Baby’s Biography (Valentine Mary Walker)

A late 19th central baby record scrapbook, semi-completed for Valentine Mary Walker.  Green cloth-covered pictorial boards with gilt lettering front and spine.  Decorative green endpapers.  Illustrated.  4to.  Covers are heavily worn and soiled, crumbled away at corners, heavily rubbed around edges with cloth fraying at corners and spine ends, cracked and fraying along spine joints..  Hinges cracked and gutters strained with some leaves loosened.  Pages a little toned and the odd mark, several corners dog-eared and some spotting and toning throughout.

Baby’s Biography is a late 19th century baby record book, belonging to the genre of nursery biographies popular in late Victorian Britain.  Structured as an a decorative outline for parents to complete, it features dedicated pages to track a child’s birth and early development,, including placeholders for mementos such a lock of hair or photographs at various ages.  Its aesthetics are in keeping with the sentimental domestic culture of the period and influenced by the highly decorative contemporary tastes.  While an interesting item itself, its poor condition leaves the major interest in this copy coming from the fact that it has been largely completed in the name of Valentine Mary Walker, born in Willesden Green on May 9th 1910, complete with many family details of the Walker family, the Crittal family (her mother was a Crittall, a part of the prominent Essex-based family and founders of the Crittall Manufacturing Co – now known as Crittall Windows Ltd – the world’s leading manufacturer of steel-frame windows).  Valentine Mary married into the Gush family in 1932, and details of this wedding and some Gush family details also included  – the couple’s children included George R P Gush, the prominent British wargaming historian.  The latter part of the biography is packed full of family photos from the 1910s and 1920s, many of Valentine herself – at the beach, horse-riding and with siblings(2). Most of the photos have dates and brief details of where taken and who is in them.  Particularly touching are details of her childhood birthday parties, the friends who remembered her birthday and the presents exchanged, the the list of names she had given to her dolls when aged 5 and a half.).  Valentine Mary’s uncle was Valentine George Crittall, the first Baron Braintree, a sometime member of Parliament and founder of the model village of Silver End, near Braintree in Essex.  A unique resource for family and social historians.