Loyola Hall, Ranihill

The building depicted in the postcard below still stands, in fact you can even buy it if you have a spare £1.25 million.
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/controversial-historic-mansion-could-yours-11930684

However, as it is no longer used as a religious retreat, it fits in with the remit of the blog.
There is also another reason why I've decided to blog about this and that's because it was very familiar to me throughout my childhood and teenage years.  I imagine those of you from my home town reading this blog  will have their own memories of Loyola Hall, from a certain history teacher's inability to pronounce it to trying to sneak in at lunchtimes and being chased out by the gardener.
The building and site were closed to visitors and a large wall hid most of it from view, which made it all the more fascinating for me. I remember being very little and being unable to see anything at all over the wall except when I was on the bus and I could just make out the main hall and beautiful looking grounds. The fascination never abated and even at 18 I would try to sneak a peak over the wall to get a better view. When I eventually got to enter the place, in my early 20s and looking for a missing cat (he turned up safe and sound), it was something of an anti climax.
The Grade II listed building was built in 1824 and known as Rainhill House, later becoming Rainhill Hall after extension work in 1869.  It was owned along with most of the land in Rainhill at the time, by the Bretherton-Stapleton family. The devoutly Catholic family, who also founded the nearby St Bartholomew's Church, sold the building and grounds to the Jesuits in 1923. It was used mostly as a spiritual retreat with upwards of 2000 visitors yearly.
It was also used to house the North Korean Football Team shortly before their quarter final match in the 1966 World Cup. One can only wonder what the atheistic North Koreans made of the religious imagery, probably not a lot as they lost their match 5-2.
The building underwent many renovations in its history but the postcard seems to predate those and probably dates from around 1960.
Loyola Hall closed as a retreat in 2014 due to a lack of Jesuit priests to run the place.
Its not sure what the future will hold for the building and grounds. The are many rumours locally about the planned future of the place. I'm not going to comment on them as there are plenty of other places for people to have their say, but I will update the blog when we know for certain.

Update 2018

The hall is going to be a hotel and wedding venue.

http://www.sthelensstar.co.uk/news/16256427.Loyola_Hall_plans_for_hotel_and_wedding_venue_approved/

The Mystery of the MV Lyubov Orlova

In my last blog post concerning a ship I stated that she reminded me of a film star, well the vessel in the card below was named after a movie star, the Soviet Union's Lyubov Orlova.

You may not have heard of the actress, but you have probably heard of the vessel as she is the so called cannibal rat ghost ship that certain tabloids wanted us to believe was headed our way back in 2014.  This turned out to be false but it's not known what actually did happen to her.
MV Lyubov Orlova was built in 1976, a year after her namesake had died. She was built in Kraljevica, the oldest shipyard in the Adriatic which was then in Yugoslavia now Croatia. She was owned by the Far Eastern Shipping Company based in Vladivostok and was used for Antarctic cruises which she carried out without incident until 2006 when she ran aground at Deception Island, which itself is  home to abandoned scientific bases and might be of interest to some of you. 
The ship was taken out of service in 2010 and effectively placed under arrest. She was seized following a suit by a haulage contractor over a $251,000 debt. The 51 strong crew had not been paid for 5 months.
She was impounded at St John's in Newfoundland becoming gradually more derelict until she was sold for scrap in 2013. It was  when she was being towed away that her status as a ghost ship started. The tow line broke and the ship started to drift. As she was in international waters, there was some dispute as to whose jurisdiction she fell under and with no-one claiming responsibility the vessel continued to drift. She was sighted a couple of times in early 2013 the last time being on 12th March that year. It's not known what happened to her after that but she is believed to have sunk.
You may wonder how we can lose a 300 ft. ocean liner but she is not the only ship to have disappeared, though she is the only one, as far as I know, to have created such headline grabbing stories.
I've been searching for a card of the Lyubov Orlova since I first read those stories two years ago and I finally found one on ebay a couple of years ago. It's not the best quality but for me it's the "holy grail" of cards.
I'm not sure when it dates from but it's from the Soviet Era and published by Morflot.
    

