author
Joseph Clarence Hemmeon
b. 1880
A careful historian of public institutions, he is best known for tracing how Britain’s postal system grew from royal service into a modern public network. His work combines economic thinking with a strong feel for administrative history.
1 Audiobook
The History of the British Post Office
by Joseph Clarence Hemmeon
About the author
Born in 1879 or 1880, Joseph Clarence Hemmeon was a Canadian scholar whose career was closely tied to economics, political science, and public administration. A memorial published by Cambridge notes that he spent nearly forty years in McGill University's Department of Economics and Political Science and later retired near Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where he died in 1963.
Hemmeon is remembered most widely as the author of The History of the British Post Office (1912). The book reflects his interest in how large public systems develop over time, and it has remained the work most often associated with his name in library and archive records.
Because surviving biographical material is limited, many personal details are not easy to confirm. What is clear is that he belonged to the early twentieth-century world of scholar-historians who wrote detailed, source-based studies of government institutions and their place in everyday life.