MAILED CATALOGUES

By the time you read this, new higher postal tarrifs will apply here in the UK and as I write petrol & diesel went up today. What happened to deflation? Could it be that postal costs are still a bargain? You can send a 950 gram package by first class mail from Truro in Cornwall to Troon in Ayrshire for under £4 and an airmail letter to Vladivostok for less than 60p. Mention of names should be avoided at this stage but to some indulgent members of the stamp trade 5am is a late night, but to your postman it's when he starts sorting the day's mail for delivery later on; a pleasant enough task in the Cotswolds at springtime but in February in the sleet on some bleak housing estate a very different matter. Hopefully some of the new money flowing in to Royal Mail will finds its way to the person on the front line without whom there would be no Richard Allan Mail Bid Sale.

COLLECTION STORAGE

Anyone familiar with our operation will realise that your describers handle and evaluate a huge volume of stamps ranging from beautifully written-up collections complete with little illustrations, photographs and cuttings to messy untidy accumulations containing who knows what? Much of this material appears in auction having come from executors or collectors themselves who have changed their interests or simply feel the need to sell. Which type of lot sells better? Usually the type where the buyer has a pretty good idea what he is buying and the messy boxes can go for good money but more often that not it's the buyer of these who finds the hidden gems. And the moral - you don't have to write up your collection to exhibition standard but a simple pencil note under that ordinary-looking stamp will indicate to the potential buyer that this is the scarce watermark or the rare die 2 and it could just be that you or yours will get that little bit more for your collection at the end of the day.

RHODESIA

It seems that the reason the Rhodesian TPO down cancellation is scarcer that the TPO up is that the TPO up mail mainly carried letters from women to their men 'up country' in the mines. Anectdotally is seems it was the women who wrote more to the men that vice-versa hence the relative scarcity of the TPO down. To this day, by the way, we still use the 1977 Rhodesia Stamp Catalgoue produced in Africa to evaluate relative values of this cancels.

ST HELENA

Some years ago we had a visit from a Yorkshireman residing in St Helena whose shrewd investment holding Tristan Relief sets had been eaten by a plague of termites on the island.

SEYCHELLES - Just Handled
1935 Silver Jubilee IR. with a double flagstaff variety. Although this variety is listed on the three lower values it is not yet listed on the 1 rupee.

ZANZIBAR

French Post Offices. Picture postcards of the impossibly name Bububu Railway, believed to be the world's smallest, which operated betwen 1906 and 1927. This was opened by an enterprising American who gained the concession by offering to fit electric light and fans to the Sultan's Palace.

NAUGHTY STAMP DEALERS - we recently found

A most unusual and interesting item being a letter dated 1896 from a stamp dealer to his customer regarding a couple of German States forgeries and a Ceylon Wyon head item which states "I have handed to Benhjamin, it will cost you 20/- as there is considerable work putting on the corners etc but he says it will be well worth a fiver when done".

So, who was this Benjamin character? In 1888 Alfred Benjamin and Julian Hippolite Sarpy opened a stamp shop in Cullum Street, London. The shop specialised in forgeries which they sold as genuine, these creations mainly being produced by G K Jeffreys and it would come as no surprise if the Benjamin of Cullum Street also added corners to rare early Ceylon stamps and we would speculate that the stamp in question may well have been the rare 4d of 1859, now catalogued at £4,500. That they were a bad lot named the "London Gang" is a matter of public record as Benjamin and Sarpy were convicted at Thames Police Court in 1892 on charges of forging stamps and conspiracy. Benjamin was sentenced to 6 months hard labour and Sarpy to four. Undeterred, they were still operating out of Cullum Street until the 1920's and whether the stamps they sold were genuine or forged, we don't know but as our letter is dated four years after the convictions, it would appear the Benjamin was still up to no good.

CYPRUS

- UNLISTED but recently handled

£5 - this one with an unlisted frame break

DISTINGUISHED PHILATELISTS

The names Edward Denny Bacon, Marcellus Purnell Castle and Edward Benjamin Evans may mean little to the modern philatelist but these individuals were the philatelic celebrities of the late 19th centry and early 20th centry. Bacon became keeper of the Royal Collection in 1913, Castle sold parts of his stamp collection in 1894 and 1900 for the then massive sums of £10,000 and £27,500 respectively and Evans published his first article on stamp collecting in 1864 giving us an idea of the extent of the hobby when it can have been no more than a couple of decades old. Why mention these individuals? The Straits manufscript surcharge mentioned earlier comes with a Philatelic Society of London certificate signed by these then famous philatelists with the document dated 1894 and bearing the number 61. Could this be the oldest surviving certificate from the organisation which later was to become the 'Royal', in its way the certificate could be rarer than the stamp which it certifies.

SPECIMEN STAMPS

On the subject of specimen stamps, all member states of the Universal Postal Union were by treaty under obligation to send around 200 specimens of every new stamp issued to the UPU headquarters at Berne in order that the UPU could then distribute a sample of each to the member postal authorities. The idea being that the post offices of member states would be able to identify genuine stamps from spurious ones. These stamps were usually saved by the postal authorities in various ways and numerous archives have come on the market over the years and it is hard to believe now that even during the height of the second World War the stamp issues of Great Britain and Russia for example would have found their way, via neutral Berne, into the postal archives in Berlin. 'Specimen' UPU examples of the Victory issue of 1946 are frequently encountered but we have never seen anything after that so the process would appear to have been abandoned about the middle of the last century.

MALAYA

Recently handled
Pahang 1897 John Fortescue Owen bisects mint & used with the mint 2c. on half of 5c. interestingly haveing the "JFO" manuscript upright but the "2c" inverted possibly explained by Robson Lowe who states that on some stamps the new value was added by the Chief clerk.

FALKLAND ISLANDS

South Georgia was the first of the Falkland Islands to be retaken from the Argentines in 1982 but even to those who think obliquely, the Falklands & the late Clement Freud do not form an immediate association. Clement Freud was the grandson of the famous Sigmund Freud; he was variously a Liberal MP, a celebrity chef before the name celebrity chef was invented, renowned wit, raconteur & TV personality. He told a story about the Falklands so often that it may even be true but lets suppose its an apocryphal one for now.
It goes like this: in the mid 1980's, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was walking down the Mall and spotted a man sitting on the pavement displaying a sign which read "DISABLED FALKLANDS WAR VETERAN, PLEASE GIVE GENEROUSLY". Mrs Thatcher reached into her handbag and handed the man a £5 note at which point he looked up and said "muchas gracias". Never could the milk of human kindness have been so quickly soured.

CURRENT AUCTION 280 ending Tue 25th Aug 2009

Now online at www.richardallan.co.uk where you can view the auction content or register for LIVE BIDDING.
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Greetings and welcome to my blog where I will be bringing you information and details about my current postal/internet auctions, as well as keeping your interest with the odd stamp tale.

My latest World sale should be online by the end of the week, which you can view either from the link to the lefthand side or here; http://www.richardallan.co.uk

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