An unused postcard showing a row of cannons facing the slipway and the wharf beyond.  I had never seen a photograph of these before.  It took me a minute to realize exactly where they were located, but it was obviously the Literary Institute, which was established in 1882.  There is a photo on a stock library website taken in 1901 and showing a similar view from the Francis Frith collection.

In 1900 an article in the Welsh Gazette stated that the ultimate origins of the cannons was unknown but they had been presented to the Institute by the Urban District Council who had presented them to the Institute, and the letters G.R. on the barrels showed that they had once belonged to the Crown.

Henry Birch’s 1982 booklet about the Literary Institute (A Brief History of The Aberdovey Literary Institute 1882-1982) makes reference to the cannons in connection with celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897, when they were rusty and badly neglected after standing outside the Institute “for some years” and it was proposed that they should be restored and mounted.  There was an unverified local story amongst older residents that the cannons were fired to celebrate the end of the siege Mafeking, and that a ship at anchor in the estuary was dismasted in the process.  The booklet says that in later years the cannons were used by boats alongside the wall as mooring posts.  By 1940 the Institute’s committee had decided that they should be scrapped to help the war effort but they were unable to find a scrap dealer who was interested.  In 1941 a letter to the Committee indicates that two were to be retained and restored “for sentimental reasons” and the others were to be “sold to the local salvage depot for 6d each.”  There is no mention of what happened to the final two.

This is a Wrench postcard, number 73082.  Evelyn Wrench, who set up Wrench Postcards in 1902 when he was in his early 20s, was celebrated as a business success story, a model for other young entrepreneurs, and several newspaper articles were written about him.  There is more about him at the end of an earlier post.