From Years Gone By…

Received client email:-

Thank you for fantastic work you did on the lanterns and the frame. We are really happy with them.
We showed them to my parents on FaceTime. They were also impressed with how they looked and happy to see them in such good condition again. In case you are interested, they told us some more about the history of the lanterns.
My grandfathers were both ex-pats at the mines in Rio Tinto, a small mining town in south west Spain where my parents met and married – and where I was born.
A Danish couple (Kae and Karen Hase) came to run a farm in El Zumajo, a couple of miles from Rio Tinto, in 1916. This farm had no electricity at the time so any work outside daylight hours had to be done by lantern.

The 2 lanterns that you restored were amongst these, so must date from the late 1910s or 1920s.

My parents fondly remember visiting the farm as children which the Karen Hase continued to run after her husband’s death. (Apparently she laid on Christmas celebrations and was generally kind to the local children although she had no children of her own.)
In 1954, in ill health Karen Hase returned to Denmark. She sold many of her possessions before returning – including the lanterns, which my grandparents bought.

These passed to my parents who later gave them to us.
The attached article (in Spanish) is about the farm at this time, so you can see pictures of the original owners of the lanterns and in the third picture a building on the farm where they were used.
http://lafactoria-cuencaminera.blogspot.com/2009/10/la-granja-danesa-de-el-zumajo-por-juan.html

Thanks again for restoring them.
All the best

Anthony