Of course, I would have loved to have owned this stamp, just as I would have loved all the others. But my favourite was five years older. In 1961, the Seventh Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference was held in Westminster. There were two stamps issued. The 6d value was a horizontal rectangle with a purple background and gold overlay of the roof-beams of Westminster Hall, and then there was the is 3d vertical stamp. This had a racing-green background, and was split into two halves: on the top was a picture of the Queen printed in dull blue, and beneath it was an engraving of the Palace of Westminster and a mace and sceptre. On the error, there was no Queen. Simple: a white box on a green stamp. In the late 1960s, when I first became aware of it, it was the most beautiful small object I had ever seen, and remains so for me today.
Then, for about twenty years, I forgot about stamps. Or rather, I neglected to collect them. First came exams and university, then work, then marriage and children, a mortgage. But when I was in my early forties, my interest ignited again. I can't pinpoint the cause—perhaps it was an article in the newspapers or a browse online—but my enthusiasm returned and with it just enough disposable cash to pursue the stamps I could never afford in my childhood. Within a few weeks I was visiting dealers and buying magazines, fantasising. I wanted the same thing now as then—stamps with errors on them. I still dreamed of being that London schoolboy who, in 1965, wandered into a post office for the new set of stamps marking the centenary of the International Telecommunication Union, saw that the is 6d value was missing pink, and bought as many as he could afford, which was twenty mint copies. I knew that would never happen to me. But maybe now I could buy that error from the dealer he sold them to.
It took me a while to tell anyone of my revived passion. I could only admit it to people I could really trust, people who would not think any less of me. My children thought stamp collecting both strange and perverse, and inevitably used that same phrase they employ to describe anyone over twenty-five in trainers and into rap music: 'Sad.' My wife tolerated my obsession but seldom expressed interest. Her questions were invariably focused on one thing. I wanted her to say, 'Tell me about the history, the beauty, the rarity! Tell me about that one!' but mostly she said, 'How much was it?'
My answer was usually the same. 'Not much, really.' But of course it was a lot—the equivalent of a weekend away, or a beautiful painting, or a year's theatre tickets. And the one thought I always had during these exchanges was, 'If only I'd bought it when I was a boy.'
I still have my first stamp album, with about three hundred stamps amassed between 1966 and the start of 1973. From 1973 there was a gap of one year before I started collecting again in a new album. What caused the gap, and what happened in 1973? I came of age, and my father died. And I made a very bad investment.
Gutter Pairs
To give up collecting at the beginning of 1973, if only for a while, was not a good idea, for one reason: bar-mitzvah presents. Along with a ridiculous number of suitcases and many copies of Who's Who in the Old Testament and The Joy of Yiddish (these are real titles, and very popular choices for people who don't buy many books, like Schott's Almanac today), I received a fair bit of money from people who knew I couldn't possibly want another suitcase or book. I should have spent it on stamps, but I didn't. Stamps were good value in 1973, but of course they always appear good value looking back. I counted up the cheques on the morning after my party at the Esso Motor Hotel near Watford, and I had about £1,200. Some of this went on Premium Bonds, and the rest went in the bank. I think I was allowed one special gift, something I wouldn't normally receive because it wasn't considered practical or informative. This is likely to have been the Peter Bonetti goalkeeping ensemble.
With £1,200 I could have bought a couple of fine errors, perhaps a block of the 1966 Technology issue with missing Jaguars. People who knew about stamps would have placed an order with their dealer straight away. For example, when the collector Thomas Keay Tapling was at school in the mid-1870s, an indulgent family member gave him £500 for Christmas, this at a time when £500 could secure a very fine house. But he didn't buy a fine house, he bought fine stamps. He received advice from one of London's leading philatelists, and the stamps formed the cornerstone of the brilliant collection that now resides at the British Library. A few months before he had received the £500 he had turned down the purchase of a rare Canadian stamp for $10, judging it too expensive, and he would never forget the lesson: buy when you can, or forever regret it.
