Well, after finding out the rose growing on the side of my house is New Dawn, I did a bit of looking around and found another rose planted around the same time period (1930) at the side of my next door neighbour's house. Our two houses have about four feet between, and this plant is in /very/ bad shape.

There's some kind of white mold/fungus/paint(??) all over part of it, it's been nearly crushed by something heavy, and it's been pruned back like it was a weed.

There're six (plus three dead) flowers on it, about the same size as New Dawn but with much fewer petals -- average count is about 18. It seems it makes them in clusters by three. They're a dark magenta/red-purple color, as are the buds. The plant itself seeeeeems to be a climber, and is green with red thorns. The thorns are pretty nasty, especially compared to the pleasant New Dawn. The leaves are dark green, leaf shaped and semi-glossy. Possibly papery, but its hard to tell when its so sickly.

It smells really weird, not strong but sweetly licorice-spice-musky, almost unpleasant. One of those cases where your nose wrinkles but you smell it again nonetheless. :-)

I've taken one of the few healthy looking pieces and am going to try and grow it, I feel so sorry for the mother plant.