New Farm - Day 3...

[CRUSADER]

The hunt continues on the new farm for a good place to start gridding. As I'm now pretty sure the ring ditches are Bronze Age barrows, I will leave these for another time as it tends to be 1 object or nothing. Unless the Saxon's were around, which I have no signs of.
Therefore today we started at the obivious place nearest the Church. I guessed our resident detectorist would have been there, but it was the most trashy place we had tried, multiple signals most swings. Maybe he gave up on it, but this is the area I like, so started cherry picking as it was to many to dig on young wheat & we only had 2 hours:

Tudor Lace Chape
Mystery Medieval? Object with holes & a rivet in the centre
Buttons
Smashed Crotal Bell

My best button in a long time, I really like this one, never seen it before.
TWO PENNY POST OFFICE
Backmark:
P & S Firmin
153 Strand London
& 13 Conduit St
Dates it to 1839-49 I believe, & makes it one of the earliest PO Buttons ever produced, what a piece of history & in great shape as well.
If anyone can find one online let me know?

 

[eboy1960]

all i can say

 

[flyinryan2]

Way to go on all the buttons!

 

[snakeyes]

Great finds, I'm always looking foward to your posts

 

[CRUSADER]

Thanks, from what I can tell the Twopenny Post Office was renamed the London District Post Office in 1844. This narrows the date, & I think the production of these buttons most have been low. I'm pretty sure this will turn out to be a Very Rare Button.

 

[bill from lachine]

Crusader,

Good score on the PO button....top notch condition....I had asked a UK detectorist on another forum why he found
so many buttons in the plowed fields....he told me that in days gone by they used night soil for fertilizing the fields
and plenty of buttons would end up in the chamber pots....lol.

Not sure if it's true or not but sounded plausible at the time.

Regards + HH

Bill

 

[CRUSADER]

Crusader,

Good score on the PO button....top notch condition....I had asked a UK detectorist on another forum why he found
so many buttons in the plowed fields....he told me that in days gone by they used night soil for fertilizing the fields
and plenty of buttons would end up in the chamber pots....lol.

Not sure if it's true or not but sounded plausible at the time.

Regards + HH

Bill

Most of the buttons were dumped on the fields, one way or the other. Often they were burning the clothes & using the cotton as fertilizer/conditioning the soil (lightening heavy clay soil). Shoddy was often used up until the late 1940/50s.

 

[Rick (Nova Scotia)]

"one you haven't found"

Pretty much says rare to me.

AND in FANTASTIC condition.

Nice to add one to the collection.

Congrats.

 

[Bill D. (VA)]

Nice haul as usual. Hope you get into the silver soon. Good luck!

 

[CRUSADER]

Nice haul as usual. Hope you get into the silver soon. Good luck!

We will, its just a huge farm & it will take time, plus someone had a 15 year head start, so we will be the mop up crew.

 

[Gunrunner61]

Killer Button Cru......Your Rockin as usual.................HH

 

[CRUSADER]

UPDATE:

This is from the British Postal Museum:

Our curator has suggested it is a button from a Twopenny Post Letter Carriers uniform.
There used to be multiple administrations of the post from different branches of the service, particularly in London. There was the Inland Office- responsible for the whole postal system, the Foreign Office who dealt with foreign mail and the Twopenny Post Office in London. Each had their own staff who delivered mail. In theory, it was possible in London to receive mail from three different letter carriers on the same day (General Post, Twopenny Post and Foreign). The charge for a local letter in London was Twopenny with an additional charge as you moved outside the defined area.
Just about all of this changed following Postal Reform in 1840, the posts being more or less amalgamated.

I pushed them a little on the date/raity, as this implies that the button is 1839-40 (wow short lived):

We do have a number of buttons in the collection, these appear to be scattered throughout and are part of the cataloguing backlog. However obviously the majority of buttons in our collection are part of, and fixed to, the uniform collection. We do have few particularly early items of uniform amongst the hundreds that we hold (off site), probably the Mail Guard and River Postman are amongst those earliest. So it is possible that we do not hold a Twopenny Post uniform.
The last thing to consider is that buttons had a value, their reuse was encouraged, if not required, at the time. It is very possible that many Twopenny Post buttons were reused on the replacement uniforms and saw extended use.

Basically, it seems they don't have one & the rarity is as I expected.

 

[granthansen]

Great finds... love the button!