Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Sharing Our Stories: South African Children's Literature in English
- 2 Reading Outside the Lines: Peritext and Authenticity in South African English Children's Books
- 3 San Tales – Again
- 4 Lessons From the Honey-Guide
- 5 Charles Rawden Maclean, Baden-Powell, and Dinuzulu's Beads
- 6 Two English Children's Authors in South Africa: J.R.R. Tolkien and Rudyard Kipling
- 7 The Chronicles of Peach Grove Farm: an Early South African Children's Book by Nellie Fincher
- 8 Is Pauline Smith's Platkops Children a Children's Book?
- 9 The Fall From Grace of Kingsley Fairbridge
- 10 Cigarette Card Albums and Patriotism
- 11 Cecil Shirley, Author and Illustrator of Little Veld Folk
- 12 “Some Far Siding”: South African English Children's Verse in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- 13 Cross-Cultural Misreadings: Maccann and Maddy's Apartheid and Racism Revisited
- 14 Memories of Social Transition in Southern Africa: Unity Dow and Kagiso Lesego Molope
- 15 Visual Design in Collections of Writing in English by South African Children
- 16 Refugee Stories: the Suitcase Stories and I am an African
- 17 Sources for Research in South African Children's Literature in English
- 18 A Survey of Research in South African Children's Literature
- References
- Glossary
10 - Cigarette Card Albums and Patriotism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Sharing Our Stories: South African Children's Literature in English
- 2 Reading Outside the Lines: Peritext and Authenticity in South African English Children's Books
- 3 San Tales – Again
- 4 Lessons From the Honey-Guide
- 5 Charles Rawden Maclean, Baden-Powell, and Dinuzulu's Beads
- 6 Two English Children's Authors in South Africa: J.R.R. Tolkien and Rudyard Kipling
- 7 The Chronicles of Peach Grove Farm: an Early South African Children's Book by Nellie Fincher
- 8 Is Pauline Smith's Platkops Children a Children's Book?
- 9 The Fall From Grace of Kingsley Fairbridge
- 10 Cigarette Card Albums and Patriotism
- 11 Cecil Shirley, Author and Illustrator of Little Veld Folk
- 12 “Some Far Siding”: South African English Children's Verse in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- 13 Cross-Cultural Misreadings: Maccann and Maddy's Apartheid and Racism Revisited
- 14 Memories of Social Transition in Southern Africa: Unity Dow and Kagiso Lesego Molope
- 15 Visual Design in Collections of Writing in English by South African Children
- 16 Refugee Stories: the Suitcase Stories and I am an African
- 17 Sources for Research in South African Children's Literature in English
- 18 A Survey of Research in South African Children's Literature
- References
- Glossary
Summary
When I was a little boy during the Second World War, and Daddy was “up North”, “for the Duration”, if I got under my mother's feet on a rainy day she would pack me off to look at four wondrous albums. Today those same albums, their hard covers rather the worse for wear, are still treasured items on my bookshelf. They are the albums issued by the United Tobacco Company for its cigarette cards, and are like time capsules of what it meant to be a white South African in the 1930s and 40s.
Collecting cigarette cards was a popular hobby among children in the war years. They swapped them at school, and if, like one of my friends, they lived near the UTC factory in Cape Town, they could go to the factory office and buy ones missing from their collection – though I would have thought that was unfair. Another friend of mine remembers from her childhood how she would look at the albums when she was sick in bed. Leafing through them now, I realise that I did more than page through them, looking at the pictures: I actually got my sticky fingers onto at least one page. Some of the places allocated on the pages for certain cards had not been filled, so I got busy. Heavily glued in, sideways across the place for No. 55, Cape Turtle Dove, is a card of a hoopoe.
The albums are Our South Africa Past and Present (Botha 1938), Our South African Flora (Compton 1940), Our South African National Parks (Stevenson-Hamilton 1940), and Our South African Birds (Roberts 1941). They were designed and printed by the Cape Times.
UTC packed the Our South Africa Past and Present cards with C to C cigarettes. Everyone knew that “C to C” stood for “Cape to Cairo” – a hangover from the failed imperial dream of Cecil Rhodes. I remember after the War, when we moved to Windhoek, there was a C to C Bazaar in Kaiserstrasse, and there's still a C to C Butchery in Germiston. The later cards were also packed with cigarettes manufactured by the Westminster Tobacco Company and Policansky Brothers, “For the benefit of smokers of their products”. The albums were on sale from tobacconists for a tickey (3d) each.
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- Chapter
- Information
- SeedlingsEnglish Children’sReading and Writers in South Africa, pp. 92 - 97Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2012