The Sub-Office Postmarks of Sheffield
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The Sub-Office Postmarks of Sheffield Frank Walton RDP FRPSL RDYP Version 1.02 - 16 September 2018 The Sub-Office Postmarks of Sheffield 1 Return to Postmark Index The Sub-Office Postmarks of Sheffield Published by The Stuart Rossiter Trust First published 2018 © Frank L. Walton ISBN 978-1-908710-06-2 All rights reserved. Except as permitted in law, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher. Whilst the author has used his best endeavours to clear copyright and/or pay appropriate licence fees for the images to be found in this book, the nature of historical archive images means that information about copyright ownership or lifetime for some of the images may have been impossible to determine. The publisher would like to hear from anyone who has additional information about the copyright status of any of the images. Please contact the Trust via the website www.rossitertrust.com if you can provide such information. Frank L. Walton is hereby identified as the author of this work as provided under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book has been written with the sole intention of sharing information with collectors and researchers. The book is made freely available from the Stuart Rossiter Trust website, and can be printed by users for their own use. The only restriction on use is that the book should not be sold for any monetary gain by a third party. Typeset by Frank L. Walton The Sub-Office Postmarks of Sheffield 2 Return to Postmark Index Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. Index to Sub-Office Postmarks 6 3. Sub-Office Locations 10 4. Registration Labels 18 5. Right Justified Index 20 6. Selected Bibliography 21 7. Sub-Office Postmarks 22 8. User Guide 404 9. The Stuart Rossiter Trust 405 The Sub-Office Postmarks of Sheffield 3 Return to Postmark Index Introduction Background Collectors and researchers of Sheffield postal history are very lucky, as they have the extensive series of publications by Ron Ward to draw upon. Ron, and his other Sheffield-based contemporaries of Eric Lewis and Bill Sedgewick, wrote no fewer than five handbooks on the postal history of the Sheffield area. These were published in the 1980s. The one shortcoming of this series of books is that the Town Sub-Offices within the city area were never covered after the cut-off date of 1880 in Ron’s seminal work Sheffield Postal History. Sheffield is a major city in England, 160 miles north of London. It is wholly in the county of Yorkshire, originally in the West Riding, but after re-organisation in 1973 it fell under South Yorkshire. Along most of its southern edge, the city boundary coincides with the Derbyshire county boundary. There have been numerous boundary changes since 1901, with portions of Derbyshire being subsumed within the city - and thus within Yorkshire. Scope This book documents the postmarks applied at all post offices that fell under Sheffield head office, other than Sheffield itself. Specifically excluded are any instructional marks. Also excluded is any reference to the colour of inks used. A total of 330 differently named offices are included, and each one of these has its own page recording the life of the office and illustrating the postmarks used. There are over 1,800 postmarks illustrated. Although most books of this nature have a very clear date range defining their scope, there was no obvious end point for this study. Hence I decided that whatever information had been encountered would be incorporated into this work. Definitions Sub-Office This has been very broadly used as meaning anything that isn’t Sheffield Head Post Office! There are many types of office that are included: Town Sub-Offices, Rural Sub-Offices, District Offices, Money Order Offices etc. Postmasters This generic term has been used to record the names of the people responsible for running each office. Included are Postmistresses, Sub-Postmasters, Sub-Postmistresses, Officer in Charge etc. Research at the Postal Museum in London demonstrated that, somewhat surprisingly, the Post Office does not have an archive that shows the names of postmasters. The date ranges shown only cover the periods where names have been discovered. These are normally taken from Directories, so they can often be outdated, contain spelling mistakes - or just wrong! Whilst accuracy cannot be guaranteed, the information is faithfully reproduced. Locations The precise postal address of each office is often difficult to establish. The locations given are normally extracted from local Directories. As with the names of postmasters, no archive exists that specifies actually addresses of Sub-Post Offices. The date ranges listed are provided on the same basis as the names of the postmasters. Office Dates The dates of opening and closure of