By 1973 I had taken my father's advice: £60 for a stamp with an error was an awful lot to pay, and how could I be sure it would appreciate? That doubt, of course, was an error in itself. But a big word in my family at this time—and I imagine many families where the parents met during the age of austerity—was 'fritter'. The key to spending money wisely was to buy something that would be useful and last, something with assured value. Stamps did not fall into this category.
I didn't object to this wisdom; I embraced it. I received a school prize in 1973, the only one I ever won, and the prize was a book token to spend at the High Hill Bookshop in Hampstead (killed by Waterstones; now a Gap). I could have spent it on things I was actually interested in—the Morecambe and Wise Jokebook, a Sherlock Holmes—but that would have been frittering. I chose a hardback called The Jews in the Roman World, which I have yet to open, let alone read. It was presented to me on speech day by the mountaineer Chris Bonnington, an old boy, and as he shook my hand and handed me the book he looked at me inquisitively.
My father died eight months after my bar mitzvah and five months after my school prize. He had suffered a small heart attack some years before, and was going along nicely with a new exercise regime and a changed diet. The strangest ingredient of this was his special salt, which came in a tall blue-and-white plastic bottle and was apparently low in cholesterol. He took this with him everywhere, partly because he liked salt with everything, and would even put it on his peanut butter lest SunPat had forgotten, and also because it became a talisman. Have salt, will survive.
We didn't have much processed food then. My mother enjoyed preparing dinner parties, and she was good at it. Her guides were Graham Kerr (the dishy 'Galloping Gourmet' who used to drink as he cooked long before Keith Floyd got the knack), and Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World. These recipes specialised in aspic and cholesterol, and my mother was in her element in the decade of quiche Lorraine, tournedos Rossini and zabaglione. If any food could be put inside another food—beef Wellington, salmon en croûte—then it became doubly desirable. But there was a limit to her adventurousness; she never much liked the scent of garlic that was wafting through other London homes, and the chancer from the north who came round on his bike with shallots and garlic around his neck soon learnt not to bother at our house. The only commercial tradesmen my mother welcomed were the knife sharpener and the delivery boy from a shop called Panzer's, which specialised not in tanks, but in goodness from the old country—marzipan, pickles, stock cubes, sausages, sauerkraut. We were long past the age of austerity and Marguerite Patten's mock desserts, but she still ran a cautious kitchen. She kept leftovers until it was no longer possible to remember the original meal from which they derived, and she peeled and boiled everything until it hung by its last fibre; one more scalding minute in those pans, and her carrots would have just been orange water. My mother's signature dishes were usually things that rolled: beef olives, matzo balls and rum babas. But we all judged every meal delicious, and only once can I remember acute drama and hunger and tears, the day our lazy basset hound Gus—who had never leapt up to anything in his life—leapt up to steal an entire cooling leg of lamb.
But fake salt came from a different kitchen, the encroaching world of edible chemicals. As the 1970s drew on, everything that could be made false, was. Pleather, fake fur, the wood-finish around our television—all sold not as a replacement but an improvement. This all sat comfortably with my father's false back teeth and the soft top on his 1971 Triumph Vitesse, his mid-lif
e-crisis car. He bought this just before his real mid-life crisis, something awful and mysterious that happened at the office one day and hung over him and our family for months. In fact, he may never have recovered from it.
My father was a solicitor at one of the oldest and most Jewish city firms: Herbert Oppenheimer, Nathan Sc Vandyk. My grandfather Leopold had paid for him to be taken on by Harry Louis Nathan (later Lord Nathan) in 1936, and his Articles of Clerkship reveal his true name: Herbert Sidney Garfunkel. He was born in Hamburg in 1919, and moved to England at Easter 1934. His parents, of banking stock, remained in Germany until 1939, but there was no mistaking the direction of the country after Hitler's ascendancy in 1933. (My mother, born in Wesermunde in 1925, also left Germany in 1934, moving with her parents and sister to Jerusalem.)
