Donetsk, Apr 2 – DAN. DPR State Post has issued a postal stamp featuring John James Hughes, a Welsh engineer, businessman and founder of the city of Donetsk.
The stamp is decorated with Donetsk coat-of-arms and Hughes portrait. The stamp can be used for registered letters with receipt up to 20 gr, in accordance with the current fee rate of 44 rubles.
The number of copies issued is 30,024.
The envelope for the new stamp features pictograms representing industrial objects and clippings of Donbass geological map.
Hughes moved to the Russian Empire in the summer of 1870, at the age of 55, as the Millwall Iron Works Company received an order from the Imperial Russian Government for the plating of a naval fortress being built at Kronstadt on the Baltic Sea.
He immediately started to build metal works close to the river Kalmius, at a site near the village of Alexandrovka.
Over the next twenty years, the works prospered and expanded, first under John Hughes and then, after his death in 1889, under the management of four of his sons.
Hughes died on 17 June 1889 during a business trip to St Petersburg.
According to some sources, Hughes learned to write and could only read capital letters.*ot