A while later, with Virgil homework complete, Bunter is once again in a thicket with his five chums. And there again is Sir Hilton Popper, and they can just make out an income tax demand in his pocket and a scowl on his face. Sir Hilton, 'a gentleman whose estate was covered by mortgages almost as thickly as by oaks and beeches', owed the Revenue much money, and had taken to talking to himself as he worked out the solution. 'How is a man to meet such demands?' he wonders. 'Last year I had to sell a farm! The year before to let my house to a bounder. This year I must sell the stamp.'
Bunter and his friends are not philatelists, but when Sir Hilton removes the Blue Mauritius from his pocket-book, 'They realised ... that it was something special and precious in the postage-stamp line. They were able to discern that it was blue in colour, and that it showed a profile of Queen Victoria. They also caught the words "Two Pence".' Frank Richards was probably no philatelist either, or he would not have had Sir Hilton pick up his stamp between finger and thumb rather than tweezers, and certainly not directly after a lamb supper. Almost inevitably, it isn't long before the stamp is stolen again.
I would follow these exploits lying on my bed. My bedroom had a good-sized desk for homework and model-making, a row of shelves by the door with young novels and Guinness fact books, a pinboard by a window with Chelsea posters detached from Goal, and a view that looked into a wide leafy street and sideways towards our elderly spinster neighbours. My bed had a built-in storage unit along one side in which I kept the things that were dearest to me—Grundig radio and cassette player, magazines, a bear, my small stamp album. I was relieved to sleep here every night rather than the boarding school dorms of my fiction. (At one point my shelves also held the Moomintroll books by Tove Jansson, and one of these, Finn Family Moomintroll, carried the impossibly sad woe of the Hemulen. The Hemulen moped around at the start of the book because he had completed his stamp collection and now had nothing to do. 'There isn't a stamp or an error that I haven't collected. Not one.' It dawned on Moomintroll what a tragedy this was. 'I think I'm beginning to understand ... You aren't a collector any more, only an owner, and that isn't nearly so much fun.')
By a satisfyingly improbable sequence of events, Bunter again finds the Blue Mauritius for Popper at the end of the book, and Popper rewards him with a beating for not finding it sooner. Six weeks later, Bunter is again waiting anxiously for the postman in Billy Bunter's Beanfeast.
The story of the stamp went on. The next time I encountered it, it was in an American crime thriller and I was in London's Finchley Road. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, the corner shop next to Frognal railway station was a valuable source of soft-core pornography, and many boys at University College School would call in there on the way to or from the playing fields. Storage was no problem: you can bury a lot of things in a dank Puma holdall and the external bat sleeve of a cricket bag. It was the usual fare—Club International, Men Only, Health & Efficiency at the last resort—and we passed them around the pavilion with a nonchalance we would later use on teenage girls in our gangs at Golders Green and Hampstead: we are only vaguely interested, we shrugged, when we were all very interested indeed. Inevitably, we ran on to rugby and cricket pitches exhausted. It was also that phase at an all-boys school when we were as interested in each other as in the magazines.
The shop in the Finchley Road had two sections, the section at the front which had nothing anyone was interested in, and the damp section at the back, beyond a sticky plastic rainbow curtain. We were so underage, but the owner was obliging and understood. With school friends that curtain was no barrier at all, and we'd swan through on a mission. Most of the magazines had been previously owned and dispensed with, and they had an earthy smell. Occasionally there would be a cache of Americans —Hustler, Twink, Superjugs—none of them hard-core, but somehow more exotic, more unreachable. The further away the women in these magazines were, the safer I felt. And in the American magazines there would occasionally be men with huge drooping penises, perhaps photographed after the act, an act perhaps appearing in another magazine yet to make it to NW3.
There were rarely any women I actually fancied in either the American or British mags, and of course I would have been profoundly nervous of any real-life encounters. The Readers' Wives, all old enough to be my mother, were particularly unattractive and overgrown, and taught me something subliminal about the dangers of bad lighting. Georgie from Berkhamsted likes to party. Pamela from Northholt likes to join her. But where were these places, and where were these parties? One of our number, a boy called Steve who had sprouted early and claimed to have learnt to drive in a field, also claimed to have done it with a girl in a phone booth on holiday, and the rest of us were both suspicious and jealous.
