Wednesday 17 October 2012

North Wootton - couple of Climax rubber cancels

According to Mike Welch's comprehensive set of articles in the S&DPHG Journal, North Wootton had five Climax rubber cancels as well as two rubber skeletons.  Here are a couple of them from 1905 and 1907.
I believe the 1905 cancel is catalogue number 2080 in Mike's list (it appears to be a slight later date than Mike has seen), while the 1907 cancel is number 2090.

Climax Rubber Date-Stamps were first issued in 1885 to small post offices that were not Money-Order offices, to date-stamp the recently introduced postal orders. Later, they were also used by these offices to date-stamp Parcel Post labels and ordinary mail. Although much cheaper than steel hand-stamps they were very much less durable, and from about 1916 they were gradually replaced by the more economic steel hand-stamps.  From their introduction in 1885, the rubber datestamps were necessarily used with a special violet water-based ink, because the normal post office black ink contained oil that would damage the rubber. In December 1910 a new black ink suitable for rubber handstamps, was introduced.


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