Hop Picking

One of the articles that I read in my first copy of the SSG news letter in April 2006 was a very interesting article written by Brian Sulman about an order form postcard for a series of Salmon postcards on the subject of Hop Picking. On the obverse side of the postcard was the name and address of Mr. J. Salmon at 85 & 87 High Street, SEVENOAKS, Kent. On the reverse side of the card was a list of 8 hop picking postcards that could be ordered with space for the name and address of the person ordering the postcards. Unfortunately I have never come across this postcard or any like it. The cards listed on the reverse of the postcard were:

1.      Dipping and Carting Hop Poles.

2.      Hop-Picking New Style, with Fixed Poles and Wires.

3.      Hop Garden showing Oasthouses in the Distance.

4.      Hop Garden, Picking the Hops.

5.      Hop Pickers at Work.

6.      Carting the Hops in Pokes to the Oasthouse.

7.      Carting the Hop Pockets to London Market.

8.      Oasthouse (interior) Drying and Pocketing Hops.

This series of postcards had the back Type 1 (or Type A) but there were also Modern reprints of these postcards as well as a Continental size reprint. The postcards were numbered 567-574 plus a set was printed with no numbers. I think the un-numbered postcards were printed first. 

There was also an addition to Brian’s article written by the editor of SSG news letter, Tony Longshaw, which expanded on his article and gave a list of the Hop Picking postcard together with the Type 1 card numbers and the Modern card numbers.

Here are images of all 8 postcards in the series.

Once I read about this series of cards I was intrigued and decided that I would try to find the whole series maybe fill in some of the blanks that were mentioned in the SSG news letter article. How hard could it be to find 8 postcards?

In fact I found the un-numbered series of these postcards first, finding my last postcard, 572 two years after I had started. I also found only 1 postcard with a number on the back and that was dated September 11^th 1918. The un-numbered postcards had the earliest date of September 7^th 1906. All the postcards in this series were by the artist C. Essenhigh Corke.

I did find one of the less common versions of postcard 571, Ivy Hatch near Sevenoaks but postcard 575, Kentish Hops (reproduced from nature) still eludes me.

Type 1	Postcard Caption
567	Dipping and Carting Hop Poles.
567	Dibden, Sevenoaks.
568	Hop-Picking New Style, with Fixed Poles and Wires.
569	Hop Pickers at Work.
570	Carting the Hops in Pokes to the Oasthouse.
570	Old Oast House, Dibden, Sevenoaks.
571	Carting the Hop Pockets to London Market.
571	Ivy Hatch, near Sevenoaks.
571	Stone Street, Ivy Hatch, near Sevenoaks.
572	Oasthouse (interior) Drying and Pocketing Hops.
573	Hop Garden showing Oasthouses in the Distance.
574	Hop Garden, Picking the Hops.