His story never changed. It was 'delustful', he said often, 'very delustful'. I'm not sure I have ever heard anyone use this word since. 'And cramped,' I should have said. Instead, I thought about what could have gone where, and whether she sat on the metal phonebook shelf, and how cold that could have been.
'Mary was gorgeous,' Steve said. 'Long blonde hair ... nipples like cherries.' He was, almost certainly, describing a film he may have read about, probably starring Mary Millington or the impossibly sized Chesty Morgan. The nearest I got to a real mythical girl was by calling the numbers in the back of the magazines. There would be many promises: many 'lessons', some 'punishment', all of it 'strict'. I thought I had suffered enough of that at school, but I was enticed by pictures of blondes with their hair back and their mouths open, and so I phoned them. I think I knew I was being ripped off with my very first call. One could never actually reach Bernadette or whoever, not because she was still running from her catechism tutorial to be with me, but because she was completely imagined by, I imagine, an unusually fat man from Essex. I would get a certain way each time. 'Very shortly you will be put through to Bernadette, who is panting to meet you,' informed a soft female voice. 'But first...' But first there was some nonsense about holding the line while a technical problem was solved, and then there was a delay while a new phoneline was advertised with the promise of triple-X fare, and then Bernadette would be along any minute now, and then there was a recorded tape of someone calling me a big boy until the line went dead. It was so convincing, and my hopes so high, that I must have called at least three times before I realised that this was a technical fault that was more complex than first thought. And then because Bernadette wasn't available, I would try Susan or Carole.
I had no idea how much these calls would cost my parents, but we lived in that blissful era before bills came itemised. I would call when they were out in the evenings and I was being looked after by my brother. I wouldn't tell him what I was doing, but he would have understood; I later found a small but neatly arranged pile of magazines at the bottom of his bedroom cupboard. They were Parades,* cost 8p at the dawn of decimalisation, and I have them in my dubiously titled 'rare publications' box along with first copies of Whizzer and Chips, the Face and the Independent (there are none of my own 'glamour' magazines in there, as these were recycled into the eager school pool or thrown away on Hampstead Heath with shame).
A few weeks went by, and then an unexpectedly large phone bill arrived in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and my parents may have put this down to an increase in the price of their calls to their relatives in Israel. For the next few weeks my family in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would wonder why things had gone silent our end, unaware that I had been financing someone's white-shagpiled mansion in Basildon.
In the Finchley Road, there was another conundrum: how to enter the back of the shop by myself. As part of a gang, the plastic curtains were all swish swish swish behind us. (Swish: wasn't that another magazine of the period? Caning?) But by yourself, the eyes of the owner were upon you, as were the eyes of everyone walking in the street towards Swiss Cottage or Golders Green. It looked almost like a regular bookshop from the outside, even though few of the books in the window had actually been published in the last decade. Ther
e were a lot of sporting and show-business autobiographies, a lot of almanacs. But as you emerged from the shop with something new in brown paper in the holdall, everyone passing knew you hadn't bought Swingin' Dors by Diana Dors. The gulf between the regular books, laid out like meat products in a 1970s Moscow supermarket, and the innards of the Swish was so vast that even Hannibal would have thought twice. The owner had no problem with a teenager indulging in the Swish; indeed we were his best customers. But his attempt to put a young, lone, uniformed blusher at his ease only made things worse.
'Good afternoon, Sir.'
I had only been called 'Sir' in gentleman's outfitters and in stamp shops. In fact, the similarity between buying porn and buying stamps was only just becoming clear. The slight seediness, especially in the early 1970s; the feeling that, at all times, you were being conned; the impression that there was always something better that you weren't allowed to see; the unshakeable belief that no matter how long you looked, you would never be satisfied.
'Is there anything I can help you with?'
This was in the front, legit part of the shop. I always said I was just browsing, which was true, but how many times can you flick through Hunt for Goals by Roger Hunt? I was, of course, always looking towards the Swish, and the shop owner knew it. I think I only made my solo way through there twice, and the rest of the time I just dawdled. One day the legitimate shelves bore a new cache of crime thrillers. These were probably by James Hadley Chase, Erie Stanley Gardner, Eric Ambler and Ngaio Marsh. But I was taken by the work of Vernon Warren, and one book in particular: The Blue Mauritius.
