Towards the end of the 1970s, Brandon and his competitors all benefited from a brief philatelic boom. Newspapers began extolling the virtues of stamps not just as a quiet hobby for those who don't get out much, but also as a fertile opportunity for profit, and there was always a story of great finds in an attic and a flabbergasted owner. In addition, many countries operated strict exchange-control regulations, but you could put stamps in your wallet and customs officials rarely bothered you. Several stamps had been singled out for investment potential, including the 1929 George V GB Postal Union Congress £1 and the 1939 George VI high values, and their price rose astonishingly within two years. In 1976, David Brandon was selling a well-centred, excellently perforated mint copy of the PUC £1 for about £700; three years later it was £2,500. This elaborately engraved stamp, which featured St George and the Dragon, is consistently voted the most beautiful British stamp of all time. The problem was, it was a common stamp. The crash came in 1980, when the market was flooded and the auction prices slumped dramatically. The price of a PUC £1 went back to about £500, and those who had bought at the top end just a few months before suffered badly. Brandon was left with fifty-one copies, and took a big loss, but he did manage to carry on trading. 'I've always loved stamps, so pulling out wasn't an option,' he told me. 'But a lot of dealers were buying stamps with an overdraft, and they couldn't sell their stock at a sufficient price to pay off what they owed. So they went down.' In those days it was said that you had to have a particular talent not to be able to make money out of stamps. 'It was thought that so long as you kept buying PUC £is you couldn't go wrong,' Brandon said. 'These days people realise that you need knowledge.'
Brandon has used his knowledge to build up a profitable sideline: expertisation. During one of my visits to his house, Brandon pointed to a pile of certificates of genuineness he had just done for a small auction house, and he showed me the card of stamps from Bermuda to which they referred. 'That's repaired, that's re-backed ... that's a forgery, that's a forgery, those are all genuine, that's a forgery...' His expertising committee, which consists of Brandon and two others, changes its personnel depending on what is being examined. It has been going since 1976. It grew from the dissatisfaction some dealers felt in waiting four or five months for certificates to arrive from the established Royal Philatelic Society and the British Philatelic Association. 'We'd be interested in a stamp, and perhaps buy it, but then we'd have to wait months for a certificate before we could sell it.'
He told me that he had to handle the stamps to know whether they were genuine or not. 'Then I can give you an opinion which is probably 99.9 per cent correct before I examine it closely. When I first did expertising, I knew someone who could tell by looking at a stamp through a [transparent] envelope. You just know if it's right or wrong. But we get items for certificating that people say they got on eBay, and even before it comes in I know it's going to be wrong. And invariably it is. It costs them £59.92 to find out.'
The majority of the items he examines are genuine. Many of the early stamps have faults—creases and thins—but he says expect things to be a little bit soiled after 150 years. 'But with eBay it's always 99.9 per cent wrong. You get what you pay for, and you don't get a stamp worth £1,000 for £20.'
His certificates leave no room for misinterpretation: 'The Committee is of the opinion that the Great Britain, 1965 (8 October), 3d multicoloured, chalk-surfaced paper, Watermark Multiple Crowns (sideways), Perforation 14 × 15, olive-yellow (Tower) omitted (SG.679a) unused pair with full original gum is genuine.' This is accompanied by a photograph. 'With most of this stuff now,' Brandon says, 'we've seen so much of it over the years that you could almost do it with your eyes shut.'
