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Albert Hales

postcard

Lock on the River Rother at Iden

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Grocer and sub-postmaster, Iden. Hales set up business as a grocer at Iden in about 1906 (he is listed in Kelly's 1907 Sussex Directory but not in the 1905 edition). He was still trading in 1934, but retired by 1938.

Hales published a series of sepia-tinted real photographic cards of the country around Iden, and presumably also of the village itself, though none have been reported. The cards lack borders and have jet-black, hand-written captions. The photographs are credited to A. Coleman, but the cards are labelled on the back "Copyright. A Hales, Iden".

Hales was born in about 1876 at Stockbury in Kent. He began his working life assisting his elder brother, Edmund Hales, run the latter's grocery shop at Stockbury. In 1905 after moving to Sussex he married Marianne Clinch, who had been born at Borden in Kent in 1877. The 1911 census records that he and Marianne lived in The Street at Iden with their two daughters, Winifred Mary Hales (born in 1906) and Mariah Norah Hales (born in 1910).

The photographer, A. Coleman, has not been traced. The initial may of course have been wrongly recorded. A Percy Coleman of Playden near Rye published postcards in 1910-11 but the caption handwriting and general design of his cards bear no relation to that of the Iden cards.

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