Here was that stamp again, an object more desirable than the red-headed broad being held at gunpoint on the jacket (the spine of the book showed the Blue Mauritius with a silver dagger through it, probably also not the work of a long-term, serious philatelist). The plot was distinctly hard-boiled, and a lot like Mickey Spillane. It was full of girls called Mitzi. At the start of the book, a private detective is down on his luck when an unlikely-looking client walks into his cold Chicago office. 'For a hobby I practise the art of Philately, are you with me?' the stranger asks.
'You collect postage stamps, yeah I follow.'
At this stage—the book was published in 1954, two years after Bunter—the stamp is valued at $20,000. But the stamp the client mentions is rarer still, predominantly because it only exists in fiction. Rather than a twopence blue, it is a one-penny blue. It was an error. It should have been a one-penny red, but the dyes got mixed up. According to the stranger, only one sheet was printed before the error was noticed, and all but one stamp was destroyed. This is now worth more than $150,000. And had the stranger ever seen the stamp? 'Seen it? I've owned it.' The problem was, he had needed some cash, sold the stamp, regretted it almost instantly, and now had enough 'simoleons' to buy it back. Ah, if only things were that easy. The new owner of the stamp won't sell it even for $450,000, and the stranger has gotten desperate. 'Do you realise what it is like to own something when it's the only one in the world?' he asks the detective.
'No, mebbe I don't.'
The stranger asks the detective to steal the stamp back for him, but the fee the detective wants—$250,000—is too steep. They say goodbye. And then the adventure really starts, with the detective travelling to New York to track down the dealer who bought the stamp from the stranger, and then the man who bought it from the dealer. Only problem: the man who bought it has been murdered...
***
As a stamp collector, the Blue Mauritius follows you to your grave. More exotic than the Penny Black and a hundred times rarer, it is a stamp so heavy with lore that its true history outflanks its fictitious appearances. Any account* will describe the story of the glamorous ball held in Port Louis in 1847 by the Governor's wife Lady Gomm. The envelopes used for the invitations marked the first ever use of the one-penny orange-red and the twopence blue, and in so doing established Mauritius as only the fifth country in the world to issue stamps. The twopence stamp, which was modelled on the British Penny Red but was of far coarser design, carried an inscription on all four sides: Postage, Mauritius, Two Pence, Post Office. These days a British colony stamp would probably carry a picture of an indigenous species, or an extinct one, which in the case of Mauritius would have been the dodo. In 1847 it was a badly drawn portrait of Queen Victoria with something approaching a double chin. It is believed 500 were printed of each value, but only twenty-six or twenty-seven are known to have survived. The stamps continued to be worth twopence (or less because they were used) until about 1865, when a market for them was established by French collectors. As Detective Brandon was informed by the New York dealer he met on his travels, the stamp has 'no legal value whatsoever ... the immense value that attaches to it is given only by the few specialists for that kind of thing that there are in the world'. This is the essence of all stamp collecting, indeed of collecting anything: you don't have to be one of the Duveen brothers to know that a stamp, like everything else you may purchase at auction, is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it.
Part of the initial allure in France—apart from the fact that these stamps were a vivid fresh discovery in a flourishing new hobby—was that it contained the words 'Post Office', whereas the stamps printed from an improved engraving the following year in far greater numbers bore the words 'Post Paid'. It was also very rare, as the vast majority were thrown away in Mauritian waste bins well before new ballgowns were ordered for Lady Gomm's party (1,000 'Post Office' stamps were printed in 1847, whereas it is believed 100,000 of the 'Post Paid' stamps were printed between 1848 and 1859). And in this way the stamp became a holy grail. One id used stamp surfaced in 1869 in Bordeaux and was sold to a female dealer named Madame Desbois. It was then bought by Moens along with some other stamps, who sold it on to a collector for about £10 in 1870. In 1897 a dealer bought the stamp as part of this man's entire collection, valuing it at about £1,200. In 1901 it was bought by the Berlin Reichspostmuseum, where it was placed in a glass-fronted display frame, surviving the Second World War first in the museum's vaults and then in a mineshaft in Eisleben. In 1977, a year after a former US army soldier had offered the frame for sale to the London philatelist Robson Lowe (who reported this offer to Interpol), the soldier surrendered it to the US Customs Service. Following reunification, it was returned to a postal museum in Bonn, and it is now on display at its new permanent home (until history pulls it away ...) in the Museum fur Post und Kommunikation in Berlin. And no doubt those who see it report its bearing as 'luminous', for nothing adds ardent light to a stamp better than a brilliant past.