Sub-Offices are not easily derivable from PO Archives. The dates provided in this book are put together from whatever sources are available: notices in the Post Office Courier magazine, dates of sending handstamps or reports in local newspapers. Ken Smith has maintained a website (https://sites.google.com/site/ukpostofficesbycounty/) which meticulously records this information, and has provided a very useful check to research from other sources. Dates This book quotes several thousand dates. In the tables, all dates are written in the format dd mmm yyyy, i.e. the day number, followed by the first three letters of the month name, followed by a four-digit year number. This format is used irrespective of how a date appears in a date stamp. For postmarks that have no date included, the quoted dates are derived either from a dated postmark on the same envelope or from a manuscript annotation. It is recognised that information derived in such a manner may be a day or two different. The Sub-Office Postmarks of Sheffield 4 Return to Postmark Index Postmark Images Many images have been taken from material held in the author’s collection, but this left many gaps with a few dozen offices not represented. An appeal to members of the Yorkshire Postal History Society generated a most significant contact in that the current owner of the huge collection put together by Ron Ward got in touch. Ron’s superb material was still 99% complete as written up in the period 1950 to 1990. I was given unlimited access to the collection, which ultimately generated approximately 2,000 digital images which were invaluable in building earliest and latest date ranges, and of course providing more illustrations. Between my own collection and the ex-Ron Ward material, many postmarks were recorded from multiple examples. This allowed me to either pick a clear strike, or build a composite image by taking clear portions from different examples. Many illustrations have been retouched to eliminate spurious ink marks and generally to improve readability. All measurements of postmarks are quoted in millimetres. For circular datestamps, the measurement has been taken from the centre of the line on one side to the centre of the line at the other end of a diameter. This technique eliminates variations due to over-inking or smudged impressions. Sources Used for Histories of Offices Census returns: 1841 to 1911 White's Directories: 1841, 1849, 1852, 1856, 1862, 1879, 1901, 1905 and 1911. Post Office Directory of Sheffield... : 1854 Kelly's West Riding Directory: 1881 Kelly’s Sheffield and Rotherham Directories: 1922, 1925, 1931, 1937, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1951, 1954, 1957, 1959, 1963, 1965, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973 and 1974 Kelly’s Derbyshire Directories: 1908, 1925 and 1932 The 1939 Register and maps viewed via the www.old-maps.co.uk site. Ken Smith’s UK Post Offices website Historic newspaper articles on internet Ordnance Survey Maps, older versions of which show post offices marked, especially in rural areas Sheffield AZ street maps: c1975, 1991, 1996, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2016. Acknowledgements This work would not have reached publication without assistance from many people. Philip Robinson FRPSL has been an enormous help by assisting with the research in directories and census returns for details of dates, names and addresses of postmasters and locations of offices. Clive Jones also is a keen collector of Sheffield material, and, as well as providing dates and illustrations from his collection, acted as a peer reviewer for each office. It may come as a surprise to many readers, but 55 of the 330 offices listed are, or at least were at some point, in Derbyshire rather than Yorkshire. For these offices, James Grimwood-Taylor FRPSL and Gordon Hardy both acted as peer reviewers. James also added numerous dates and illustrations from his records and collection. Howard Hughes provided information and illustrations concerning the late use of a Maltese Cross cancellation at Chapeltown. My research took me to The Postal Museum in London where they hold the postmark impression books. These primary sources yielded handstamps not recorded by the philatelic world previously and, with their permission, several postmarks are illustrated in the book. I would like to thank the trustees of the Stuart Rossiter Trust who have supported this project with enthusiasm. We have moved together into the realms of digital philatelic publishing; whether this is a model for the future will be judged in due course. Recording of Future Discoveries Although this book has been in the taken over ten years to research, it is clearly never going to be the final word on the subject. If any reader has further information, the author would be pleased to hear from them by email to [email protected].