My father became a pupil at the Perse School, Cambridge, excelling at most things apart from sport. He was a lance-corporal in the Officer Training Corps, and held the same post when he joined the Durham Light Infantry in 1940. Towards the end of the war he was working for the Americans in the Press Censorship Department of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, and the Certificate of Merit he received at war's end is the earliest official document I have containing his anglicised name: Herbert Garfield. If it hadn't been for Hitler, I would have been Simon Garfunkel.
He qualified as a solicitor in 1947, and he was a partner by the time of my birth in 1960. Four years later we moved from East Finchley to a large house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and we remained a happy and secure family enjoying middle-class comforts in a confident country. It is not altogether trite to suggest that in the 1960s you could measure the state of a country from its postage stamps. Certainly this is how I learnt much of my history, and it was how Britain wanted to be seen: proud of its past, secure in the present, sure of its future. Battles, Democracy, Heritage, Christmas and always Royalty—these were the regulars, augmented by Science and Technology, Sport and Art. This was my miniaturised encyclopaedia: by learning the background to the Joseph Lister centenary, the building of the Forth Road Bridge and the Emmeline Pankhurst commemoration I would begin to grasp a little of our history. Because new stamps were always an event in those days, their photo in the papers would always be accompanied by a summary of what they were commemorating, and my dad liked to read them out: 'Joseph Rowntree, the confectionery maker and philanthropist, was born in York 130 years ago. Joseph Lister, who developed antiseptic and sterilisation, was born in Essex 140 years ago'—and thus began my journalistic instinct for the meaningful anniversary. These British stamps of the 1960s, always my main interest with errors or not, have never been surpassed, the perfect balance between design and subject matter. There was such a clear order to them, and I remember counting the weeks and days to the next issue. I queued up with my mother and brother at the post office in Market Place, the quaint shopping strip that couldn't bear to think of itself as part of the North Circular, and we were in the company of many other boys and older collectors. Some had brought small stock albums to carry their purchases home flat behind glassine strips. Some had labels to place softly on the corners of first day covers, special envelopes supplied to carry the new stamps with a postmark from the first day of issue.
The stamps were one thing, the buying process another, and adding them to your album at home another still, and I soon came to learn that stamp collecting was rich in rhythms and protocol, and it was this that soon became addictive, the deep comfort of ritual. Looking at them now, they carry a still beauty and clarity: stamps marking the first flight of Concorde and the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, stamps commemorating the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings and the 700th anniversary of Simon de Montfort's Parliament, stamps depicting British birds and wild flowers and famous ships. I've mentioned that I thought this was my history, and in an immediate sense it was. But it was never my family's heritage. My parents never collected stamps, and if they had collected Germany when they were young they would have long abandoned their hobby.
England had welcomed my parents with opportunity, and they took every opportunity themselves to embrace English culture. They loved the stately homes and the old universities, my father loved the rigmaroles and privileges of the legal system, and in the summer of 1966 my mother went mad for Geoff Hurst. Jack Rosenthal couldn't have written it better: England v. Germany in the final, my mother allergic to football for her entire forty-one years, but then suddenly they kicked off at Wembley and she was screaming at the television as the goals went in. Mother 4, Nazis 2. And then a few days later we were at the post office before it opened for the England Winners stamp. I think she bought a whole sheet and used it as regular postage, her own victory lap with Bobby Moore every time she licked one.