***
I always learnt a lot from David Brandon, particularly what a good salesman he was. I visited him several times to talk about his life and the history of great stamps and collectors, and at the end of each visit I usually had a quick look at his error stock. There were all sorts of things I had no interest in, and many things I loved but couldn't possibly afford. As I flicked through each specimen on a special showcard, Brandon said things like, 'That's a wonderful example,' and, 'That block is unique—as far as I'm aware, the biggest in the world.' On a couple of occasions I made a point of not bringing my cheque book so that I wouldn't be tempted by a rash purchase. But this cautionary act was irrelevant. 'You can just take it if you like,' Brandon said as I admired a copy of the 65p Nobel Prize stamp from 2001. I didn't really collect decimal issues (just too many of them), but this stamp was something else. The normal examples had a small hologram of a boron molecule on them. The error had no hologram, just white space on a white stamp with a little inscription on it. These were purchased from a post office in Kent, and there were eight copies known. While I was admiring it he told me that there are a lot of collectors whose partners have no idea how much they spend on stamps. A lot of people say to him, 'Here's the cheque, please don't send me an invoice, the wife wants a new cooker. Just take it if you like,' Brandon said, 'and you can send me payment in instalments.' I'd only seen one in a magazine before. I took it.
And then I took it back. After I had owned the missing hologram stamp for a couple of weeks I concluded that I had made a big mistake. The stamp was stunning, and genuinely rare, but it had actually cost me tens of thousands of pounds more than I had realised. The problem was, it wouldn't be a one-off purchase, because it was decimal. Previously all my major purchases had been pre-decimal, which was a manageable specialisation encompassing only a decade of commemoratives; after 1971, the field opened up into a vast territory I didn't understand. The pre-decimal stamps were the ones I grew up with, while most of those that came after held no comparable charms. So I called David Brandon on the phone. 'The bad news is, I think I've made an error of my own.'
'It really isn't done', he said, 'to take things back.'
'I was hoping I could trade it for some earlier items, like a block of the 1965 International Telecommunication Union Centenary is 6d missing pink.'
'OK, he said. 'Because it's you.'
On one occasion I told him of my passion for the is 3d 1961 Parliamentary Conference stamp without the Queen, and he said, 'I know what you mean—it's absolutely beautiful. If I had a dozen I could sell them all by the end of the week.' I asked him what my chances were of getting one. 'You never know,' he said. 'I'll have to talk to Mark.' Mark was his son who now lived in Portugal, and handled the modern errors. 'The problem is,' David Brandon continued, 'you could have all the money in the world, and if a stamp isn't available you can't get it.' He explained that some of his wealthiest clients had spent many unrewarding years searching for stamps with a catalogue value of under £40. With the is 3d Parliamentary stamp the dozen examples he mentioned did not exist; there were only six known, and only four in mint condition. With stamps, my dealer said, it's always a quest. 'Any fool can simply write out a cheque.'
On one of my visits to David Brandon's house, I noticed a large collection of stamp albums stored in cardboard boxes just inside his entrance porch. 'Oh that,' Brandon told me a few weeks later. 'I sold that on. There were no rarities, just a big general all-world collection from someone who's been collecting for forty years and who lived down the road. I'd never even heard of them, but his son used to go to school with my son Mark and knew the stamp connection in our family.' Brandon then described the collection with a phrase that put a chill around my heart. He called them 'mostly small nothing stamps'.
Mark Brandon: excitingly, this was the same name as the detective hero in the hard-boiled American caper about the Blue Mauritius I had stumbled upon in the Finchley Road. When I told David Brandon about this—indeed, when I presented him with the book as a surprise—he was delighted. In fact, he couldn't believe it. He flicked through it, marvelling at the other Brandon titles: Brandon in New York, Brandon Returns, Brandon Takes Over. 'I will give it to Mark as a Christmas present from you,' he said, adding, 'It is unbelievable!'
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p; Brandon then took me down to a basement room where he had some rare wine and many old stamp auction catalogues and books. He suggested I borrow a couple, and said there was no hurry to return them. Mostly they turned out to be dull. 'There are lots of books about stamps,' he said, partly as a warning. 'And they don't really sell.' I told him my book was about stamps, but also about other things. 'Well,' he said in search of compensatory phrasing, 'I'm sure your book will sell more than the ones that didn't sell so well.'
