Discover Eastbourne’s past, present and future at

THE EASTBOURNE HERITAGE CENTRE 2007 2 Carlisle Road, Eastbourne – Opposite the Winter Gardens

OPEN 1 April – 7 October 2007, 7 days a week, 2-5pm

ADMISSION CHARGES – Adults £2 Seniors and Children £1

GROUPS WELCOME – Exclusive morning use of the Centre available for pre-booked groups (minimum 48 hours notice)
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ENQUIRIES – 01323 411189 or eastbourneheritagecentre@fsmail.net

Please click for information about the Eastbourne Victorian Festival between the 29th September and the 6th October

In addition to the permanent displays we are pleased to present a special exhibition for the 2007 season:

MAD ABOUT MABEL!

The Life and works of Mabel Lucie Attwell

Mabel Lucie Attwell was a prolific artist and entrepreneur who produced postcards, wrote and illustrated books, designed posters, advertisements, jigsaws and calendars. Her designs for Shelley China included chamber pots and animal tea sets! Her most popular item which sold in its millions worldwide was her bathroom plaque with its famous verse starting ‘Please remember, don’t forget, never leave the bathroom wet…”

Born in 1879 in Mile End Road, her father owned a group of butcher shops in the East End and she was well educated at Coopers Company Coborn School. She was encouraged by her older sister to write and illustrate stories adding witty captions to pictures. When she was 15 she took some sketches to a publisher and received 2 guineas for them. Later she enrolled at St. Martin’s School of Art and went on to work for Raphael Tuck – illustrating such books as Mother Goose and Alice in Wonderland. She had met an artist called Harold Earnshaw at St. Martins and they married and went on to have two sons and a daughter.

In 1911 she started a long association with publishers Valentine & Sons of Dundee which would be sustained through two world wars. Initially they produced postcards followed by calendars, books, shopping lists, framed prints, jigsaw puzzles and cardboard wall plaques. It was in the early postcards that her novel idea of using children as adult symbols first emerged. Her distinctive toddlers with their cheery cheeky caption had as much, if not even more appeal for adults. The baby talk was a contrived adult view of childhood, cute and with a very obvious appeal. The cards were sent from adult to adult who enjoyed the rather cheeky sentiments expressed in such a novel way.

The work of Mabel Lucie Attwell soon became well known. Her popular 1913 poster for London Underground brought her into the wider public eye. Then in 1919 Hodder and Stoughton commissioned Mabel Lucie to provide illustrations for a children’s book Peeping Pansy written by Queen Marie of Romania, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was invited to visit Romania by Queen Marie three years later and stayed at the Royal Palace. The queen showed the honoured English guest a shelf of Attwell books and pictures and told Mabel Lucie ‘I keep them as a comfort for when I am down in the dumps, whenever I am sad, I come up here and look at them’.

The first Lucie Attwell Annual was printed in 1922. She illustrated the entire annual and wrote many of the stories and verses. Mabel Lucie continued to produce annuals for the next 52 years until she died in 1964.

Throughout her career her output was phenomenal; she admitted in a magazine article that she worked very hard and that she was a perfectionist. Millions of postcards were bought at seaside resorts up and down the country. Although different in their styles, Mabel Lucie with her appealing babies and Donald McGill with his saucy big bosomed ladies were the King and Queen of British postcards. Many people wrote to Mabel Lucie telling her of their growing postcard collections – she always wrote back personally.

During the Second World War, Mabel Lucie turned her attention to morale-boosting postcards. She was now a widow and worked in an empty building by the Thames. She later said, “I never went down into an air raid shelter. I was too busy trying to make people laugh about wartime bread and sausages, instead of crying about them.” After the war she moved to a house in Fowey in Cornwell where she continued to work and it was here she spent the rest of her life.

In her early days she had struggled to become an accepted breadwinner. Most women work nowadays but this was a rarity in the 1920s and 1930s. Her life was sometimes hard; her artist husband had lost an arm in the First World War, her youngest son had died at an early age and she was later widowed in 1937 but there is no trace of this in her work. Shortly before she died Mabel Lucie summed up her ‘lively ‘life, “My life has been good and sad. I have, according to many letters I received, given a lot of happiness to a lot of people through two world wars.”

Mabel Lucie Attwell had a great love for East Sussex and rented holiday homes there during the 1920s and 1930s. With her family she first acquired property in Rye. Later she moved to Church Farm in Littlington near Alfriston and then bought a farmhouse at West Dean which is now the Manor House. For a period she rented Ocklynge Manor, Eastbourne, and sadly this is where her son Brian died of pneumonia aged 20 in 1935. Two years later in1937, her husband Harold died of war wounds received in the First War, and both he and Brian are buried at West Dean just outside Eastbourne.

Her appeal is as strong as ever 40 years after her death. Her yearly annuals are eagerly sought after by collectors, her nursery ware for Shelley potteries is much prized and rarely found and her early postcards are rapidly snapped up at postcard fairs.

The Eastbourne Heritage Centre would like to thank John Henty for the loan of his extensive collection of Mabel Lucie Attwell memorabilia.

We also hope to put on a display of some of the work of the Victorian artist Louisa Paris.

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