History

Posting images of out towns and villages

By Paul Rendell

Old postcards were produced by a wide variety of publishers. Some local shops, published their own cards and other publishers like Lugg & Sons and S & A Jones both from the Arcade in Okehampton sold their postcards in lots of local shops.

Group of people from Okehampton taken by William Chapman (Paul Rendell Collection)

In this article we will look at Chapman and Sons from Dawlish and how they grew to become one of the leading suppliers of postcards on Dartmoor and other parts of the Westcountry. William James Chapman was born in Exeter, in 1830. An early diary shows that in 1859 he received 7s 6d for ‘photography’. Soon thereafter he started a photographic business in Exeter but in 1863 he moved with his wife to Town Tree Hill, Dawlish. Together with one of his sons, William Samuel Chapman, he ran William James Chapman & Son doing group photographs for local people. By 1890 the Chapmans were selling mainly trinket boxes made of cardboard covered in velvet material, putting a local photograph under glass and using it as a lid. Postcards in Britain came into being at the time of the 1870 Post Office Act, and from 1902 senders of postcards were allowed to write on the same side as the address, freeing the whole of the front surface for a picture. At about this time summer visitors were beginning to discover Dawlish, Torquay and Exmouth. Chapman & Son could see the future business potential and started producing postcards of the printed vignette type. These provided a cheap and convenient means of personal communication and, in addition, publicised the attractions of Dawlish and Dartmoor to a wide audience. This brought more visitors to Devon who in turn bought more postcards to send to family and friends. By 1907 postcards were the company’s main business. William Samuel Chapman used to travel through South Devon and across Dartmoor in a pony and trap with his bulky and cumbersome photographic equipment and he recorded many scenes of everyday life that were fast disappearing. During the winter months he would print his most favourite photographs and stockpile them until the summer months. In the spring he would visit his retailers which were mainly village shops, post offices and fancy goods shops. The outlets would normally take dozens rather than hundreds of cards at a time.

William would often take a train to a photographic location such as Okehampton. He would arrange to be met by a horse and trap from Okehampton Station and would be taken to see the military practicing on the moors, or to produce new images of Station Road or other scenes in the town or sometimes pop to the outlying villages like Belstone. In fact there were over 30 different postcards published of just Okehampton itself without counting those of the nearby moors. The person who took William around would tell local people that Mr Chapman would be in town and many locals would meet him and ask for their portrait to be taken. Typically he would spend the day in town and take up to two dozen photographs. This may not seem like a lot by today’s standards but he had to contend with heavy glass plates which came in boxes of 12 and were more than enough to carry around.

When the Chapman family first started manufacturing postcards they were printed using sunlight. The half plate 6” x 4¾” glass negatives and the printing paper were placed on a large shelf-like rack and this was leant against the south facing wall outside the printing works. Years later the cards were produced indoors on a bench top with a light shining up through opaque glass. The room in which this took place was dark, except for the light from a dull red, electric bulb. The blank card was placed on the glass negative and the light

Station Road in Okehampton with Moorland Hotel, halfway down the hill. (Paul Rendell Collection)

underneath switched on for a count of three. This was a slow and timeconsuming process which later was replaced. Sometimes Chapman would sell one of the negatives to another publisher such as Palmer of Okehampton who would produce postcards very similar to Chapman’s but with their own name on them. There is a postcard of a group of ponies by Okehampton Moorgate near the army camp. The bottom right picture was taken by Chapman but was not a good picture, so back in the studio they super imposed some more ponies in the foreground ‘top right’ and ‘bottom left’. As they proved to be a best seller, Mr Palmer from the Arcade in Okehampton bought a copy of the print and made this own version of the postcard and sold in the local shops alongside Chapman card. There over 10 outlets for postcards in Okehampton in the 1930s so it was also worth coming to town and taking photographs

The company’s first postcards were of Dawlish Parish Church, numbered 1-10, and then of Dawlish Beach. The last numbered card seems to have been 28,745 and pictured Lyme Regis, although many of the postcards were not numbered.

Contact Paul Rendell on paul.dartmoor@ gmail.com if anyone knows of other publishers of postcards in West Devon.

Okehampton Camp by Chapman (Paul Rendell Collection)