'Posties' from the early 1900's Left to right back row: Mabel, Lily, Elsie, ? Front: Mattie and Amy Submitted by Ray Hill 24 Greenfield Road, S65 3NX Postmen and Postwomen
You find some fascinating stuff at bric-a-brac sales, as Retro reader Ray Hill from Rotherham knows only too well.
Regular Retro readers will remember the photographs he found of Thomas Allop’s a couple of weeks ago, of which there is more on pages 2 and 3.
Wadsley Infant School - Class III Circa early 1900s Submitted by Ray Hill 24 Greenfield Road, S65 3NX Postmen and Postwomen
Ray has also been kind enough to share some more photographs, made into postcards, some of which show a completely different piece of Sheffield’s working past, women postal workers.
Ray wrote: “I enclose another set of photos that I picked up on the Rotherham bric-a-brac market. There seems to be another mystery to solve.
“I remember taking them to a postcard fair at Myers Grove School about 25-odd years ago.
“I showed them to a chap and he said, ‘Show them to that bloke over there, he works on the Sheffield Star,’ and I’m sure it was where people sent in old photos.
“I’m sure he said they were Sheffield posties during the war.
“Note the two sent bwetween Winnie and Nellie and the group with names written near their faces.
“Are Winnie and Nellie on the school photos?”
As one of the group photographs says ‘WDSO cricket team 1917’, that gives us a rough date, and the school pictures say they are of Wadsley C of E School, so could the postie pictures be of staff at a district sorting office (DSO) at Wadsley?
Pure speculation but perhaps you could shed some light on these intriguing photographs.
It’s a fair possibility that the ‘bloke over there’ from The Star was probably the much-missed columnist Peter Harvey, who wrote extensively on Sheffield history.
Thanks again to Ray for sharing these pictures with us.