see also - Polish stamps from World War 2
A few weeks ago top of the Bom Jesus Sanctuary, which is an ancient church and religious site just outside the north Portuguese city of Braga. At the top of the hill was an old post office. I think it might still sell stamps, but I'm not entirely sure because I saw it at the end of the day. Anyway, there was this wonderful blue tiled sign outside. I thought it was lovely. And if you're in the area, try the vinho verde wines - they're great.
see also - Polish stamps from World War 2
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At the start of the Second World War – after the invasion by Germany - large numbers of Polish servicemen managed to escape to Britain. And the British allowed them to set up a Polish government in exile, based in London. At the end of 1941the Polish government in exile produced its first set of stamps. These featured pictures of Poles fighting as part of the British army. In 1943, a similar set of stamps was produced and in 1944 this set was re-released with overprints celebrating the Battle of Monte Cassino in which Polish forces took a clifftop monastery from the Germans. In theory these stamps were supposed to be used by Polish forces in Britain. But in fact the stamps had no real use. They could only be used in Polish ships in British ports or on Polish military bases on mainland Britain on certain days of the week. It would have been much simpler for the servicemen simply to have used British stamps. Not surprisingly, it is not always easy to find these stamps in used condition. This envelop, posted in 1943, has been stamped with the complete first set. Obviously it was sent philatelically, because it has a vast amount of postage on it – far more than one would normally need to send a letter from a British port to Brighton. It is an interesting cover, and a good example of how stamps can be used as a propaganda tool - as much as a means of communication. see also Travelling Post Offices - a piece of history Until 11 years ago the Post Office ran special travelling post offices. These were trains with special carriages, so that staff could sort the letters on the journey. This cut down delays and meant that the post reached its destination more quickly. There used to be special post boxes at the various stations for people who had missed the ordinary last post. For these letters a late fee was payable and there was a special handstamp cancellation. Many philatelists became obsessed with collecting letters posted in the various TPOs -with the appropriate handstamps. Obviously, this meant that they had to get the letters posted in rail stations in time to catch the train. Presumably they would get a philatelic friend to drop the letters at Cornwall, Edinburgh, Aberdeen etc, so that the letters could be properly cancelled. These days the TPO covers are not worth a lot of money. You can buy them for a couple of pounds each. I bought the ones in this picture just a few weeks ago. But they are rather sweet. It's nice to think of all the philatelists coming up with clever schemes to get their letters posted in this way. About seven years ago I bought a lovely collection of used Machins from a stamp shop in Brighton. The collection seemed to go from about 1970 to 1990. And it also included all the high value castles which were produced in 1988. I should point out that Machins are the stamps with the queen's head which were first issued in 1967. The design was by Arnold Machin and it has remained in use ever since. The person who had put the collection together had bought every new Machin that came out in blocks of four. He also bought every configuration of Machin from stamp booklets. And they were all cancelled, with the dates clearly marked. I'm not sure if the original collector had sent the stamps through the post, but none of them had gum on the back. The original collector must have spent several hundred pound putting this lot together. - the page of high value castles had a face value of £38 alone. I think I gave the dealer £50 for the album. I still enjoy looking at them. Several billion Machins have been created since 1967. It is often said Machin's image of the queen has been reproduced more than any other portrait. Machins have a wide variety of different colours. I think the design is incredibly neat and attractive and the colour palates used are very striking. And I love the fact that my collection is all in blocks, which makes them into a really tidy collection. Most dealers regard Machins as a bit of a joke. They have never gone up in value and most dealers will just use them as postage. Some specialists buy new blocks of every variety of Machin – including the various print numbers and security codes. I think this is over-doing it. Many of the new Machins are high values – a couple of pounds each. So you could easily spend a thousand pounds a year on stamps that will never be worth anything. But I'm pleased with my collection – it's a design classic, it's attractive to look at and for a relatively small sum of money it has given me a lot of pleasure. So you can see what I'm talking about, here's a picture of just one page of the collection. Isn't it pretty? See - First day covers - are they a good investment? The Millennium set - the last great British commemoratives In any stamp shop, there are always stacks and stacks of first day covers (FDCs), most of which are worth very little. They were probably bought by doting grandparents who felt that they might be a good investment for young children. So is there anything which has real financial value? The great days of first day covers was in the 1960s, when just about every schoolboy (and some girls) would save up their pennies to get the latest stamps. By the 1960s the post office were cashing in on this trend and were using special First Day of Issue cancels and were selling special commemorative envelops. Most of the FDCs from this era are terribly common. They are very pretty, and very collectible but will never be worth very much. However some of the earlier ones could be valuable. Anything from the 