Never Seen A Cover Like This One.

This cover O.H.M.S. "official paid"
I don't even know what I am looking at.
Any help appreciated.

Robert






Seems to have a date of September 1967...???

http://greatbritainphilately.blogsp...age-and.html (I doubt the 9/67 is a date). Why not show us the entire front?
Don

Attempt to maximise re-use of official envelopes, rather than using a new preprinted one each time.

The 9/67 is date that the group of 100,000 (see 6-digit number to left of 9/67) were printed. Usage was likely during the following year.

The "TPC" probably ientifies the firm who printed the labels.

was this letter mailable without a stamp.
thanks Don for the link.


what you see is the whole cover Don

Robert

The "official paid" device IS the stamp - simply the GB equivalent of an OHMS perfin or G overprint on a Canadian stamp.

The cover is just a British government letter. OHMS currently stands for On Her Majesties Service. ie Government business. During the 1940s labels were used to economise on envelopes to save paper, but this is the first I've seen with the stamp on the label. The envelope doesn't look to me to be a British size, though the official paid imprint and OHMS looks perfectly British to me. Why were the ministry of Agriculture having to write to a Canadian address and why is a government letter addressed by hand?

Most individual letters from Government Departments before the days of computer-generated letters to fit window envelopes were addressed by hand. No-one would send an envelope to the typing pool for addressing.

Does the (N.I.) refer to Northern Ireland?

Okay, Geoff, I'll bite

Q/ Why wouldn't the typing pool prepare the envelope at the same time that they prepared the letter?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who prepared government correspondence with, like, you know, typewriters)

What big teeth you have, grandmama.

When I became a civil servant, Government Departments were in the process of increasing word processor use, but it was quite limited. A senior civil servant would have a secretary to do his/her typing, and the secretary would probably have a letter-quality printer, although many still preferred a tyewriter. The rest of us would use the pool. This entailed a significant amount of toing-and-froing, because the pool would misinterpret the scrawl or dictaphone message it was given. Your suggestion is sensible, but my own memory is of handwriting the envelopes for outgoing letters - or, indeed, the letters themselves.

In this case, the contents may have been a form or a circular, or a personal letter misusing the official envelope.

Am I correct in assuming that this envelope had only been used once to mail to Canada and the label appears to have been used as a tamper seal. There is is no other address on the normal front side of envelope.

As to the point of the Ministry of Agriculture addressing this letter to a Canadian buisness, the Ketchum Manufacturing made metal agricultural tags. So it appears to have been validly used on official buisness and not personal buisness. It obviously made no sense not to use the label as it could not be used for the return mail from witin Canada anyway. One only has to search Ketchum Manufacturing to find that it started in buisness in 1913 in Ottawa and is now located in Brockville Ontario. They even made the metal army dog tags for our military and still do today. It is still in buisness today and sells around the world and has diversified to custom identification tags and other identification products for agriculture, aquaculture, seafood, livestock and laboratory animals, hotel and hospitality and industrial uses. Interesting story. Link to items: https://www.ketchum.ca
.

The odd European size and the brown heavy-looking envelope says that more than a letter was sent here. The wrinkling seems to show something perhaps oval-shaped was sent with something rectangular and smaller over it, maybe just a small protective cardboard piece. Wild pure speculation might say it was some kind of metal tag being sent back with changes requested or somesuch, but we'll probably never know.

Does anyone know who figured the postage on items like this and informed the bean counters? The Royal Mail? The untyped address shows that it was an easy thing to handle, just drop in the post and let someone else figure the postage needed.