There is something especially revealing about a picture postcard when the image on the front and the message on the back tell two quite different stories. This card of the Pump House Hotel at Llandrindod Wells was made to show the resort at its best. The great red-brick hotel stands beyond lawns and young trees beneath a pale blue sky, substantial, prosperous and reassuring. It is the Llandrindod Wells which hoteliers, publishers and the town itself wanted visitors to carry away with them, a place of health, comfort, scenery and leisure. Then the writer turns the card over and begins with six words which undo the whole advertisement: “We don’t like this place at all.”
The original card is now in my collection. It was published by E. & S. Art Publishers as No. 4 in a numbered Llandrindod Wells series and carries the title “Llandrindod Wells. – Pump House Hotel.” Other surviving cards by the same publisher include local views numbered well into the series, among them Holy Trinity Church, No. 16, and “Visitors Going for the Waters”, No. 37. This was not an isolated view, therefore, but part of the small visual industry which grew up around the spa. A visitor could buy a recognisable image of the place, write a few lines on the back and send both the scenery and the news home together.
The card can also be dated more closely than its lack of a postmark might at first suggest. Its reverse is divided, with space for a message on the left and the address on the right, but it carries the characteristic early instruction that this arrangement applied to inland use while foreign posting remained subject to the older rule. Britain began admitting divided-back cards in the opening years of the twentieth century, with examples carrying comparable wording securely postmarked in 1903 and 1904, while the divided back was accepted internationally through the Universal Postal Union in 1907. The E. & S. Llandrindod views are independently described as early twentieth-century cards. Taken together, the evidence points most comfortably to about 1904–1906, probably around 1905. That remains an informed dating rather than an exact one, but it is substantially narrower than simply calling the card Edwardian.
That date places it in the great postcard boom. Britain had introduced the official postcard in 1870, but the picture postcard became one of the defining forms of everyday communication of the Edwardian period. The scale is difficult to appreciate now. Around 75 million postcards were sent in Britain in 1871. By 1910 the annual figure had risen above 800 million, almost eighteen cards for every person in the country. Lancaster University’s Edwardian Postcard Project has calculated that about six billion cards were sent during the Edwardian decade. In larger towns and cities there could be several postal deliveries in a single day, sometimes as many as six, so a short message posted in the morning might reach its recipient only a few hours later.
They were popular because they occupied a useful space between a letter and a conversation. A letter demanded paper, time and a degree of formality. A postcard invited brevity. People used them to say that they had arrived safely, to arrange a visit, ask somebody to meet a train, report an illness, pass on family news, thank somebody for a parcel, send birthday or Christmas greetings, flirt, gossip, complain, or simply maintain contact. Holiday cards were only one part of the story. In the Edwardian years the postcard was a cheap, quick and visually attractive means of communication used across society. Men and women, young and old, clerks, shopkeepers, workers, tradespeople, professional families and prosperous travellers all appear in surviving collections. It was one of the few written forms which could be both extremely ordinary and intensely personal.
At a resort such as Llandrindod Wells the cards had another purpose as well. They were souvenirs, but they were also advertisements which visitors paid to circulate. Stationers, newsagents, hotel counters, railway bookstalls and other local retailers stocked views of hotels, lakes, pump rooms, streets and surrounding scenery. Publishers issued numbered series because visitors often bought more than one, and postcard collecting itself became a craze. The person who bought this particular card was therefore participating in something completely normal for the period. The unusual part is not that they chose a postcard of the Pump House Hotel. It is what they wrote on it.
There is a pleasing irony here. The publisher sold the Pump House as an image of success, while the writer used that very image to record disappointment. Had the card been posted, the hotel would have been advertised to the recipient at precisely the same moment as its food, atmosphere, climate and supposed health-giving qualities were being criticised. Few pieces of evidence could demonstrate more neatly the difference between the history a resort promoted and the experience an individual visitor actually had.
The timing is important because this was close to the Edwardian high point of Llandrindod as a spa resort. The railway had reached the town in 1865, transforming access to what had previously been a comparatively isolated inland watering place. Hotels, boarding houses, baths, public spaces and new streets followed. The old Pump House Hotel was demolished in 1887 and replaced by the much larger building which opened in 1888 and was later enlarged again. By the early twentieth century it was advertising more than 150 rooms and, by 1906, accommodation for about 200 people. I have written elsewhere about the longer history of the Pump House Hotel, from the springs which made the place famous to the great Victorian hotel and its eventual demolition. This postcard gives us something different. It gives us the voice of somebody who was actually there.
“We don’t like this place at all, nothing to do but walk or drive & Mother cannot walk much as the air is so relaxing. She feels worse than when we came & has neuralgia come on every day. The food is very bad, milk puddings for lunch & dinner & very little meat, only 7 people, very dull. We long for sea-air. Awful rainy climate, had a storm on Sunday night.”
