Julian Bagwell

There are two stories regarding the following postcard

The first is its message which starts ‘Alice has developed mumps’ and goes on to say that the family will not be coming to Guernsey as planned the following day because of that.  The second story is the postcard itself, unusual in that it was sent Express Delivery.  This item went at Service II, which meant it was carried through the normal mail but then when reaching the despatch office had to be sent out immediately and not wait for the next postal round; the rate for this was 3d per mile, paid for with two Jubilee issue stamps and denoted by the red Express label at the bottom left.

But the story does not end there.  The postcard was despatched from Derby at 10.15am on the morning of 27^th December 1900, a Thursday, as evidenced by three Derby/242 duplex cancels.  There was obviously a problem with the initial delivery as at the top left is written ‘N.A. / 7.35am’; this presumably means ‘No Answer’ when the messenger called early in the morning.  The postcard was probably taken back to the Post Office, where the two vertical blue lines and the rare Money Order Office (M.O.O.) handstamp dated 29^th December were applied.  The postcard was probably delivered later in the day.

At London 2022 I acquired the envelope shown below.  I am building up a small collection of letters to or from Guernsey with Ship Letter (SL) cachets, but I had never before seen one with a Dover SL handstamp; ports such as Guernsey itself, Southampton, Weymouth, Poole and Portsmouth, the latter group all with some sort of shipping passage to Guernsey, are where most such cachets abound.  What is even more remarkable is that the cachet was applied in 1878, an amazing 63 years after the last known use of this cachet at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

Before looking in more detail at the envelope itself, what was a Ship Letter and why do such letters carry a separate and distinguishing cachet?  In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, mail to and from Great Britain could only be carried by ship.  Mail on those ships owned or under contract to the Post Office was called Packet Mail, but mail was also carried on private ships, not under contract, and this was Ship Letter mail.  The Post Office agreed to pay the Masters of private ships a fee to encourage the efficient handling of any letters they carried; the Master or one of his crew was required to hand in any Ship Letters at the ship’s first port of call within Great Britain (before 1840, when postal rates were primarily distance based, this was to the advantage of the Post Office – for example, a letter from overseas addressed to London and carried on a London bound ship whose first domestic port of call was Plymouth would attract much more postage if handed in at Plymouth rather than London).  Before September 1799 the mail was then forwarded to the Inland Office, but the Ship Letter Act of that year gave the Post Office power to use private ships for the conveyance of letters at half the usual packet rates and a Ship Letter Office was set up at the London Chief Office and remained there until 1847, being responsible for all overseas letters other than those carried by Packets.  A Ship Letter charge was made for such mail and normally this was then paid by the recipient.  Ship Letter cachets were applied to the mail at the port of entry to enable such mail to be properly sorted.

The envelope below is a real rarity, a letter to Guernsey with a Dover SL handstamp. 

There were no direct shipping routes between the two and the postal markings indicate that the letter was handed into the post at Dover. 

Most of the shipping routes to that port originated at the time in France or Belgium, although other sources for the letter are also possible.  A 1d Red, plate 190, was probably applied at Dover before the letter was taken to the Post Office; there a circular datestamp on the front for 16^th February 1878 and the Dover Ship Letter handstamp were applied.  The cancel on the front is numeral ’10’ of the London Inland Branch, which by then handled foreign mail, the London Ship Letter Office functions having been transferred there in 1847, and there is a London transit handstamp for 16^th February on the rear, together with a Guernsey receiving handstamp for 19^th February.  The addressee, Mary Le Page, is shown in the 1861 census living at Roque a Boeuf, the house to which the letter is addressed.

What was remarkable is that this is the first recorded use of the Dover SL handstamp since 1815, the year the Napoleonic Wars finally ended.  The handstamp appears genuine and is known as S8 after the classification system developed by Robertson.  I have a BPA Expertising Certificate dated December 1999 stating that the envelope is genuine.  So why was a handstamp last used in 1815 brought out of the cupboard 63 years later?

What follows is necessarily speculation.  My guess and it is little more than that, is that a postal clerk in Dover decided that the letter was not of domestic origin and should be treated as foreign mail.  That is consistent with the manuscript ‘4’ on the front, one explanation of which is an additional amount to be paid, a penalty at twice the standard 2½d international rate (1878 was three years into the standard UPU rate for international mail), less the value of the 1d Red.  Other explanations might also be possible, bearing in mind that not all postal authorities were members of the UPU in 1878, but whatever one’s view, the fact that the Dover SL handstamp was applied indicates that the letter was not treated as being domestic, despite carrying a single 1d Red and presumably the sender, or perhaps a member of a ship’s crew, trying to post it as a domestic mail item.  Why such an old handstamp was apparently dusted off and used is not clear, but perhaps this was the only way for the clerk formally to alert London, where the stamp was cancelled, of his or her reservations about the origin of the letter.  That begs another question, was this the only time in 63 years that suspicion had been raised about a letter handed in at Dover and if not, what other markings were used for such mail?

Any thoughts or other views on this cover will be gratefully received from members.

My thanks to Colin Tabeart, James Grimwood Taylor and Alan Moorcroft, all of whom provided helpful advice; the words, of course are all my own.