30's, 40's and 50's could be worth money. The Royal Silver Wedding FDC with the £1 stamp, catalogues at £425. I bought one (illustrated) for £30. It doesn't have a pictorial cover, but it is nice and clean and clearly cancelled. The Festival of Britain FDC from 1951 (also illustrated) has a catalogue value of £38. I bought this one (the envelop is slightly toned) in a large and very cheap auction lot. You could probably get a really nice copy for about a tenner. You have to be wary about catalogue values. At the end of the war, the Post Office issued a set of two stamps to commemorate the victory. Understandably, they were bought by vast numbers of people. The catalogue value of a FDCis £65. I have two FDCs and I paid almost nothing for them. See Also - British First Day Covers - Are they a Good Investment? Is it worth collecting First Day Covers? This week has seen Europhilex 2015 – the huge international stamp exhibition at the Business |Design Centre in Islington in London. Among philatelists there have been mixed feelings about this show. It certainly has been extensively advertised and has brought visitors from all over Europe. One of my friends – a retired Austrian judge – came over specially to see it attended almost every day of the show. However British collectors were less impressed. The trade stands were dominated by European dealers and auctioneers, with relatively expensive stock. If you were looking to unload £50,000 you could have talked to Spinks, David Feldman, Sandayre or any of the other big names. But if you wanted to spend a couple of hundred quid and get a few nice stamps for your collection, the choice was a bit limited. And it was obvious that the organisers hadn't sold all the display space. Some of the stands were entirely empty and some were filled with photographic displays, as a way of filling up the surplus space. One of the more interesting stands was run by the Royal Philatelic Society of London stand, where a friend of mine was advising people on the value of their collections. I thought this was a sensible way of attracting people, who might have collected as schoolchildren, back into the hobby. For anyone interested in postal history, there were vast display areas for the competition entries. There was probably too much on display. I went into one room and noticed that there was a security guard, so I realised there must be something valuable. Looking more closely I realised that one of the stands had the famous Swedish tre-skilling banco stamp, which has a value of three or four million pounds. It was only under a sheet of perspex. A determined gang would have been able to steal it, although it would be almost impossible to sell. Another philatelic treasure on display was the printing block from which the Mauritius 2d Post Office – one of the most famous stamps ever produced - was printed. There was quite a lot of wartime mail – much of it from the First World war. There was a particularly good exhibit on Gallipoli. There was also a lot of confederate post from the American civil war. When I attended, there were relatively few people looking at the displays. Gathering a lot of expensive stamps in one place, doesn't seem to capture the imagination of the public. Stamp collectors and the philatelic industry need to find a new way to get people excited about stamps. Oh, and I bought a couple of bits of pieces. I spent a tenner on some mint stamps from New South wales, and another fifteen pounds on George V controls. There was nothing else that I really wanted. The show gave me a pleasant couple of hours, but I'm not sure it lived up to the hype.. see also - John Dupont and Collecting Stamps in Jail And read Jack Shamash's book - George V's Obsession - a King and his stamps Over the last 40 years, the British Post Office has produced a large number of Prestige Booklets. These have wonderful illustrations, are beautifully laid out, but are worth very little. I often go to general auctions – auctions where they sell furniture and jewellery as well the odd parcel of stamps. Anyway, a couple of week ago I saw a bunch of these booklets on sale. I did a quick calculation. The stamps are all decimal – ie they were issued after 1970 – so they are all valid for postage. I reckoned that the face value of the stamps was around £60, so I put on a bid of £30. If nobody else wanted it, I would get the lot for £30 plus commission – a total of £37.20 including tax. I got a phone call the following day to say that I had won. After I picked them up I realised that the face value was actually £95, so I hadn't done too badly. But I really don't want to collect them. I feel that they are contrived have no real postal use. However there was one booklet pane that I really wanted. It contained the £1 Coronation stamp – which was a copy of the 1/6d stamp designed in 1953. It's very pretty and has a catalogue value of around £55, although you can probably pick it up for a tenner. The original was designed by Dulac - one of the greatest stamp designers - and it's a genuinely nice thing. You can see the stamp - it's horizontal and green - in the middle of the picture. As you can see, I've already started breaking up some of the booklets. The Coronation stamp, which you can see in the picture has already been put into one of my albums. And the rest I will break up and stick on letters. Incidentally, if you ever feel like buying any of these prestige booklets, ring up a dealer for a chat. He will almost certainly have lots of them and if you ask nicely, he'll let you have most of them for just a shade over the face value. see also - British first day covers - are they a good investment? For the last fifty years, people have been buying first day covers (FDCs) in the expectation that they would rise in value. Often grandparents bought them for their grandchildren, believing that it would be a good investment. I spend a lot of time in stamp shops and I can tell you that almost any first day cover produced by the Post Office since decimalisation in 1971 is worth very little. Stamp dealers get offered boxes and boxes of FDCs – often from people