32 APRIL 2016 http://www.stampandcoin.co.uk

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Stamp sidelines

I

f you joined the stamp

collecting fraternity only

recently it’s unlikely that

postmarks have loomed

large on your horizons.

You’ve been far too busy,

I’m sure, hunting down and

accumulating affordable material for

your thematic interests; or keeping

abreast of new issues from your favourite

country. Postmarks probably mean no

more to you than annoying, and often

indecipherable, marks on your unsorted

loose stamps. And your mantra so far

might have amounted to: ‘buy stamps

with postmarks as light as possible; just

enough to confirm postal use’.

I repeated the same slogan until

deciding to add a few Victorian stamps

to my collection. I saw at once that

stamps within my limited budget had

postmarks in super abundance. To

enjoy collecting them I would have

to squeeze interest, information and

postal history from them; to transform

puzzling postmarks to information-

packed clues about a stamp and its

cover during an eventful journey from

sender to addressee.

It proved easy to discover rich

sources of information about postmark

collecting via the internet and in the

regular column in this very publication;

but I opted to give advanced learning

An introduction to

Victorian postmarks

a miss at the outset, deciding instead

to absorb information on the earliest

marks found on Penny Blacks and Penny

Reds and their covers by reading dealers’

catalogues and previous sales reports

which provide superb illustrations and

expert descriptions of every lot. Of

course, most of the rare covers packed

with the richest history were beyond my

pocket. Nevertheless, the information

was freely available; and one of these

days I’ll have enough spare cash to bid

on some of those remarkable pieces.

Meanwhile I can now browse dealers’

bargain basements with knowledge that

continues to increase and which might

lead me to an unspotted affordable cover

or to a stamp in only fair condition

carrying a rare postmark.

1840 onwards

Postmarks on early adhesive stamps

conveniently divide into two broad

categories: cancellations and date

stamps. In the days immediately

following the introduction of the Penny

Black on 6 May, 1840 a concerned

Rowland Hill wrote to his staff:

‘It has come under my knowledge that all

sorts of tricks are being played by the public

in exercising their ingenuity in devising

contrivances for removing the [cancellations]

by chemical agents and other means. One

contrivance is to wash the stamps over with

isinglass before the letter is posted. [It] acts

as a varnish, and the obliteration is easily

removed later by soap and water.’

This led the Post Office to introduce

obliterators, often referred to as ‘killers’.

The first of these was the Maltese Cross

obliterator used on Penny Blacks and

Twopenny Blues. A red ink, known

as red composition, was made up in

local offices to a formula supplied by

London. Inevitably, different shades

of red resulted during the mixing, and

this accounts for many (though not all)

variations in early Maltese Cross colours.

Another problem with red

composition came to light when

investigations showed that it could be

removed from stamps with relative ease.

In London an experimental switch to

black ink, made by diluting printer’s

ink, proved it was more reliable than

red, so a gradual changeover to black

killer marks followed throughout the

Many collectors of Victorian stamps search for mint examples, with no sign of the intended postal journey,

but as Ed Fletcher reveals, studying postmarks on stamps of the 19th century can be hugely rewarding

From top: Black Maltese

Crosses on a cover

mailed from Liverpool to

London in July 1841;

a red Maltese Cross was

much easier to see on a

Penny Black

Red on black, and black

on red for comparison

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