MARCH - Fantastic Felines & Jason

There was an exhibition in the Streetlife Museum that I kept seeing mentioned on Twitter.  It was called Fantastic Felines and was a display featuring picture postcards designed by a music hall singer Violet Roberts.  Although born in Hammersmith in 1895, her family moved to Hull when she was 6 and she spent the rest of her life in Hull and later, Beverley.

A very talented lady, as well as singing, she was a postcard artist.  In Edwardian England, the postcard was almost like today's text message.  Postal deliveries were several times a day so you could send a postcard in the morning and get a reply by the afternoon post.  Violet's postcards featured drawings of comically dressed cats with amusing captions and the exhibition featured a number of them.



There's a great article and pictures on the KCom website here

On the way home through the station (now known as The Paragon Interchange although you'll never hear anyone from Hull call it anything other than 'station'), we stopped to have a look at the full-scale replica of Amy Johnson's biplane, the Gypsy Moth nicknamed 'Jason'.  As part of the prison’s reducing reoffending initiative, Hull-based artist Leonard J Brown worked with inmates to create the model.  I did spend a few minutes looking around for the model before spotting it up high.  It is a little too high up to be instantly noticeable in my opinion but it does look impressive.

Full-scale model of Jason hanging from the roof in Paragon Interchange.