In this issue: Club News. – Gondwana. – What do you Collect? – Innovative stamps. – How do Postal History Items Survive? – 1841 Penny Black. – 1842 Mail to Europe
EXMOUTH STAMP CLUB NEWS
The Club Committee members met again in a garden on 9 June, with a discussion of plans for re-starting regular Club meetings a priority agenda item. From September, Club meetings will resume on the third Wednesday of each month, with the start time of 19.30.
EXMOUTH STAMP CLUB RE-OPENS for our first meeting this year
Wednesday 15th September at 7.30pm at OUR NEW VENUE
All Saints’ Church Hall, 2 Church Road (off Exeter Road), Exmouth EX8 1RZ
2021-22 Programme
15 September – Presentations: Ed Elsey, Over Under and Through the Snow; Elizabeth Mackenzie, Art and Stamps; Jonathan Blood-Smyth, Biafra, the War and its Aftermath.
20 October – Extraordinary General Meeting. Followed by presentation: Barbara Rogers, Russia.
17 November – Club Mini-Auction. Followed by presentation: Roger Mazillius, QE2 Falklands Stamps and Postal History.
15 December – Presentation: Richard Stupples: Early Seated Britannia and GVI Seahorse Issue.
19 January – Presentation: Dave Cleaver – Nuclear Submarines.
The new venue is All Saint’s Church, Exmouth. There is ample space and seating for us to ensure ‘social distancing’ and a supply of hand sanitiser will be available. We should all bring our own masks. We cannot supply coffee/tea and biscuits as in the past, so if you wish to have drinks and nibbles during the evening please bring your own. There is very limited car parking at the church, but it is not far from the town car park or on-street parking. There is a bus stop close by.
Following the Chairman’s letter in June, in which it was explained that the election of Officers/Committee was due and to avoid unnecessary and costly postage, and with a year taken out of our normal meeting procedures by covid restrictions, the Committee recommended that the existing Committee be automatically elected en bloc for 2021-22 unless members raised objections with the Honorary Secretary. No objections have been raised and no additional names have been put forward so the Committee membership is now:
Chairperson Richard Wakeman
Vice-Chairman and Secretary Ed Elsey
Treasurer and Auctioneer Gerald Smith
Packet Secretary CR
Webmaster Jonathan Blood-Smyth
In the May Newsletter the Committee indicated that venue fees were likely to be higher after lockdown, making a modest increase to the annual membership fee necessary. The membership fee was waived for 2020-21 and previously had not been increased for several years. For 2021-22 the Committee is recommending a membership fee of £15 per annum.
Since Government restrictions prevented the Club from holding the AGM in July again this year, we will hold an EGM on 20 October where members will be able to discuss the Committee election and membership fee. Also, in the light of being unable to follow our own Club Rules, the Committee will propose changes to the Rules to take into account the possibility of similar circumstances occurring in the future.
Members are invited to submit short items for future newsletters, of sophisticated or simple, valuable or valueless stamps from their collection which might interest or enthuse readers of the Newsletter.
GONDWANA
As part of my new Club presentation ‘Over, Under and Through the Snow’, I acquired a set of covers of international Antarctic scientific bases including this BAT example relating to Gondwana, an ancient supercontinent from the Neoproterozoic era (c. 550m years ago) and breaking up during the Jurassic period – well known to us in Devon. South America and Antarctica separated during the Eocene period. Gondwana was the largest piece of continental crust of the Paleozoic Era, an area of some 39,000,000 square miles, about one-fifth of the Earth’s surface, making up two-thirds of today’s continental area, comprising S. America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, the Indian subcontinent, Zealandia and Arabia.
WHAT DO YOU COLLECT?
We recently asked members what philatelic items they collect so that the Club could compile a list of members’ interests. But how many collectors have kept their hinge packets from yesteryear? One member read about a pre-war collector who amassed 100,000 hinge packets at 1d each. Although our member has over 70,000, he does not believe he will make the ton. He also doesn’t find much that might sell – there is a big difference between value and price! The two most valuable so far are very badly damaged.
INNOVATIVE STAMPS
May’s newsletter demonstrated some of the more quirky examples of stamps that either were poorly designed, intended to be controversial or simply attract attention. At least some members
would think these are more imaginative than some of our recent British examples of commemoration. So here are two more.
The 2003 stamp from Gibraltar which incorporates powdered rock from the Rock; this was on a commercially used cover, but the franking missed the stamp, so the cancel is the sorting dots! An additional stamp with odd material to those highlighted in the May newsletter.
The second one is on the cover of the 2003 Comet catalogue; spot what is wrong … answers can be found at the end of the Newsletter.
HOW DO POSTAL HISTORY ITEMS SURVIVE?
