-and.html

Highett staples: Velvet Soap, Robur Tea and house paint

Today I was driving on Highett Road near the Highett Railway Station. I saw a glimpse of a painted paintbrush on a fascia, decided to give it a miss, then saw a European cake shop. Hmmm. Lunchtime. Worth a look then.

So I parked, got some food and walked down the street. Lucky I did - walking back the other way I stumbled on a palimpsest of signs that includes a Velvet Soap sign with a cartoon figure painted over the top:

I saw the sign from a small square across the road. There was something on the wall there too. I took a closer look - and realised it was the R and O from a large Robur Tea sign:

 

The paint shop fascia was there too, but hard to photograph from the other side of the busy road: