W. Reginald Bray
Willie Reginald ("Reg") Bray (born April 30, 1879 in London (Forest Hill), † June 6, 1939 in Croydon ) was an English eccentric who spent four decades and with more than 32,000 sometimes bizarre postcard experiments and object mailings - including himself - explored the capabilities of the UK's Royal Mail , collecting more than 15,000 autographs from around the world. Through exhibitions of his autograph collection, publications on postal topics and appearances on the radio, he established himself in public as The Human Letter and The Autograph King .
Life
Bray was born in 1879 in Forest Hill, south-southeast London, to Edmund and Mary Bray. The couple lived there in a Victorian villa with Edmund's half-siblings Mark and Lizzie Duffet and their mother Elizabeth Duffet on Stanstead Road.
As a 10 year old Reginald attended St. Dunstan's College. It is reported that he was an average student who started collecting stamps and train tickets early and who - not least to seek female companionship - joined the Forest Hill Cycling Club, the local cycling club, with friends. He kept this joy in cycling his whole life.
Bray trained as an accountant and practiced this profession throughout his life. He also applied the care he had learned in this way to his hobbies , assigning a number to every curiosity sent and every postal autograph request and documenting the process in detail in a register.
After courting three sisters at the same time as a young man he met through the Forest Hill Cycling Club, he chose the middle one, Mabel Hargreaves, and married her in September 1908. The couple had a daughter named Phyllis, who was born in August 1909.
Bray had lived in Forest Hill since he was born. He didn't leave this part of town until 1938 when he moved to Croydon .
W. Reginald Bray, "who never took a sick day in his life", died of a heart attack in his home at the age of 60 .
Postal experiments
The year 1898 was seen by Bray himself as the actual beginning of his fascination with the postal system, as in that year he purchased the current Post Office Guide for a sixpence , in which every type of postal service, its costs and the postal regulations concerned were listed read completely.
The Bray biographer John Tingey suspects that formulations in the Post Office Guide such as "letters [etc.] should be clearly and legibly addressed" and "all letters [etc.] must be delivered as addressed" aroused Bray's curiosity, to what extent the Royal Mail can follow its own guidelines set out in the Post Office Guide . Tingey also suggests that when the entire family moved to 135 Devonshire Road in 1899, a Penfold mailbox was within sight of the house - and is still there today.
For over 40 years and until his unexpected death, Bray carried out more than 32,000 both creatively conceived and systematically documented postal experiments and autograph requests. In the 1950s his daughter Phyllis sold this material by the box and only a few selected pieces remained in the family's possession. Today post-curiosa by W. Reginald Bray are sought-after collector's items.
Unofficial postcards
Sendings of bizarre postcards were z. E.g. a card crocheted by his mother Mary with the pattern “Bray, Forest Hill”. Unmarried, he sent another crocheted card to Annie Taylor , a young lady he adored (the relationship ended unsuccessfully). He also experimented with unusual postcard formats: he himself drew and cut out cartoon-like shapes such as a man's head or a donkey's head; He also sent several postcards sewn together from starched shirt collars .
With his postal collages, drawings and picture puzzles (see below), Bray was a previously unrecognized pioneer of mail art , which was only made popular 60 years later by Ray Johnson .
Cryptic addresses
In order to research the skills of the postman, Bray wrote addresses in rhyme form (partly pure, partly impure end rhyme), whereby he occasionally underlined the essential elements as an aid - as in the example given. This card was sent to E. Arnold, a long-time neighbor and friend of Bray, to whom he often addressed postcards, which he received back when they met:
| Address as given by W. Reginald Bray | Free German translation (in rhyming adaptation) |
|---|---|
|
Now Postman be kind if you will |
Mister postman, please kindly understand This card is supposed to go to |
At the end of the 19th century, picture postcards and picture postcards became fashionable. Bray soon used them in his experiments by using "To the Occupier", "To the Resident nearest ..." or similar formulations as the address to reach people in the building, lighthouse , ship , train shown on the map , geographical object or the like lived or worked as residents or residents. On the cards, he asked the addressees he did not know with easy-to-answer questions and asked them to answer them by post and send the cards back to him.
In one such instance - Bray wrote to the Brighton Fire Brigade on a card allegedly showing the firefighters involved in a major fire operation (the "Lewes Fire" in 1905) - he received a letter in response admitting that so Photo was taken before the fire during an exercise on the police sports field and that the firefighters depicted had nothing to do with the fire.
For other postcards with illustrated addresses, e.g. B. the portrait of the recipient (plus street name (without number) plus place), Bray added the following very politely explanatory, but also subliminally the professional honor appealing comment:
“Dear Sir (or Madam), you will kindly redirect this postcard
to the above address as I want to test
the skill of the postal authorities with regard
to cards pictorially addressed. "
In one of these cases - the postcard was of course delivered and Bray got it back later - a British postal worker commented on a penalty postage on the edge of the postcard:
“Pursuing this game we hope there are not many.
However, for your hobby you will have to pay a penny. "
Other approaches were picture collages composed of newspapers or picture puzzles very realistically drawn by Bray himself , with which he visually represented the address.
Unpacked objects
Among the items that Bray addressed and sent to himself (or to his friend E. Arnold, see above) without packaging, but franked and sent - often from travel destinations that he had reached by bike on vacation or on weekends - There was a rabbit skull (address written along the nasal bone), an (empty) wallet that you had to open to find the address and postage inside, a pumpkin, a bicycle pump, a frying pan , a slipper, a clothes brush , a tobacco pipe , a shirt front , a slate , a Russian cigarette , a bundle of onions , a freshly dug up turnip (sent from Ireland ), a piece of seaweed stuck to a postcard, a penny piece with a pierced hole to attach the postage-paid address label (Bray forgot the Stamp and had to pay a two-penny penalty fee).
Unusual dispatch
In order to expand his collection of postmarks , Bray devised unusual ways of getting his postcards out as widely as possible by land, sea, and air.
So he left franked (and unstamped) postcards addressed to himself with appropriate instructions to the finder (or the finder) in passenger and freight cars of the railroad in the hope that they would be discovered relatively late and sent back to him from distant places would.
The same purpose served his hiding of prepared postcards in stacks of the weekly magazine Tit-Bits (... from all the interesting books, periodicals, and newspapers of the world) , which already had a high circulation and specialized in human drama and sensational journalism .
Success with this method gave him the idea of sending prepackaged postcards franked with customary stamps in rolled up newspapers to fictitious addresses in distant countries. If the newspaper was unrolled in this country when it was undeliverable, the card fell out and was stamped by the local post office and returned to Bray as undeliverable. Bray, who spent most of his life at Forest Hill, found fun showing people these cards to show that he had traveled around the world.
Bray also sent postcards by message in a bottle , which he either left in rivers or at the seaside or which he had friends who took a ferry leave. The bottles contained written instructions and a promise to give a small reward to whoever returned the postcard to Bray.
He was also able to win over balloonists for his own purposes by asking them to hand over postcards on gas-filled balloons to the whim of the wind currents.
The human letter
In the Post Office Guide , Bray found the service offering "A person may also be conducted by Express Messenger to any address on payment of the mileage charge". He was the very first person in Great Britain to avail himself of this service and was escorted to his parents' house by mail on February 8, 1900. Since he did not receive any receipt on his first attempt, he repeated his self-deportation on November 14, 1903 (photographically documented; Bray with peaked cap and bicycle) and received a postal receipt. He was later able to prove that he was the first person to use this postal service, and not a certain Henry Turner from the island of Guernsey , who had initiated the same process for himself in 1905 and from the British Postal Museum for a long time was listed as a "first person who posted himself". In 1932, Bray repeated the process a third time and again in the presence of a photographer. However, Henry Brown is considered the first person in the world to send himself away. He sent himself from Richmond to Philadelphia in 1849 and thus freed himself from slavery.
On February 10, 1900, two days after his self- deportation , Bray had his Irish Terrier Bob - on a leash - delivered by the Exceptional Express Service from the Kent Post Office (Forest Hill) to his parents' address in Forest Hill within six minutes .
The limits of the Royal Mail
In addition to Bray's increasingly demanding experiments, which the Royal Mail was able to carry out tirelessly and successfully in most cases, there were also practical and logistical limits that were exceeded with considerable frequency due to Bray's increasingly difficult challenges and the limits of the capabilities of the British Post Office pointed out.
An attempt to write the address with red sealing wax failed because the letters peeled off during transport. The card was returned to Bray with the note “insufficiently addressed” and a penalty postage.
The attempt to send a postcard with a one-penny stamp from London via New York , Stockholm , Bern , Calcutta , Singapore , Sydney and Rome to Auckland and then back to Forest Hill failed conceptually (“incorrectly addressed”).
On July 30, 1898, Reginald Bray tried to send a postcard "To a Resident, Fingal's Cave , Staffa ". However, the Royal Mail was unable to comply. The reason was probably that the island of Staffa was uninhabited at the time.
The fact that Bray was ahead of his time not only with his mail art but also in terms of customer service concepts is proven by the undeliverability of a postcard from 1899 to “Santa Claus Esq. “(“ Insufficiently addressed ”); It was not until 1963–1964 that the Royal Mail was logistically in a position to forward letters to Santa Claus and then to answer them.
Autograph collection
The trigger for Bray's passion for collecting autographs, which he asked purely by post and without direct contact with the selected people, was the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Four days after the war broke out, Bray sent a postcard to Ohm Krüger , the President of the South African Republic - and thus the British opponent of the war - with the request that the card be returned to him. The card was returned unanswered, but was provided with a large number of stamps and the war-related note “mail service suspended” (such rare stamps, used only temporarily and for a limited period of time, are coveted collector's items today ).
The king of autographs
Encouraged by this Boer War mail, Bray wrote autograph requests to each of the British generals deployed in South Africa , attaching their pictures - popularly available at the time as a cigarette picture series (branded “Ogden's Guinea Gold Cigarettes ”). In order to make the request less easy for the postal authorities in his own way, Bray cut off the name of the person concerned printed at the bottom of the cigarette picture and gave a very general address such as: B. "British Field Forces, South Africa". The Royal Mail and the British Field Post were up to the challenges and Bray was very successful with this method of collecting autographs.
Even during the Boer War, Bray considered local English celebrities such as war correspondents , politicians , writers , artists , theater and church greats and athletes (especially cricketers and croquet players ) with his inquiries. But even black sheep such as financial swindlers and convicted criminals, whose names he had learned from the newspaper, received postal inquiries from him. Two areas in which he collected particularly intensively were the emerging film industry and the ever faster developing aviation (a few examples in a row).
.jpg)
In 1906, after exhibiting his collection in several cities in England, Bray acquired the title The Autograph King . He had personalized autograph request cards printed, using this title, listing the year and locations of his exhibitions, and claiming to be "The owner of the largest collection of Modern Autographs." His inquiries with these cards created a feedback effect and he received more and more autographs.
Unsuccessful requests
In response to the thousands of inquiries Bray sent around the world, there were also refusals to grant his autograph request (some more significant examples in a row).
Winston Churchill
(1900)
Queen Mary
(1901)
King Edward VII
(1902)
Queen Alexandra
(1902)
King George V
(about 1911)
Adolf Hitler
(1934)
-b_w.jpg)
In 1900 Bray wrote an autograph request to Winston Churchill, 26, who had just been elected to the British House of Commons at the time. The returned, preprinted reply explained that Churchill had made it a rule to only give autographs for a donation of one shilling (in postage stamps) for the Church Army, a Church of England organization similar to the Salvation Army . Bray did not meet this requirement.
Even with the Royal Family around 1910, Bray's inquiries were unsuccessful and received blanket letters of reply that the reason for a general refusal lay in the enormous number of autograph requests that were sent to the royal family.
W. Reginald Bray had his longest unsuccessful fight for an autograph with the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler . After several standard written inquiries, Bray even wrote his fifth and last letter to the State Chancellery in German in 1934 . In it, he mentioned important personalities who had already sent him their autographs, including Pope Pius X , Mussolini , Franz von Papen , all the Presidents of the United States who had been contacted so far , John J. Pershing , Gustav Stresemann and many others. Bray concluded with the words "I wish you and the German nation the very best", but the Secretariat of the National Socialist leadership in Berlin saw through his diplomatic attempt, politely but firmly rejected all his requests and with clear words forbade further inquiries.
Bray had to be content with the autographs of Franz Bracht and Gerd von Rundstedt .
Appearance in public
Newspaper articles
W. Reginald Bray published articles on his activities in eight different journals.
As early as 1904, at the age of 25, W. Reginald Bray wrote an article entitled “Postal Curiosities” in the Royal Magazine , in which he explained his motives with the following words: “My object from the beginning was to test the ingenuity of the postal authorities , and, if possible, to vindicate them of the charges of carelessness and neglect. "
Another article in the Royal Magazine followed in 1911 , in which Bray dealt with a change in postal regulations that no longer allowed pictures to be attached to simple postcards - which is why he has been using the letter cards that have existed since 1892 for his autograph requests since this change .
In 1932 Bray wrote a short, illustrated newspaper article ("Dogs as Letters") in which he described his own experiences with Bob and the usefulness of this postal service. While this service cost three pence a mile in 1900, it had doubled in 1932.
In 1934, Bray wrote an article in the Post Annual about another of his collecting areas, in which he had also carried out systematic experiments on mailing. Under the title "Postmarks", he dealt with the history of British postmarks from the beginnings of the postal system in the 17th century to 1930.
In 1935 and 1936 he wrote lengthy articles about collecting autographs in the youth magazines Girl's Own Paper and Boy's Own Paper .
Bray also collected articles that appeared in English and even German and French newspapers about him and his activities.
Radio interviews
Bray gave his first radio interview in June 1933 on Radio Normandy .
In 1935 and 1936 interviews followed on the BBC radio program In Town Tonight , in which he praised the English postal system and described the Express Delivery Service as a “very useful service”. So popular was Town Tonight that Churchman's Cigarettes released a 50-picture series of cigarette pictures of people who appeared on the radio show. W. Reginald Bray is shown on card no. 6 and on the back of this card he is presented as "The Human Letter" and as "The owner of the largest collection of postal curios in the British Isles ...". Bray got all 50 cards and the autographs of the celebrities depicted on them.
Exhibitions
From 1901 Bray arranged five exhibitions of his autograph collection in London, Manchester and Leeds . The exhibition in Shepherd's Bush in 1914, the start of World War I , was Bray's last appearance as an exhibitor.
Quotes
"How the sorters must have invoked the gods on my head when they caught site [ sic ] of my innocent postcards with the address written backwards."
“ The letter sorters must have conjured the wrath of the gods against me when they got my innocent postcards with the address in mirror writing. "
"After a short interval whilst Willie wrote 27 postcards we proceeded on our way."
“ After a brief pause while Willie wrote 27 postcards, we resumed our journey. "
"... W. Reginald Bray, arguably the father of mail art."
" ... W. Reginald Bray, probably the father of Mail Art. "
References and translations
- ↑ Dt. "The Human Letter"
- ↑ Dt. "The king of autographs"
- ↑ Dt. According to his family: "who was not on sick leave for a single day in his entire life"
- ↑ Purchasing power at the time: around 4 pounds of bread or 1 pound of cheese
- ↑ Dt. "Letters [etc.] should be addressed clearly and legibly."
- ↑ Dt. "All letters [etc.] must be delivered according to the address."
- ↑ Dt. "To the inhabitant"
- ↑ Dt. "To the next resident"; in the sense of: "To the resident who lives closest there [at the destination shown overleaf]"
- ↑ Dt. "Dear Sir (or Madam), could you be so kind as to forward this postcard to the above address, as I would like to test the ability of the postal authority with regard to illustrated addresses."
- ↑ German, freely translated as: 'We hope that not many indulge in such games. Nevertheless you have to pay a penny postage for your hobby. '
- ↑ Dt. "A person can also be directed to any address via Express Messenger after paying the mileage allowance."
- ↑ A photograph of Bob can be found on the Bray website under "Some photographs", first photo in the 2nd row "Bray and parents".
- ↑ Dt. "Insufficiently addressed"
- ↑ Dt. "Inaccurately addressed"
- ↑ Dt. 'To a resident'
- ↑ Dt. "Post operation suspended."
- ↑ Examples of “Ogden's Guinea Gold Cigarettes ” cigarette pictures
- ↑ Dt. "The owner of the largest collection of modern autographs"
- ↑ Dt. "My aim from the start was to test the ingenuity of the postal authorities and, if possible, to rid them of accusations of carelessness and negligence."
- ↑ Dt. "Very useful service"
- ↑ Some of these famous personalities were distinguished by the fact that they could stand in pose like a wax figure for a long time (“Living Wax Model”) or that they were one of three people who had caught 1,300 rats alive in just one night (“Rat Catcher ").
- ↑ The front and back of this card is shown on the Bray site
- ↑ Dt. "The owner of the largest collection of postal curiosities in the British Isles ..."
literature
- John Tingey: The Englishman Who Posted Himself And Other Curious Objects . Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-56898-872-6 .
Web links
- W. Reginald Bray - Website with more information and photos of Bray and some of his curiosities
- Sydenham and Forest Hill Local History: W. Reginald Bray, The Autograph King 17 November, 2008 (Engl.)
- The New Yorker, September 15, 2010, Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn: The Eccentric Englishman (Engl.)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bray, W. Reginald |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bray, Willie Reginald; Bray, Reg |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British eccentric, autograph collector and post-curiosa |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 30, 1879 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | London (Forest Hill) |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 6, 1939 |
| Place of death | Croydon |