One twopence specimen, unused, slightly damaged and repaired, followed a similar route from Bordeaux to Madame Desbois, and then to J. B. Moens. Moens sold it to Count Ferrary in 1875, for 600 francs (about £24). In 1886 Ferrary swapped the stamp with T. K. Tapling, whose collection was bequeathed to the British Museum after his death in 1891. This was the one that really caught my eye.
Tapling and Ferrary were the two giants of nineteenth-century collecting, and they couldn't have been more different. Tapling was seven years younger, educated at Harrow, a Member of Parliament, a cricketer (he played one match for the MCC), fond of cravats. Though born to good stock and great wealth, Ferrary was practically feral.
He was born illegitimate in 1848 and brought up in Germany and France. He began collecting at the age of ten. He was a serious boy, and a sensitive one: he reportedly suffered a great deal when he heard of the humiliation inflicted upon the Austrian armies by Napoleon III at Solferino. His ancestors were also collectors, and their main interest appeared to be collecting money. His maternal grandfather, a Genoese banker, was said to have died of starvation when he deposited himself in a vault with his gold but failed to take the key to let himself out. The banker's daughter, Ferrary's mother, the Duchess of Galliera, was only given the key to her husband's private library shortly before he died, and when she entered she found a great many shelves of bound volumes containing government bonds,
some £12 million in total.
And so it was, at the death of his mother in 1888, that Count Ferrary found himself suddenly able to acquire all the things he dreamed of as a child. His inheritance was $25 million. What he dreamed of was something every modern collector can never dare to dream—the feat of completion. With the possible exception of the King of England, no one else would ever entertain such ambitions again. Ferrary was to be thwarted in his aim: even in 1888, forty-eight years after the Penny Black, it was already impossible to collect everything. Even if you had the money, some things were just not available. But Ferrary tried.
He had several important dealers, including J. P. Moens and Pierre Mahe, the latter becoming the keeper of his collection in Paris as he travelled throughout Europe on his quest for more stamps. He desired to buy every unique and legendary rarity in the world—the five-cent dull-blue Boscawen Postmaster stamp; the Kiautschou five-pfennig double-printed with 5fP rather than 5Pf; the 1851 Hawaiian two-cent blue, the 1856 British Guiana one-cent black on magenta, the Swedish tre-skilling banco of 1855 (yellow, error of colour, the only known example that wasn't the intended green).
Like most collectors, Ferrary thrilled as much to the chase as the conquest. He bought them every way you can imagine and a few more besides, paying far over the odds to happy dealers. At one stage he owned four copies of the Blue Mauritius. The stamps were housed at 57 rue de Varenne, in a private wing of a palace occupied by the Austrian ambassador. His collection was rarely seen by visitors, but one who did gain entrance was Charles J. Phillips, another of Ferrary's principal dealers. He described a room covered on three sides by cupboards with shelves, the shelves containing 'stamps all mounted on strips of stout paper'; they were not in albums but in bundles organised alphabetically, and some of the bundles were distinctly dusty. Elsewhere there were tall piles of discarded albums and paper sheets containing the unwanted duplicates from the many collections he had purchased to plunder a few rare specimens. Behind Mahe's desk stood a board with banknotes nailed to it in various denominations: 50,000 francs was allocated each week for the purchase of new stamps. At one stage in the 1890s, Ferrary's relatives became so alarmed at the amount he was spending on stamps that they decided to use the French courts to slow him down. His relatives claimed he had gone insane; to prove otherwise, Ferrary enrolled in a law course at the University of Brussels, obtaining his degree after five years. He also gave his 'solemn word' that 'in no case and under no pretext whatever I would make a debit and never purchase anything for which I could not pay cash'.
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