CUTTINGS

An interesting collection, casting light on media attitudes to the British Royal family and news management in the interwar years. Dawson was clearly mindful of publicity. As his entry in the Oxford DNB explains: 'It was Dawson who composed on a menu card the celebrated lines, ‘the King's life is moving peacefully towards its close’, having modified this from what he described as "a very commonplace" final bulletin used for Edward VII.' Penn's attendance during the King's final illness was controversial: it was later revealed that he hastened his end with morphine and cocaine.

1862 Diary of Sergeant Browne, principal flautist in the Royal Artillery band, Woolwich, Over 425 pages. Played at the opening ceremony of the International Exhibition under Costa, having been at the rehearsal attended by Meyerbeer - good descriptions of both events - and at the Horticultural Gardens next door throughout the length of the exhibition and elsewhere (Crystal Palace, Willis's Rooms, private houses, Lord Mayor's Show "nonsensical custom").

An interesting collection, casting light on media attitudes to the British Royal family and news management in the interwar years. Dawson was clearly mindful of publicity. As his entry in the Oxford DNB explains: 'It was Dawson who composed on a menu card the celebrated lines, ‘the King's life is moving peacefully towards its close’, having modified this from what he described as "a very commonplace" final bulletin used for Edward VII.' Penn's attendance during the King's final illness was controversial: it was later revealed that he hastened his end with morphine and cocaine.

Several hundred images (most illustrations rather than photographs and most in colour), many carefully cut out, all laid down on 68pp. in an album made up from a ruled exercise book roughly 20 x 16 cm, including three fold-outs (the first, beneath a decorative flap that reads 'Birds Unfeathered | Worth A Bit Of Study', carrying eight 1930s illustrations women in underwear). The album has been attractively customised with printed illustrations of motor racing over board covers.

Quarto (leaf dimensions roughly 19.5 x 15.5 cm). Ruled with twenty-eight lines to the page. Written in a close, neat hand, covering the first ninety-one pages of the notebook. Loosely inserted are twelve pages containing a further thirty stories, on three bifoliums each headed 'Anecdotes &c'. In black-leather half-binding, marbled boards. Good and tight, with text clear and complete on lightly aged paper. Calligraphic design printed on front free endpaper. A charming collection, casting amusing and entertaining light on nineteenth-century English social history.

The cuttings are laid down in a contemporary landscape 8vo scrapbook (dimensions of leaf roughly 15 cm x 25), with brown calf spine and marbled boards and endpapers. The scrapbook is worn and loose, but the cuttings, although on high acidity paper, are clear and entirely legible. A unique assemblage, casting valuable contemporary light on the two conflicts from the British point of view. The cuttings, many of them extensive, relating to the Zulu War begin at one end and those relating to the First Boer War at the other.