Sometimes, when displaying postal history, I ask audiences what material they are keeping for the 21st century? One area of collecting for me is the postal history of the Holy Land before the British Mandate. European powers (Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Russia) had a postal service from Jerusalem, and there were more offices in Jaffa and Haifa on the coast.
Popularity of souvenir postcards around the turn of the century resulted in a great deal of material sent as souvenirs by Holy Land pilgrims, and these survived in postcard albums. That popularity led to an extraordinary enterprise by a German postcard company at the end of 1899. The company planned for souvenir postcards to be sent from Bethlehem on Christmas Day 1899, the last Christmas of the 19th century. Unsolicited postcards (junk mail!) were sent to pastors of churches across Germany and Austria inviting their congregations to order cards, write greetings to friends and relatives, and return them to the company who would arrange their despatch “from Bethlehem”. There were seemingly adverts in Christian newspapers as well, but I have not seen evidence of this. It was a great success!
Postal historians estimate that tens of thousands of cards were involved. Many of them were cancelled by the Austrian post office in Jerusalem (there wasn’t a German office there until 1900). Besides the pre-ordered cards, some were on sale in Jerusalem itself. The plan was for all the cards to be cancelled in Jerusalem, with a cachet for Bethlehem. But demand was so great that the Austrian postal authorities set up a scheme to cancel a fraction of the cards in Vienna, with both the Jerusalem date-stamp and Bethlehem cachet. There were other complications; several different designs of cards were used, including one in Hungarian, and some printed on postcards labelled “Deutschland”, which wasn’t appropriate for either Austria or the Holy Land. Postcard collecting explains survival of so many cards.
But there’s another aspect to the story. Suppose you decide to order cards for all the friends you would send Christmas cards to. Your address book has names and addresses of people you haven’t been in touch with for twelve months. Some of them will have moved during that time, others may have died. And it was an era when many Europeans emigrated to the USA. Cards sent to them may not have been delivered.
What happened to the cards? They were sent back. Where to? There’s no return address on a postcard. So, many of the postcards were returned to Jerusalem, where, it is thought, the post office had a display of “Return to Sender” items for local people to collect. But they were not local people! So these cards accumulated at the Austrian post office. Many entered into the philatelic market; there were a few active dealers in the city, and one, in particular, travelled regularly between Beirut and Jerusalem. Nobody documented how many of these items were acquired by dealers in early 1900. Maybe they simply took what they could, maybe they “bought” them. These ‘lost cards’ survive, to tell the tale of the final stage of an amazing 19th-century commercial enterprise.
A card sent to Moscow and returned with an explanatory label.
So back to my starting question: what postal history of the 21st century do you have?
A card sent to Philadelphia in the USA and returned with assorted annotations. The picture side of the card with a Nativity scene and a note from the sender.
1841 PENNY BLACK LETTER
This letter was written by a Mr Smith in Budleigh Salterton on 2nd February and addressed to Exeter. Possibly owing to there not being any stamps available in Budleigh at the time of posting it was sent to Exmouth via the ‘Exmouth Penny Post’; the said mark was applied (late use, first known date 7th September 1840, last date 2nd February 1841, the same date as this letter) and on arrival at Exmouth Post Office the 1d black stamp was applied and cancelled by a red Exmouth Maltese Cross cancellation (PMD No. 3425 550 Type ap, issued April 1840, first recorded 4th September 1840, latest recorded 29th January 1841). This postmark was four days later than previously recorded and three copies are known. On arrival a red ‘Exeter’ double-ring receiving mark was applied dated 3rd February 1841 and A code.
1842 MAIL TO EUROPE
The letter shown here from Walmer was written by the Duke of Wellington (initialled in the lower left corner) and sent to W. Booth Esq., Poste Restante, Brussels, Belgium.
The letter has been opened out for display. It was uprated from 11d to 1s 4d, this being the rate to Brussels (1841 Post Office Directory). The letter was posted at Walmer and received the undated double circle ‘Walmer’ postmark in black (29 mm, 1839-43). It would have travelled via Dover to Ostend, where it received the red double ring transit postmark before being forwarded to Brussels, where it received the blue Brussels receiving mark. The red seal on the rear is that of the Duke of Wellington.
Answers to ‘What is wrong’ on the Comet cover: The answers include that the cover bears a joke address, a joke postcode, the meter franking of the stamp, and the date on the meter mark is before the stamp was issued.
Contributors to this Newsletter were Ed Elsey, David Keep, David Smith, Gerald Smith and Richard Wakeman.
Members are invited to submit short items for future newsletters, of sophisticated or simple, valuable or valueless stamps from their collection which might interest or enthuse readers of the Newsletter.