• HOME
• ABOUT
  • Culham Station
    • Some bits of history
    • Culham Station in the news
    • Changes at Culham Station
  • Culham people
    • Culham station staff
    • Culham coal merchants
    • The Railway Hotel at Culham
  • 175th Anniversary
  • Old Ticket Office publications
    • Model sheets
    • Information sheets
    • Old Ticket Office booklets
• IMAGES
  • Images of Culham Station
    • A tour of Culham Station
    • Culham Station through time
    • A case of mistaken identity?
    • Stations similar to Culham
  • Trains passing through Culham
  • Culham in model form
  • Local private owner wagons
• MEMORABILIA
  • GWR publicity collection
  • Ticket collection
  • Book collection
    • GWR books and booklets
    • GWR internal publications
    • Early guides to the GWR
    • Ian Allan books
  • Jigsaw collection
    • GWR jigsaws
    • Chad Valley jigsaws
    • A.V.N.Jones jigsaws
    • Peacock & Co. jigsaws
  • Card collections
    • GWR postcards
    • Other postcards
    • "Beautiful Britain" playing cards
    • Cigarette cards
  • Railwayana
  • Model and kit collection
• BITS & BOBS
  • Nature at Culham Station
  • Nuneham House
  • HMS Hornbill
  • Turnpikes and Toll Bridges
  • Lost stations and halts
  • Company Servants' welfare
    • The "Safety Movement"
    • GWR Widows and Orphans
    • GWR Medical Fund Society
    • Railway Convalescent Homes
    • Insurances and other schemes
  • Victorian photographers
• FIND US
• LINKS

Railwayana

Stamp and covers collection

G.W.R. Railway Letter Service

The postal reforms which accompanied the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840 gave the Post Office a monopoly in the carriage of mail, but this monopoly only applied to letters with private carriers left able to charge for the carriage of parcels and newspapers. However, legistlation introduced on 1st February 1891 allowed railway companies to now apply to carry letters between stations, and the Railway Letter Service was born. This new service enabled people to send a letter by any train to a station local to the intended recipient. Such letters could then have either been collected or passed to the Royal Mail system for final delivery. Senders of letters intended for onward delivery would have had to pay the relevant Royal Mail charges in addition to Railway Letter Service charges.

Railway companies produced their own stamps for their part of the service and we have in our collection this block of four unused 4d stamps which the GWR issued for their railway letter service.

A rare find for our collection was this used 2d letter service stamp shown here much enlarged. It is cancelled with a hand stamp showing that it was sent from CULHAM STATION GWRY. Having been removed from the original envelope there is sadly no indication as to when or to where this letter was actually sent.

G.W.R. Air Mail

Having been restricted from operating road services until 1928, the main railway companies sought to get ahead of the game as far as air services were concerned. Included in the Parliamentery Bills for 1929 therefore was provision for them to operate air services within specified areas. It was not until March 1933 that the GWR first held talks with Imperial Airways with a view to them providing and operating an aircraft with GWR staff supplying the traffic staff and handling ticket sales etc. The aeroplane provided by Imperial Airways was the relatively new three-engined Westland Wessex G-AAGW, the rear portion and wings of which were painted chocolate and cream. On each side of the rudder was the GWR twin shields logo and painted below the windows was the wording Great Western Railway, Air Services, Operated by Imperial Airways. The service only ran during 1933 and was replaced by the joint venture Railway Air Services from 1934 onwards.

In a similar manner to the well established Railway Letter Service the GWR operated an Air Mail service, producing a special stamp for the purpose. The stamp bore an illustration of the aeroplane but was shown carrying a very plain colour scheme rather than the more complex GWR one. We are fortunate to have this unused example in our collection. It has been suggested that many of these stamps were sold as souvenirs and never actually used to send letters.

B.R. Railway Letter Service

As a common carrier, British Railways continued to carry letters, parcels and newspapers and so they also published their own stamps, sometimes being special commemorative issues. They issued a pictorial 55p stamp on 12th March 1980 for the 'Rocket 150' celebrations, and a pair on 7th December 1981 for the inaugural passenger run of the Advanced Passenger Train

Images courtesy of Rob Latham.

Railway Letter Service - GWR 150
Issued on 22nd January 1985

GWR 150 commemorative issue

The Railway Letter Service was formally discontinued by British Railways in 1984, but the arrangements were reintroduced on 22nd January 1985 to permit the carriage of the special covers commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Great Western Railway. This miniature sheet of four 55p GWR 150 stamps was produced for British Railways having been designed by Dugald Cameron. Many heritage railways and preservation societies continue to operate a railway letter service over their lines and issue their own stamps for the purpose.