I got to know Brandon's son Mark over a lunch of melon and overstuffed roast beef sandwiches at his father's house. He was thirty-six, and built like a middleweight boxer. He was more of a businessman than an obsessive collector, and like most young men eager to make an impression on the world, he was keen to do this in a profession far away from his father's. During school holidays he used to help out in the shop in the Strand, and he collected a few things, but he was never really passionate about stamps. He studied business management at college, and began his selling career in a jewellery shop in Guildford. But then, because stamps can enter your bloodstream and never leave you, in 1987 he got a job behind the counter at Stanley Gibbons. He graduated from selling albums and tweezers to handling stamps, and one day a customer walked in and said he wanted to look at the modern errors. Brandon sold him a lot, and he began to see their appeal. His father had been handling the same sort of errors for years, but now he had discovered them for himself.
Errors swiftly became Mark Brandon's main interest. He thought they were undervalued, but saw that some customers were uncertain of their true worth because there was so little information about them. The head of the Queen may be beautifully absent from a stamp, and only twelve copies may be known, but who was to say two hundred more wouldn't be discovered in the future? There was no specialist catalogue, and occasionally in the Stanley Gibbons catalogue some of the prices were higher for stamps that Mark Brandon saw for sale every day than for those he had only heard about, the stamps that his clients really drooled over. So Brandon became a specialist himself, and after a couple of years he left Gibbons to work in an informal partnership with Derek Worboys, who had the best error stock in the country.
The upsurge in interest and price of GB errors may be attributed partly to the publication in 2003 of a book produced by Mark Brandon and a friend of his called Richard, who also lived in Portugal and preferred to be known under the pseudonym Tom Pierron. The Catalogue of Errors, which contained 400 pages and a CD-ROM, was the first comprehensive guide to QE2 varieties. To the collector and the trade, this was a wonderful volume, not only legitimising their strange stamps, but attempting to place a market value on them. The value was based not merely on rarity, but also on visual appeal; a stamp missing phosphor bands, of which there were only six known, was almost always worth less than a stamp with a missing value or colour of which there were ten.
The word 'known' is the key one here. The problem with errors has always been that a collector may have what they believe to be one of eight examples on a sheet bought from a post office in Cheltenham, but then it turns out that for ten years some bastard has been hoarding a block of twenty discovered in Truro. Or that someone discovers that a block of four they've had in their collection for twenty years and never given much heed, actually has no green on it. This is unlikely, but the prospect once caused me night-sweats. Tom Pierron's judgement about quantities has relied on his own knowledge as a collector, Brandon's expertise as a dealer, and every anecdote and whisper they could find from old catalogues and magazines and their friends.
In his introduction, Pierron considers the issue of investment. A tactic to consider, he suggests, is buying up as many of a single error as possible and sitting on the copies for a while. Then release them slowly over time to extract the best possible price. It can be a costly and slow process, though. He calculated the approximate value of certain classic errors over an extended period of time, based primarily on realisations at auctions. I almost weep when I report that in 1980, the Parliamentary is 3d missing blue was £500. It went up to £900 in 1985, £3,000 in 1990, £4,000 in 1995, £4,500 in 2000, and £6,500 in 2003.
He also included a chart about the quantities of the various types of errors in a particular decade, which shows how the three printing companies used by the Post Office slowly got their act together. In 1960, a year which saw both an increase in the number of commemorative issues and experiments with multiple colours, there were 300 missing colour errors compared with zero in the decade before. In the 1970s there were 143, in the 1980s there were seven, and in the 1990s there were fifteen.
At the beginning of 2005 the second edition of the Errors catalogue appeared, vastly expanded, and it broke many collectors' hearts. The prices of many great items had increased to unaffordability. If you had one of these you were laughing; I felt glum, the sort of glumness that descended from the day I saw the Post Office Tower error as a boy and has rarely lifted since. It's really not the money I could have made, but it's the beautiful thing I could have owned.