A surprising amount of social history is packed into those few lines. The writer was travelling with their mother, whose health was plainly poor. She could not walk far, suffered from neuralgia and, most significantly, was said to feel worse than when they arrived. We do not know whether a doctor had recommended the visit or whether the family chose Llandrindod because of its reputation, but health was clearly central to the way they judged the stay. That was entirely in keeping with the town’s purpose. Visitors came because mineral waters, baths, rest, regulated exercise and a change of air were believed to offer relief from complaints which contemporary medicine often struggled to treat. The important historical point is not whether the cure would satisfy modern medicine. It is that the family had entered a world in which place itself could be considered therapeutic, and the mother’s deterioration made Llandrindod seem to have failed the test.
The phrase “the air is so relaxing” is particularly interesting. To modern ears that sounds complimentary, but Edwardian discussions of climate used the word differently. Health resorts were often judged according to whether their air was “bracing” or “relaxing”. A bracing climate was thought stimulating and strengthening. A relaxing one might be regarded as enervating, especially for somebody already weak. The writer appears to have believed that Llandrindod’s atmosphere was taking strength from the mother rather than restoring it. Her limited walking, recurring neuralgia and general deterioration were all being read together as evidence that the place did not suit her.
The complaint that there was “nothing to do but walk or drive” tells us almost as much. Llandrindod was not objectively short of amusements. Visitors could take the waters, promenade, hear music, play golf or tennis, go boating, use hotel grounds and take excursions into the surrounding country. Yet much of that depended upon health, mobility and company. If the mother could not walk far, one of the principal pleasures of a spa town disappeared immediately. A carriage drive gave some freedom, but it was not the same as being able to move easily through the hotel grounds and the town. What one visitor might call restful another could experience as confinement.
Then comes the remark which appears to read “only 7 people, very dull.” The handwriting is cramped at this point and deserves a little caution, but seven seems the most natural reading. If the writer meant that there were only seven guests, the contrast with the size of the Pump House is striking. This was a building intended to hold well over a hundred people, with large public rooms, dining rooms and a sizeable resident staff. An almost empty hotel would have felt very different from the crowded seasonal world shown in advertisements and promotional photographs. The visit may have fallen early or late in the season, although without a postmark we cannot say. What matters is the writer’s response. The social side of hotel life, part of what a guest was paying for, had apparently failed to appear.
This is the sort of detail which rarely survives in official histories of resorts. Hotels advertised orchestras, excursions, gardens, elegant interiors and good company because those things sold rooms. They did not record wet mornings, empty lounges, unsuitable companions, indifferent meals or the long hours in which nothing much happened. Those experiences are more likely to survive in private letters, diaries and postcards. For that reason this rather disgruntled message is not a trivial survival. It records the gap between the public image of the spa and the ordinary reality of one particular stay.
The food clearly did nothing to improve matters. “The food is very bad,” the writer declared, before specifying “milk puddings for lunch & dinner & very little meat.” Milk puddings were common enough in Edwardian Britain, but they also had a place in invalid and convalescent diets. Rice, sago, tapioca, custards and similar dishes were regularly recommended as digestible nourishment. It is possible that the hotel’s catering reflected something of the health culture surrounding a spa, although nothing on the card proves that the mother had been placed on a special diet. What we can say is that the writer did not consider repeated milk puddings a virtue. The lack of meat made the meals seem meagre, and in a residential hotel where eating punctuated the day, poor food could quickly become the symbol of an unsatisfactory stay.
There is a class element in that complaint too. A stay at the Pump House was more than the purchase of a bed. Guests expected service, respectable company, comfort and meals appropriate to the standing of the establishment. Meat still carried a strong association with substantial eating, while milk puddings belonged as readily to the nursery, the sickroom or the domestic table as to a grand hotel. Whoever wrote the card had chosen, or helped to choose, one of Llandrindod’s principal establishments and expected a certain standard. The family clearly had sufficient means to stay at a major spa hotel, which places them somewhere within the broad middle-class and comfortably off world from which much of Llandrindod’s clientele was drawn, even if we cannot identify them more precisely.
Behind those disappointing meals stood a substantial working institution. Census returns for the Pump House reveal the specialised labour required to keep a hotel of this size operating, including housemaids, waitresses, kitchen and laundry staff, porters, bookkeepers, a coachman, a carver and, at one point, even a resident golf professional. Elizabeth Duffield, the long-serving manageress who directed the hotel through its late Victorian and Edwardian years, presided over a workforce whose labour was supposed to remain largely invisible to the guest. Beds were made, fires tended, luggage carried, linen washed and meals produced while visitors experienced the place as leisure. The postcard captures one occasion when that elaborate machine did not produce the impression expected of it.
The final lines sharpen the picture considerably. “We long for sea-air,” the writer says, followed by “Awful rainy climate, had a storm on Sunday night.” The weather had become part of the case against Llandrindod. The inland air which promoters presented as healthy and restorative was, for this family, relaxing, rainy and associated with a storm memorable enough to mention afterwards. Anyone who has endured a disappointing holiday will recognise the way weather can begin to confirm every other complaint.
