personal

My name is Clive Fennessy, and I live in Edinburgh, Scotland with my wife and two children.

I work for HP, in charge of a team of engineers working on Digital Printing presses in the North of the UK and Ireland. This has helped in my hobby which has been creating my own postcards.

I am interested in Naval history, (My Dad was in the British Fleet Air Arm during the war) and in 1988 started to collect old postcards of British Navy Battleships and Carriers.

This led onto ships of other nations, till one day in july 1989 I was digging through a box of postcards in an old second hand bookshop when I came across some coloured postcards of American Battleships transiting the Panama canal. I was fascinated in these because of their vibrant hand coloured linen pictures and the sheer size of the locks needed to lift such huge vessels.

Since that day I've collected around 500 cards on the canal, joined collecting societies (such as the Isthmian Collectors Club) and learnt a lot more about the canal and the ships that went through it.

The biggest producer of postcards on the Isthmus was the Maduro family, and the majority of older postcards found nowadays were made with their distinctive Maduro Eagle on the reverse.

After collecting as many of the Maduro cards of ships in transit as I could, I decided to 'create' my own postcards using an Apple Macintosh, Scanner, Photoshop and a Digital printing press. The beauty of this is if I find an old Black and white photo of a famous ship in the canal, I can colour it on the computer and make a postcard in the same style as the famous Maduro ones in my collection.