Dating UK railway ephemera

 What a confusing mess provenancing railway ephemera is!

Back in the middle of last year I had some fun with Victorian Railways luggage labels, and I've just been down a similar rabbit hole with British GWR labels.

Just as in Australia, there's no real way of dating railway luggage labels, except to say that ones with serifed fonts are generally older than those with sans serif fonts.

Now if the luggage label was an LNER label, we could say that it was post 1923 as railway companies were grouped into four entities after the first world war, and the LNER dates from the 1923 groupings.

Likewise, if the label said London and South Western Railway we could say the label was pre 1923 as the LSWR became part of the new Southern Railway in 1923.

All good, except in the case of the GWR, instead of merging it into a new entity to serve Wales and the west of England, they merged the smaller companies in the area into the existing GWR.

So, if you had a Cambrian Railways label for Builth Wells, it would be pre the 1923 grouping, as post 1923 Cambrian Railways had been merged into the GWR and any luggage label would have said GWR.

However, none of this is any use to us for dating purposes as the GWR reached Oxford in 1844 and continued to serve Oxford until it was nationalised in 1948.

So we're thrown back on hand waving stylistic arguments.

Just like the labels on medicine bottles, the first labels were almost exclusively letterpress.

And we could say that if they were for an obscure country station such as Abbeydore, we could guess that they would print a batch of labels and keep on using them until they ran out, possibly forty or fifty years after the station opened.

It would be possible to get a mixture of styles, because when Abbeydore opened, they would have sent labels for Abbeydore to all their stations where you could check luggage.

Some stations would have got through their labels faster than others, and others could conceivably still be using ones from Queen Victoria's time in the 1930s.

In the case of Oxford, that would not have been the case.

Due to the university it would always have been a busy station handling lots of luggage and consequently they would need to reorder luggage labels for Oxford every two or three years, meaning that while you might get a mix of styles they are all likely to have been printed within ten years of each other.

If we look at the label, we see it's printed using a rather stylish sans serif font and looks as if it might have been printed using lithography.

J W Tyler, the original owner of the hat box died in 1909.

To me, at least, the fonts used do not look to be like those used in the Victorian or Edwardian periods. Sans Serif fonts, especially stylish ones with thickened strokes look much more like you would expect in the 1920's or 1930's, so I'm guessing the hat box was used by someone travelling to Oxford some time between the first and second world wars ...