Before the advent of CAD, laser printers, photocopiers and even that old favourite Letraset, stencil plates were widely used to apply standardised and decorative lettering to technical drawings. They were sold in a wide range of styles and patterns by all the major suppliers of drawing instruments during the 19th and 20th centuries, and could also be ordered with custom words or symbols, such as title blocks.
This particular set is unusually complete, with each group of stencils still retaining its original paper wrapper, all housed in a dovetailed mahogany box with an instruction label pasted inside the lid. The stencils themselves are unsigned and of the most simple form, lacking the folded-over edges often found with this type. Also in the bottom of the box were a pair of stencil brushes that had clearly been used with the plates, possibly for black and red ink respectively.
The box contains twelve sets of stencils, nine of which are alphabets, as well as some assorted loose plates (including another alphabet without its wrapper) totaling 125 stencils in all. The set of 26 room name labels is particularly interesting, covering most of the requirements that might be expected in a large Victorian house (parlour, library, scullery, coach house, coal cellar, etc.) and there is also a nice selection of decorative borders and north arrows. As usual, the word “Specification” is particularly florid, the reason for which is unclear. An uncommon feature of the alphabets is the small alignment dot to the bottom right of each letter, intended as a guide to spacing as described by the “Directions to use the Alphabets” inside the lid.
Although the set is unsigned, the design of these stencil typefaces is essentially the same as those sold from at least the mid-19th century until the Second World War. It is difficult to ascertain who first produced these thin metal stencils and when, but an early illustration of the type can be seen in WF Stanley’s 1865 catalogue, which includes the already established letter types from “plain block” to “ornamental”, “Church text” and “German text or Old English” in sizes from 1/8 inch to 3/4 inch. Stencils of “Words used for architectural or mechanical drawing” were kept in stock, but only in 1/8 inch block letters, which seems to have been the standard. Many retailers sold the same patterns well into the 20th century, and they even appear in Stanley’s first post-war catalogue, although by the following edition of 1958 only the plain compartment styles are listed. For this reason it is not easy to date these stencil plates, especially when unsigned, but fortunately the box and paper wrappers offer some clues.
Starting with the box, it is instructive to compare it with a similar-sized boxed set of WH Harling stencils which is helpfully dated to 1915 inside the lid, often seen in sets from this maker. The most obvious difference is the system of internal partitions that keep the Harling stencil plates in their relevant groups. This results in a smaller footprint than was required to accommodate paper-wrapped stencil sets with brushes alongside them in the same space. The Harling box has comb-jointed corners and a push-button latch, whereas the unsigned box is of dovetailed construction with a conventional lock, albeit with an unusual shape of escutcheon. Together, these features point to an earlier date, dovetailed corners in particular having been rapidly superseded by comb jointing from the 1880s (this appears to have been introduced by WF Stanley for their drawing instrument cases around 1875 when the firm moved to its new South Norwood factory).
The paper wrappers proved even more illuminating (pun intended) when unfolded and held up to the light. As can be seen in the lower right image above, the paper is watermarked “W. HOWARD SUPERFINE”, all of the wrappers being of the same paper. A little research revealed that this refers to William Howard, an English papermaker of the 19th century. He first appears at the Barford Paper Mills in Surrey from around 1837 to 1839 when he left the country to establish paper mills in Russia. Howard appears to have stayed in Russia until 1871 at which point he returned to Chartham Mill in Kent (originally built in 1738) and continued production until 1930 when the company W. Howard & Son was acquired by Wiggins, Teape & Co. who went on to manufacture the well-known Gateway tracing paper at the mill.
It seems likely that the wrappers date from this post-1871 period which, along with the evidence from the box, suggests a relatively narrow window of the 1870s to 1880s. Circumstantially, it may be that the plain edges of the stencils are also an earlier feature, superseded by the folded-over type introduced in the last decade or so of the 19th century, but this will clearly require further investigation.