who collected them as children but have lost interest or who were bought them as a present. There may be one or two exceptions, but they will almost invariably not have kept their value. The scan shows two FDCs. One of them has a set commemorating the centenary of the Greenwich Meridian in 1984. So just over 30 years ago, the buyer must have paid around £1 for the stamps and another 30p for the envelop and had it dispatched to his home. Looked at as an investment, the return is pretty dire. Stanley Gibbons catalogue prices the cover at £3.50, but this is a completely unrealistic valuation. If I went into my local stamp shop, I could buy this cover for 30p. In fact, my local stamp shop is so keen to get rid of FDCs that if I offered to buy more than 100, I could buy similar assorted covers for around 20p each. If I tried to sell a collection of covers, the dealer would heave a great sigh – because he is sick to death of these things – and would probably give me about 7p each for them – if I was lucky. The other cover, which celebrates the European elections, is different. Because the address is written by hand, it is even less collectible. The original buyer would have paid £1 and has a cover, which is worth virtually nothing. If anyone tells you that FDCs are a good investment, they are talking nonsense. On the other hand, they are pretty, they have a lot of nice stamps on them, and if you're interested n stamps, it's not a bad way to start a collection. But please don't buy them from the post office. Get them from a dealer, otherwise you're just throwing money away. See also - Is it worth collecting First Day Covers? Prestige Booklets - How collectible are they? For many years, particularly in the fifties and sixties, almost every schoolboy had an accumulation of first day covers – these are the commemorative envelops posted on the first day of issue of any new stamps. Serious philatelists tend to sneer at first day covers. They regard them as a contrivance of the various post offices and, frankly, a bit of a con to coax money out of gullible collectors. Now I quite like first day covers. They are pretty, they contain a certain amount of useful information, they evoke a particular era and right now they are very cheap. I just put the New Zealand covers, illustrated above, on ebay. I got £1 for four covers, which I thought was ridiculously cheap. Realistically, I don't think they will ever be worth money, but as long as they remain cheap, they are a nice thing to have in your collection. see also - British First Day Covers - are they a good investment? A couple of weeks ago I saw a set of stamps at the Royal Philatelic Society of London. The stamps They were overprinted with the word 'Levant' and had been produced during the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign, in which British, New Zealand and Australian regiments ripped themselves to shreds in an ultimately futile attempt to over-run the Turkish lines. I knew immediately that this was quite a famous set of stamps. The set had caused some consternation to the British army and to the civil service, because George V had been desperate to get hold of them. King George V was utterly obsessed with stamps. According to courtiers, he seemed far more interested in stamps than in affairs of state. And he loved overprinted stamps. So these were obviously something that he coveted terribly. In April 1916 the curator of the royal philatelic collection, Edward Bacon, read in a stamp magazine that some British stamps, intended for use by soldiers in Greece and Turkey, had been overprinted with the word ‘Levant’. He wrote to the the king's aide, Wigram, to ask him to write to the commander in chief at Salonica for a set of these stamps. Wigram also wrote to the private secretary to the Secretary of State for War to find out who was responsible. He also wrote to the army postal department, the private secretary to the secretary of state for the commonwealth and also to the army in East Africa asking for all war stamps. Murray, secretary of the Post Office also became embroiled in the hunt for these elusive stamps. In May 1916 Harold Nicolson, who was working in Salonica was asked to get hold of any such stamps. Questions were asked of the navy to see if they had any of them. To placate the king, the senior naval officer who was in charge of a captured Turkish Island, produced some stamps with some overprints. Eventually it was found that the Levant overprints were entirely unauthorised and should never have been produced. Sir Clive Wigram, writing to Lt General Mahon, confided: ‘We all thought the issue of the stamps rather fishy and expect the young fellow who did it made a lot of money out of the dealers.’ But to the end of his days, Bacon insisted that the stamps were valid for postage and should be included in the Royal Philatelic Collection. In a similar incident, Bacon got into trouble for trying to get hold of a set of labels which were stamped by the Sinn Fein in Dublin, when they took over the main Post Office in 1916. It seems remarkable that at this time, when there was a full scale insurrection within the British Isles, that Bacon could only see this event as an opportunity for filling his master’s stamp albums. Similarly it seems remarkable that, duringt the blood-letting at Galipolli, the King was prepared to bother senior army officials with requests for spurious stamps. Anyway, it was nice to see the stamps. They may not be terribly impressive to look at, but they are an interesting historical relic and shed a lot of light on the lonely philatelic King. Jack Shamash's book – George V's Obsession – A King and his Stamps – is available from Amazon to download on Kindle. The greatest stamp collection in the world - more stories about the Royal collection |
AuthorJack Shamash is a top journalist who writes for The Times, The Guardian, The Independent as well as various stamp magazines. He is a member of the Royal Philatelic Society London and the author of the book George V's Obsession - A King and His Stamps. Archives
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