Our large format commemorative cover carries the 29p Cheltenham Flyer stamp from the Royal Mail 'Famous Trains' set which has been cancelled with the special First day of issue BRISTOL, 22 January 1985 hand stamp which shows a drawing of the entrance to Bristol Temple Meads station. The complete Railway Letter Service sheet of four 55p stamps has been cancelled twice with GWR 150 22 January 1985 PADDINGTON STATION. This hand stamp bears an image of the same GWR broad gauge 4-2-2 locomotive as seen on the first Railway Letter Service stamp.

~~~~~~ ooooooOOOoooooo ~~~~~~

Commemorative stamps and covers

Special stamps and commemorative envelopes with a railway or Brunel theme have been produced by many countries over the years. Illustrated below are those which have taken our interest and have therefore found their way into our collection. The first two shown below have a very personal connection with the Old Ticket Office at Culham.

Buckingham Covers produced their commemorative cover for the 175th anniversary of the Didcot to Oxford branch and chose to feature Culham Station prominently together with the special 175th anniversay logo which we had a hand in designing. The wording of the explanatory insert was initially provided by us but was modified by them to include a train naming ceremony at Didcot which had been announced by GWR but was then cancelled by them at the eleventh hour so never actually took place. To mark the 175th anniversary of the opening of the line to Oxford, GWR ran a very special record breaking train from Oxford to Paddington carrying invited guests. All the Buckingham covers were carried on that train and so bear wording to that effect in addition to the Didcot-Oxford 175 cancellation. You can read all about this record breaking run elsewhere on our website.

The second commemorative envelope was produced, as printed on the envelope, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Didcot to Oxford branch. The cancellaction wording is however a bit misleading as it bears the GWR 150 logo and says 150th Anniversary Great Western Railway. The official GWR 150 celebrations had taken place in 1985.

Presentation packs

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway 1830 presentation pack does in fact contain the complete strip of five stamps in the issue, but the last one is folded under to fit into the narrower pack.

Stamp booklets

The large Prestige Booklets contain, not only pages of stamps, but also several illustrated pages of text describing the main subject being commemorated. Each of the first four lines from the famous poem Night Mail by W.H.Auden are quoted on the four stamp pages in Letters by Night booklet. Whilst the text in the booklet celebrating the story of British Rail covers its history from 1948 to 1986 the four stamp pages celebrate the carrying of Royal Mail by rail. Click or tap on a booklet thumbnail to see a gallery of its stamp pages.

~~~~~~ ooooooOOOoooooo ~~~~~~

Local interest covers and stamps

These commemorative covers and stamps have nothing to do with the Old Ticket Office at Culham, or even railways, but we like them as they record significant events in local history.

Tolkein Centenary

During the 1920s, J.R.R.Tolkein became a professor at Oxford University and whilst there he started a writing group called The Inklings, which counted among its members C.S.Lewis and Owen Barfield. His award-winning fantasy novel, The Hobbit, was published in 1937. Over the years, while working on other publications, Tolkien developed the work that would come to be regarded as his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings series, partially inspired by ancient European myths, with its own sets of maps, lore and languages. Part one of the series, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published in 1954 with The Two Towers and The Return of the King following in 1955. After his retirement in 1959 Tolkein and his wife moved to Bournemouth, but following the death of his wife he returned to Oxford, living in rooms provided by Merton College. He died on 2nd September 1973, both he and his wife are buried together in a single grave in Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford.

This special sheet of stamps and first day cover celebrate the 100th anniversay of the birth of Tolkein and his enduring connection with Oxford.

First flight by an Englishman

Oxford's connection with aviation goes back much further than one might imagine, as in 1784 James Sadler, a pastry chef in Oxford, became the first ever Englishman to fly. He took off from Christ Church meadow on the 4th of October in a home made balloon of silk lined with paper, heat being provided by a fire on an open grille. He rose to over 3,000 ft, flying for about 30 minutes before landing six miles away in Woodeaton. His exploits and other scientific advances make for interesting reading.

This commemorative cover celebrates the 200th anniversay of that very first flight in Oxford. The cover was carried in a hot air balloon piloted by Peter Sadler. The flight took off from the Angel and Greyhound meadow in St. Clements near Magdalen Bridge in Oxford, close to where the first flight started. The anniversary flight lasted just over one hour and landed near what was at that time Aylesbury(Thame) Airport.

Abingdon Telephone Exchange

It is probably not widely known that Abingdon was the last manually operated telephone exchange to remain in operation in England. It closed on 26th June 1975 when a newly built automatic exchange was opened. The manual exchange was located at the rear of what was the main Post Office in High Street. It was Abingdon’s main Post Office for more than a century until its closure in January 2009. The present-day High Street extends east-west from Market Place to The Square but the stretch by the Post Office was long known as ‘The Narrows’ but in 1883 most of the buildings there were destroyed by fire. The street was then widened and the Post Office was one of the new buildings erected in the early 1890s, the 'modern' stone shop frontage was added in 1954. The building remained empty for some time after closing before being refurbished and opened as 'The Narrows' by J D Wetherspoon in October 2013. The buiding depicted on the envelope and franking is Abingdon County Hall in the market place which houses the town museum.

---