Six competitors

The mid-century cup was a category a committee reinvented each August. This is what the same trophy looked like while the club was still alive.

The 1921 flower show opened in the Miner building with more entries than ever before, the flowers filling shelves on both sides of the room and the entries for the prize cups on tables down the centre. Mrs. C. S. Hudson won the Emblem club cup for the best artistic arrangement of flowers, with Mrs. A. R. Leary second. There were six competitors for the Emblem club cup and six for the Commercial club cup.

That is a different object from the one the record shows later. After 1924 the Emblem Club cup becomes a prize with no club behind it, its category reassigned each year — a luncheon table arrangement in 1933, a miniature on a mirror in 1938, vegetables in 1942. Here the terms are stable, the field is small and familiar, and the two cups had been displayed in the window of Larson & Co., jewellers, before the show.

Mrs. C. S. Hudson won it in 1917 as well, and again in 1922. In April 1920 the paper described the cup as “held for two years by Mrs. C. S. Hudson” — the two years being 1918 and 1919, when no show was held at all. Her husband had gone to Portland with the club in 1913 and would undertake a quarter of its debt in 1919.

The competitor count is six for each cup, not six between them — the page says so under its own subhead, and the machine transcription had run the two together.