Most artistic arrangement, 1916

The award that does not match the rule — and the rule was printed three weeks earlier.

On August 2, 1916 the Bulletin printed the show's numbered rules, and rule four reserved the Emblem Club cup for the “general display” of flowers — a rule the committee said was the same as the previous year's, which carried it back to 1915. This archive filed that page and built a category history on it: the cup was for the general display from 1915 to 1917, and by 1920 it had become the most artistic arrangement.

Three weeks after those rules were printed, the same paper reported the award — and it went for the most artistic arrangement. Not in 1920. In 1916, in the same August, in the same newspaper.

So the seam this archive found in the 1920 rules, where one clause offers the cup for the general display and another for the most artistic arrangement, and found again word for word in 1927, runs back further than either. The published rule and the awarded category had already parted company by the club's own fourth or fifth show. The rule was the stale half and nobody bothered to fix it for at least eleven years.

Two smaller things follow. This is a cup year the table did not hold — 1916, Mrs. C. S. Hudson, who also took the Commercial cup the same afternoon. And the runner-up is E. A. Smith, which matters because the archive has been carrying a disagreement about whether the Commercial cup's 1920 holder was Mrs. E. A. Smith or Mrs. C. A. Smith. Two pages now give E. A. — this one and the notice of April 1920 — against one that gives C. A.