A Supernatural War by Owen Davies

A Supernatural War by Owen Davies

Author:Owen Davies [Davies, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192513397
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2018-08-27T00:00:00+00:00


Fashioning Protection

The pervasive desire for emotional comfort and physical protection generated by the war opened up new commercial opportunities for the burgeoning global market in mass-produced trinkets, charms, and talismans. The town of Attleboro, Massachusetts, known at the time as the ‘Jewellery Capital of the World’, was a major beneficiary. Companies based there first started large-scale importation of cheap trinkets and novelties from Japan in the 1870s, and it then became a major manufacturing centre of costume jewellery and novelties, which were exported to the European market.19 During the war, wholesalers in Britain purchased job lots of charms from the likes of the Attleboro companies, and sold them on to local shops and street vendors. In September 1915, for instance, one wholesaler advertised in the Manchester Evening News for ‘Hawkers and Buying Agents for our Lucky Charms’. The folklorist Edward Lovett mentions visiting a shop near Long Acre, in central London, during the war which sold charms along with beads and trinkets. In November 1916 there was even a Good Luck Fair at London’s Hotel Cecil in aid of charity, where visitors could peruse numerous stalls selling a range of mascots and charms.20 Some dealers, as we shall see, developed sophisticated marketing campaigns selling mass-produced charms direct to customers via the thriving mail-order marketplace.

Across the combatant countries many jewellery firms also developed significant sidelines catering for soldiers and their loved ones. An article on the vogue for wearing charms published in 1915 noted that green jade pigs and platinum horseshoes were ‘displayed ostentatiously in every jeweller’s window in Bond Street, the prospective present of the war-bride to her hero’. It was similarly observed in 1917 that in the galleries of the Palais-Royal, Paris, numerous jewellers’ shops presented window displays of their porte-bonheurs or lucky charms.21 In the run-up to Christmas 1914 Mappin and Webb advertised metal pocket mirrors for soldiers that would neither rust nor break and would deflect bullets. J. C. Vickery of Regent Street offered lucky white heather pendants and horseshoes in gold as ‘parting souvenirs’.22 The ‘talisman of Lammermoor’ by Alexander Cargill & Co. was designed so that it could be snapped into two interlocking pieces. One piece was to be given to a relative or loved one heading for France as a lucky talisman. Then, when the two people were reunited, the two pieces could be locked together again and ‘worn as an everlasting memento and proof that your dear one has “done his bit”’. The company offered to engrave the crest of any regiment on one side of the talisman.23 German jewellers also conducted a thriving trade in lucky rings and amulets, particularly St Michael rings, such as one showing the archangel in medieval armour, the Iron Cross on his chest, Kaiser Wilhelm II on his shield, lancing a dragon. In 1914 the Austrian War Assistance Bureau, the Kriegshilfsbüro, generated income by working with the mayor of Vienna and its jewellers and metalworkers to produce thousands of cheap Kreigsglücksringe or lucky war rings for soldiers going to the front.



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