Dover Stage and Coach Hotel - They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Well paradise is pushing it, but the Dover Stage and Coach Hotel was quite well thought of for a while.

The postcard is one of those that many people would consider boring and it certainly wouldn't look out of place in Martin Parr's Boring Postcard book but it is the sort of card many collectors, myself included, enjoy. I do wonder, looking at the Martin Parr book today how many of the structures still stand. Now there's an idea for a book.  For those of interested in that kind of thing, the card was published by Judges' and is not dated but is thought to be from mid sixties to early seventies.

The Dover Stage Hotel was built in 1957, only the third hotel to be built in the UK in the post war period. The modern but unusual design was meant to attract visitors from mainland Europe . The hotel was not glamorous but it had a lot to offer a visitor. All its 42 rooms were sea facing and had their own balcony, the hotel also had several bars and a large ballroom.  One thing it did lack were en suite facilities and though these were later added, it was to the detriment of the room size. Despite this, the hotel did attract many visitors for a while
It was not just overseas visitors who enjoyed the facilities. The ballroom and bars were popular among locals  for  wedding receptions, formal dinners and dances . Some say that this was because there was a lack of choice as other nearby hotels had been destroyed in the war but its ballroom in particular remained popular until the hotel was closed in 1988.  Unfortunately by this point the people who counted, namely Dover District Council, considered The Stage Hotel to be past its sell by date and approval was granted for its demolition.
It was stated that the plan was to build flats on site, but for some reason, possibly because that had never been the  actual plan, the flats never materialised and a car park for the visitor attraction The White Cliffs Experience was built instead.  
Ironically The White Cliffs Experience was a bit of a flop, was nicknamed the White Elephant Experience, failed to attract the visitors and closed after 8 years. Plans to build a new hotel on the site have  come to nothing and it remains a rather underused carpark.

The MV Kalakala - From Icon to Embarrassment

I've mentioned before that I particularly like Art Deco related cards so when I heard about the MV Kalakala I just had to find a postcard of her.
This wasn't too difficult considering that she was once the second most photographed item in the world, with only the Eiffel Tower beating her. Not bad for what is basically a car ferry.
She was also one of the most popular exhibits at the 1962 Seattle World fair. The postcard below was sent from Seattle but many years earlier in 1946.

She was launched in 1926 as the Peralta but a fire 7 years later destroyed her superstructure. The brief for the redesign was to be distinctive and modernistic and eventually it was decided she should modelled on contemporary aircraft. The publicity was also intriguing, billboards were commissioned with simply Kalakala written on them in large letters.
The unusual design was a case of style over substance. The narrow car deck meant that she could carry less vehicles than other vessels and there were difficulties with docking due to the setback of the wheelhouse. Still, she remained popular with tourists who enjoyed moonlight cruises on the ferry.
The design faults didn't stop her from seeing heavy service in WWII where she was used to transport shipyard workers and Navy personelle. Her popularity as a vehicle  had waned by the 1950s and she gained unflattering nicknames such as the Silver Slug and Galloping Ghost.
She was retired from service in 1967 but was used as a factory ship until she was beached in 1970 and used to process shrimp. In 2004 she was sold to a private investor as her previous owners couldn't afford the upkeep. However she was evicted from her new home Neah Bay that year and the Macah people who had provided the anchorage sued the owners. I do not know the outcome of this but she was moved to Tacoma Washington.
By 2011 she was very frail and would up being sold for a nominal fee of a dollar with the understanding that the purchaser would renovate her. This did not happen and she was scrapped in early 2015.
When writing about the Kalakala I can't help picturing her as a tragic movie star, tragic beginnings,  good looks and publicity helping her get noticed  followed by rising and falling popularity. She has a brief moment in the sun again before retirement followed by lawsuits and eviction and finally ending up on the scrap heap unloved and largely unmourned apart from by those of us with a cult interest in these things. Kind of sad  really.     
If you are wondering about the unusual name she is from the Chinook Jargon trade language and means "bird". The Chinook Jargon, unlike the Kalakala, is still being used but with less than 650 speakers who knows for how much longer.