As the 1960s progressed I became a more serious collector, and the more I thought of myself as a committed philatelist, the more eager I became for some acknowledgement of my commitment. But as I edged towards my teens I was also growing aware that collecting stamps was not the sort of thing that would bring instant approval from girls. It would not even bring instant approval from boys, and, at a less civilised institution than University College School in Hampstead, philately might have resulted in a beating. The first time I entered my school's annual philatelic competition (which, for the winner, meant a prize on Speech Day, enabling some people in the hall—perhaps my parents—to believe the prize had something to do with academic merit rather than just steaming things off old envelopes), I was not at all surprised to find that the other entrants were the sort of boys I looked down on—the friendless, the ungainly. I didn't envy their lives, just their stamps: one boy, also called Simon, had a small collection of George V 'Sea Horses', high-denomination stamps that, although postally used, were probably worth a hundred pounds. I think he had been left them in a will, something that as far as I knew would never happen to me. For the school competition one year I put together a fairly elaborate story surrounding the Wild Flowers set of 1967, describing each of the flowers in turn and where they grew. I think I listed some varieties I had seen in magazines, such as 'missing campion bloom'. The other Simon mounted his Sea Horses on clean album pages, labelled them 'George V Sea Horses, 1913, 2s 6d, 5s, 10s and £1', and won. I think the teacher who judged, probably a collector himself, thought the other Simon's stamps worthy of space in his own collection, whereas my flowers he probably had as full sheets, ordinary and phosphor (the phosphor was an innovation to aid automatic sorting).
It would have been unusual for me not to have thought for a minute about stealing the other Simon's stamps. Not because I wanted them, but because I wanted him to be unhappy. The thought quickly passed: I'd be found out, I'd be expelled, I'd still feel unsatisfied. It was at this point that I came to terms with one of the great universal collecting truths: no matter what you had in your collection, it wasn't enough. You could collect all the Queen Elizabeth issues, but there would always be new ones every few weeks, and a gnawing feeling that there were some rare shades or misperforations you didn't yet have, and what about going back to the Georges and Edward VIII and sixty-one years of Victoria? And could you really call yourself a collector if you didn't have something or everything from the Cape of Good Hope and the British Commonwealth? In this way stamps taught me about setting boundaries and limiting one's ambitions—about life, really—but unfortunately this knowledge didn't quell the overriding desire to obtain more stamps.
At school we all put our acquisitions in albums by licking tiny translucent 'hinges' and sticking one bit on the stamp and the other on a page, a process known as mounting, something which instantly reduced the value of mint items by about two-thirds. Not that value was ever the thing. I never collected with an eye on investment, because nothing I could afford cost more than the price of the stamps over the counter. I probably entertained the hope that when I was older the worth of my collection might be able to buy me a car, but I think I knew in my heart that the moment I bought the Battle of Hastings strip, the very first
in my collection in 1966, it would probably be worth about the same for years to come, or much less if you separated each of the six stamps from the six-stamp strip, which I did. And then again less when I mounted them, and then less still when I only bought the strip of 46 stamps and the 6d value, and not the is 3d key stamp because it seemed too expensive. I know now that 14,865,204 of the ordinary 4d Hastings stamps were sold, and 2,643,660 of the phosphor printing, which means that after almost forty years, these stamps are worth about the same as I paid for them, and I can't even use them for postage.
Occasionally I would buy cellophaned packs from WH Smith that bulged in the middle. These cost a few shillings, and promised to contain stamps with a catalogue value of £5 or £10, which told even an eight year old that catalogue values were not things to rely on. Some packs came with plastic tweezers and a plastic magnifying glass, so that a beginner could pretend to be a pro, much like a child could play with a fake plastic driving wheel in the back of an Austin Allegro. But it was laughable to imagine that the magnifying glass would actually discover anything interesting in that pack of cheap stamps, and the tweezers were redundant too, as you could have handled the stamps with treacle on your fingers and not reduced their value further. The best stamps were ones that came free on envelopes through the letterbox. Franking machines were not yet in every office; secretaries were dispatched to buy two hundred stamps at a time, and even the most official mail had a colourful corner. These would be steamed off with a kettle or placed in warm water, and then dried on newspaper, and they filled a lot of album space.
Once, I sent away for something advertised in the back of a comic called 'approvals', a fateful snare. The idea of approvals was that you sent away for stamps 'on approval' and only once you had received and 'approved' them did you send back a postal order or cheque as payment. In theory, I suppose, you could have approved some stamps and kept them and rejected others and sent them back, haggling with the dealer about how much was owed; or that at least may have been the implication in the Dandy, Look & Learn and Treasure. But when I sent away for my approvals I had no idea what the concept meant—only that the prospect of receiving expensive-looking stamps with no outlay was appealing.
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