West Africa Study Circle       

Links to additional documents produced by WASC members

This page is a gateway page to a growing repository of documents intended to help with members' research. Some of the documents have been compiled by WASC members, others are scans of material such as offical post office reports.

This link will take you to the page of Maritime documents, including Elder Dempster timetables and related maps

This link will take you to the page of Air services documents

This link will take you to the page of reports and other documents related to Nigeria and the Camerooons

This link will take you to the page of documents related to Ghana and the Gold Coast

This link will take you to the page of documents related to The Gambia

This link will take you to the page of documents related to Togo

This link will take you to two documents related to Ascension

This link will take you to the page of documents related to Sierra Leone. Two Sierra Leone items prepared by Frank Walton and available free of charge are shown on our books page.

This link will take you to a .pdf copy of the WASC Book 'West African Post Office Impression Books' by P. Beale, J. Martin, and F. Walton, which is now out of print. It contains images of postmarks, taken from cancellers supplied by the Post Office to West African countries, between 1862 and the early 1960s. While the record is not complete (many records were destroted by bombing during the Second World war), the book illustrates almost 2000 cancels. There is a handy index at the back.

This link will take you to a page linking to articles on philatelic techniques (currently articles on measuring colour, on measuing cancel diameters and how to search for a specific word or phrase in a folder of .pdf files).

West African Forces Air Mail Letter Cards, Air Letters & Honour Envelopes 1942-1945
32 page monograph by John Daynes and Nigel Lutwyche. Published by WASC with a small hard-copy print run (listed on our publications page), and available as a free .pdf download.

Post Office Archives and early postal history of West Africa
PO Archives and early postal history of W Africa by Beale 1972 (10pp)

Specimen stamps display by Samuel 1972
A two page summary of a display on the Specimen Stamps of Gambia, Gold Coast and Sierra Leone, given by Marcus Samuel to (B)WASC in 1972

1855 postage rates UK to West Africa
A one page summary of postage rates

Civil censorship WW2 outgoing mail from the USA
In December 1941 the USA started to censor mail bound for overseas destinations. Censorship officers were based at inspection stations in key post offices and applied their own examination numbers to inspected mail, which can be very useful to the postal historian tracing postal routes. In 1980 Wilford Broderick and Dann Mayo published a detailed survey titled Civil Censorship in the United States During World War II which in now available as free download from the Military Postal History Society. Pages 31 to 33 list the various examiner numbers by inspection station.