Cancelling

Cancelling is perhaps the easiest part of the postal system to mechanise as the process is much more repetitive.  Cancelling machines were developed in the 1850s to make the laborious but important task of cancelling stamps quicker and easier.

The BPMA collection holds examples of the three major types of mechanised cancelling machine:

• the manually-fed and operated machine
  
• the automatically-fed but manually operated
  
• the fully automated machines.
  

Here are four examples of cancelling machines in our collection:

Pearson Hill Cancelling Machine (Replica), 1991, accession number: OB1996.0396

This replica of the Pearson Hill Cancelling Machine was commissioned in 1991 by the then National Postal Museum to mark its 25th anniversary.

The original, developed by Pearson Hill in 1857 was arguably the earliest mechanised part of the postal system. No examples of the original machines survive

Pearson Hill was the son of Rowland Hill whose postal reform in 1840 created the need to mechanise the post to cope with the increased usage. 

Pearson worked with the Post Office to develop machines to automatically cancel stamps and thus speed up the processing of the mail. 

Parallel Motion Cancelling Machine, c. 1850s, accession number: 2002-0941

This is an example of a parallel motion canceller. It was the earliest of a simpler, hand-operated range of cancelling machine. These were developed by Pearson Hill after the treadle-operated variety.

Although this is an original example, it was refurbished by Royal Mail Research and Development in 1992.

Letters were placed directly under the machine. The operator would push down the handle which would apply the inked impression over the stamp. 

While a step towards mechanisation these were still very much reliant on manual operation. They did, however, greatly speed the cancellation of stamps. 

Later versions of the machine sped up the process up further. A similar mechanism is seen today with self-inking date stamps. 

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Hand-Operated Cancelling Machine, 20th century, accession number: 2002-0066

This particular machine is operated by hand but the letters would have been fed in automatically. This marked a major development in the cancelling of stamps.

Letters were loaded in bundles onto the top of the machine. By turning the large handle on top letters were pushed through, past an inked die, and out to the other side of the machine. 

This machine was manufactured by Krag and machines like this were in wide-spread use by 1910.

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Electric Stamp Cancelling Machine, after 1916, accession number: OB1994.293/4

This machine is a single impression cancelling machine. This means that only a single cancellation mark would be applied to the envelope. It was used at the Norwood Delivery Office in South London.

The counter on the machine shows 387,069 letters passed through this machine. It is possible, however, that the counter went back round at least once in the machine's lifetime. 

Other machines were continuous where the circular die would continually impress the mark (often a wavy line) across the top of the whole letter, leading into the next.

Electric stamp cancelling machine like this one greatly sped up the process of cancelling the mail. Letters could quickly be pushed through the machine and the stamps be cancelled. If required a ‘slogan’ or message could be impressed onto the envelope.  

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