Thomas and Alice Pullen ran the village post office from about 1904 to the mid-1930s from this house on the Gloucester Road (see map). The photo dates from 1909 and the woman and girl are almost certainly Alice Pullen and her daughter, Dorothy. They seem to have run the post office briefly from Vicarage Cottage, on the Marlbank Road, before moving here.

Thomas was originally a coachman but by the time of the 1921 census was described as a ‘painter (out of work)’. Alice seems to have been principally concerned with the post office business, listed as a post office clerk in 1911 and a sub-postmistress in trade directories in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The post office later moved to Myrtle Cottage on Drake Street, where Myrtle Price ran it for about 30 years, but in the meantime the house on Gloucester Road became the village shop and remains so today.

It was common for the early village sub-postmasters to run the post office alongside another occupation and to be assisted in the post office work by their wives. The first sub-postmaster in Welland was Richard George, appointed in 1855. In the 1861 census he is recorded as a shoemaker and his wife Ann was listed as ‘midwife, post office’. They lived at the ‘Post Office, Drake Street’ but we do not know at present which building that was.

Later sub-postmasters were James Grice, who was a grocer, probably in the Brookend area, and Thomas Pear. We do know that James Grice appeared in Billing’s 1855 Worcestershire directory as a farmer and shopkeeper on Drake Street and the property may have been Slade Firs, where he was certainly living by 1860. He was sub-postmaster by the early 1870s and was followed at Slade Firs by sub-postmaster Thomas Pear from 1876-1879. George Jenkins took over in the 1880s, running a combined post office and grocer’s shop from the house now known as The Old Post Office on Drake Street. He was evidently a busy man, as the 1892 Kellys Directory lists him as grocer, assistant overseer, school attendance officer and rate collector. He also acted as enumerator for the Welland census in 1891 and 1901. George Jenkins was succeeded by Thomas Pullen.