Mark Brandon bought Derek Worboys's stock a year before he died. Worboys was planning his retirement, and it was a great shock when, while undergoing routine surgery, he died on the operating table. He did not have the error field to himself—his main competitor was a firm called B. Alan Ltd, and there were several others who sold errors as part of their general trade—but he had the most impressive range (on his website he called it 'the most significant stock of rare stamps on the planet'). I asked him about his clients. One of them, he said, a man called Gavin, had nearly everything, old money and decimal, rare and not so rare. Would he talk to me? 'I can ask him.' (He did ask him, and he said 'no'.) Brandon had told me that most error collectors tend to be terribly protective of their collections, and the last person they would want to discuss it with would be another collector. It might put them at a disadvantage when an item they required came up for auction. It might upset the market if they had taken Tom Pierron's tip and hoarded many examples of a particular stamp. And it might upset their wife or husband (usually wife) to read how much they were spending.
Mark Brandon thought there were about two thousand people who collected GB errors, including about fifty who were prepared to spend many thousands of pounds every year. He said that his errors website regularly attracted ten thousand page hits a day. I wondered what would happen to the market when the current generation died, fearing there weren't enough younger collectors to keep the hobby alive. Mark Brandon thought the rare stuff would always be in demand, and was cheered by witnessing a riot in the Far East when young collectors thought the post office would close before they could get a new set of stamps postmarked on the first day of issue.
We also talked about forgery—the forging of error. The Brandons said that gold Queen's heads can be removed from many stamps with ironing and chemicals, including the 1966 Hastings set, but you can spot that one because the embossing would usually be removed as well. Some pale colours will just change on exposure to light, or after wiping with some sort of solution, but you can spot that with a good ultraviolet lamp. 'Chloramine-T they used to use...' David Brandon said.
'You must have made some mistakes over the years,' I suggested.
'Oh, all the time,' Mark Brandon said. 'Everything I sell is too cheap. It's the same story—I wish I had most things I sold ten years ago because they're worth twice as much.' He talked about the Post Office Savings issue. He bought the original block of thirty stamps before it was split up into three strips, and sold it in 1988 for £20,000. If he was to sell that now it would be £60,000 or £70,000. 'But you have to live and eat,' he pointed out, 'so you can't hoard the stuff.'
I told him of my lust for the is 3d Parliamentary, and asked what my chances were of acquiring one. 'Not great,' Mark Brandon said. 'Unless you're very lucky and one comes up for auction.'
David Brandon mentioned some of his celebrity customers, including Arthur Negus ('came into the shop a lot, charming gent'), Adam Faith ('a great frie
nd'), Lee Marvin Junior ('looked just like his dad') and Leslie Crowther ('couldn't stand him'). His biggest customer was a man named Sir Gawaine Baillie. I had become aware of him shortly after his death in December 2003. Sir Gawaine achieved fame racing Jaguars and Fords alongside Stirling Moss in the late 1950s, and became wealthy through his company H. P. C. Engineering, which he ran for more than forty years. On his mother's death in 1974 he inherited the estate surrounding Leeds Castle (the Castle itself was bequeathed to the nation) and it was about this time that he rediscovered his fondest boyhood hobby. His obituary in the Daily Telegraph didn't mention his interest in stamps, which is some omission, because he devoted four hours each day to his passion, and in the process formed arguably the greatest private collection of modern times. It was valued at about £11 million, and contained items that made even the coolest dealers drop to their knees. His collection showed a mastery of the British West Indies, the Australian States, British Africa and Rhodesia, British North America, New Zealand and all outposts of the British Empire. And then there was Great Britain—the Victorian colour trials and plate proofs, mint blocks of Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues, a unique sheet of the 1880 2s brown, and the famous 2d Tyrian Plum, which, following the death of King Edward VII in May 1910, was never issued. And then there were the Great Britain errors, including the 1966 Birds block missing black, blue, bistre and reddish brown, and the orange Minis without the Jaguar, which was said to be Sir Gawaine's personal favourite. 'He died far too young, just 69!' David Brandon told me in an email. 'He was an absolutely charming, kind, understanding and altogether lovely man. He had come to my house many times and we had some great days together on stamps.' Needless to say, if ever parts of the Baillie collection came up for sale it would make paupers of all who bid for it.
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