The longing for “sea-air” also places the visit within the wider geography of British health tourism. Inland spas and seaside resorts competed for many of the same visitors, especially those seeking recuperation, a change of climate or relief from chronic illness. Mineral waters had centuries of medical reputation behind them, but the sea had acquired its own powerful therapeutic associations. Sea bathing, coastal air and the idea of the bracing seaside had become deeply embedded in British habits of convalescence and holidaymaking. Families could compare one environment with another, inland air against sea air, hills against coast, mineral water against salt water. The writer had made that comparison and decided firmly in favour of the sea.
That verdict is all the more striking because the Pump House existed to persuade visitors that Llandrindod was good for them. The hotel had grown from the saline and sulphurous springs which helped create the resort, and its late nineteenth-century rebuilding transformed a long-established watering place into a modern commercial hotel. Its publicity offered comfort, grounds, baths, recreation and the prestige of staying at one of the town’s leading establishments. Yet here was a guest deciding that the mother was worse, the air unsuitable, the hotel dull, the food poor and the weather dreadful. The marketing had done its work well enough to bring them there. It could not control the judgement they formed once they arrived.
It is easy to smile at the bluntness of the message, particularly the milk puddings and the “only 7 people”, but there is anxiety beneath the irritation. The writer was watching a mother who could not walk far, whose neuralgia was recurring and who felt worse than when they came. Time and money had been spent on the stay and, very probably, there had been some hope that the change would help her. Instead, the journey seemed to have achieved nothing. The complaints about food and weather sit beside a much more serious disappointment, the fear that the supposed cure was not working.
That is why postcards deserve to be taken seriously as historical sources. Their very informality preserves things which official records often miss. Behind the grand story of a spa resort were thousands of private decisions. Should an unwell parent be taken away for a few weeks? Would the waters help? Could they manage the walking? Would the climate suit them? Was the hotel worth the expense? Should the family try the coast instead? Most such conversations disappeared with the people who had them. A postcard could accidentally preserve a few sentences of one.
In this case there is one further complication. The card appears never to have been posted. It has no stamp, no postmark and no completed address. The message runs across the printed division and into the space where the recipient’s details should have gone. Perhaps it was meant to be put in an envelope, perhaps it was abandoned before being addressed, or perhaps it was simply retained among family papers. There is no way to know. Its survival gives the message an unusually private character. This is not the conventional holiday formula about good weather and pleasant surroundings. It reads like the verdict of somebody writing to a person who already understood who “Mother” was and why her health mattered.
For Llandrindod Wells the value of the card lies in that tension between image and experience. The front shows the town as it wished to be seen, spacious, healthy, prosperous and serene. The reverse records an individual experience which was almost the opposite, poor health, restricted mobility, an empty hotel, disappointing food, rain, a storm and a longing for somewhere else. Neither side is the whole truth. Thousands of people returned to Llandrindod over many years and clearly found the waters, the society or simply the holiday agreeable. One dissatisfied family does not overturn that history. What it does is make it more human. Successful resorts were perfectly capable of producing unsuccessful holidays.
The great Pump House Hotel has gone, its site now occupied by Powys County Hall, but this small piece of card has outlived the building it depicts. The hotel’s formal history can be reconstructed from newspapers, census returns, plans, advertisements, company records and photographs. Those sources can tell us when it was rebuilt, how many people it accommodated, who managed it and how it fitted into the rise of Llandrindod Wells. The postcard does something they cannot. It restores one anonymous voice and, through that voice, a moment of ordinary Edwardian experience. The publisher expected the picture on the front to be the important part. More than a century later, it is the writing on the back which makes the card exceptional.
Sources and Further Reading
Original postcard, Llandrindod Wells. – Pump House Hotel, E. & S. Art Publishers, No. 4, author’s collection. On postal-format grounds I would date it to about 1904–1906, probably around 1905. The estimate is based on the early divided-back instructions rather than a postmark and should therefore be treated as approximate.
English Heritage, “Postcards: Wish You Were Here”, for the growth of postcard use in Britain, including the rise from about 75 million cards in 1871 to more than 800 million annually by 1910.
Lancaster University, Edwardian Postcards and the Edwardian Picture Postcard Project, for the use of postcards as cheap, rapid everyday communication across Edwardian society, the frequency of urban postal deliveries and the estimate of roughly six billion cards sent during the decade.
For dating the postal format, comparison has also been made with surviving British divided-back cards postmarked in 1903 and 1904 carrying closely comparable inland and foreign-postage instructions, together with the international adoption of the divided back in 1907.
Rhodons Collectables, surviving E. & S. Art Publishers views of Llandrindod Wells, including Holy Trinity Church, No. 16, and “Visitors Going for the Waters”, No. 37, both catalogued as early twentieth-century cards. These demonstrate that the Pump House card formed part of a wider numbered Llandrindod series.
For the history, enlargement, management and working life of the hotel, see Antony David Davies, The Pump House Hotel, Llandrindod Wells: The Building That Made the Victorian Spa, drawing on census returns, contemporary newspapers, probate material and local studies.
W. H. Howse, Old-Time Llandrindod, and C. W. Newman, “The Pump House Hotel, Llandrindod Wells”, Transactions of the Radnorshire Society, vol. 52, 1982.
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Coflein records for Llandrindod Wells and the Pump House site, including early postcard and photographic material relating to the hotel and spa.