And within a few months, penury beckoned. Sir Gawaine Baillie had died. His entire collection was to be sold by Sotheby's in ten separate auctions. When the huge and beautiful catalogue accompanying the first sale arrived at my house one morning in August 2004, I made a phone call cancelling a meeting after lunch and retired upstairs with it to my bedroom. On [>], lot 1061, was the stamp I had wanted more than any other, the 1961 is 3d Seventh Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference missing the Queen's head. Apart from light wrinkles on the gum, it was a perfect example, a strip of three. There were only four perfect examples in the world. The estimate was £2,000–£2,500. I remember closing the door and spending the next three hours in rapture.
Not Alone
Men and women began collecting stamps in 1840, the same year that stamps began. These days it is easy to regard the earliest collectors as eccentrics and obsessives, more so, indeed, than we may regard the stamp collector in the modern age. But the Victorian collectors were also celebrationists. They were witnessing another great advance in communications, as significant as the birth of inter-city railways a decade before. They knew this because they were the immediate beneficiaries of this transformation. Further, they had helped bring it about: in 1840, the postage stamp was not just an attractive and intricate piece of paper, it was also a symbol of the popular will.
Before the Penny Post, the postal system was reliable but complex and costly; after it, letters arrived not only faster and more cheaply, but in vastly increased numbers. In 1839, one year before reform, the number of letters carried in the UK was 75,907,572. In 1840 the number more than doubled to 168,768,344. Ten years later the number was 347,069,071. How was this done? With foresight and zeal.
In the early nineteenth century it cost 4d to send a light letter from one end of London to another. The same letter would cost 8d from London to Brighton, 10d to Nottingham and at least is to Scotland. The prices had been raised frequently to pay for the Napoleonic wars, and varied according to whether they were carried by mail coach or coastal steamer. The Post Office was well organised and managed all but the final yard of the delivery with efficiency. But then there was a problem, as postage was usually paid by the recipient, a slow enough process even if the recipient was available when the postman called; it was like paying a utility bill every day. As a revenue-raising scheme it was first class; as a democratic form of communication it was fraught with difficulty and corruption. Members of Parliament had long resisted reform because the system suited them well: they received free postage on signature, and they accepted paid seats on company boards in return for signing everything that left the company's offices.
As disquiet about these inequities grew, the outgoing Secretary of the Post Office, Sir Francis Freeling, began to feel cornered. In a private note he wrote, 'Cheap postage—what is this men are talking about? Can it be that all my life I have been in error?' He complained that throughout his career he had run the most efficient service possible, and carried out his duties to the letter. 'Where else in the world does the merchant or manufacturer have the materials of his trade carried for him gratuitously or at so low a rate as to leave no margin of profit?'
This would not have brought much sympathy from Robert Wallace, MP for Greenock, elected through the extension of the franchise in the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act, and a fierce opponent of the current postal service. Where Freeling saw efficiency, Wallace saw mismanagement and delay. His speeches came to the attention of a civil servant named Rowland Hill. With Wallace's assistance Hill conducted his own research into the postal system, and he published his proposal for improvement in that most Victorian of campaigning methods—the pamphlet. Hill noted the abnormalities and corruptions, and showed that revenue from postage had been gradually falling in recent years despite the huge potential profits to be made.
His suggestions were revolutionary. He proposed a uniform postal charge of one penny per half-ounce for any letter sent within the British Isles, and submitted that the cost should be paid in advance. To this end he drew on a previous idea of Charles Knight for a prepaid letter envelope, but his second idea was the one we remember him for: 'A bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp, and covered at the back with a glutinous wash which the user might, by applying a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter.' Hill's 'stamp' was reference to the proof-of-postage design that had yet to be decided upon; the whole sticky square was known initially as a 'label'.
Scholars and pedants like to argue that others also have a claim on the invention of the stamp—there is a Lieutenant Treffenberg of Sweden (1823), James Chalmers, a bookseller from Dundee (1834), and Laurenz Kosir from Austria (1836). Their claims are well founded but almost irrelevant. It is never difficult, after the event, to claim that you were the one who had the idea for 'Eleanor Rigby' or a boy wizard's adventures at school. By fortune of circumstance and the energy that inspiration brings, Rowland Hill was the one who made it public and made it happen. Despite the haughty air visible in the most popular engraving of Hill, his biographers do not portray him as an arrogant man or even an unduly self-interested one; there is certainly no evidence of stealing another's ideas for credit, and he emerges keenly focused on the common good. Perhaps this explained his popularity. His reforms, which seem to us today both elementary and long overdue, were still a leap into the unknown. People were not used to paying for the postal service in advance; but they trusted Hill and his practical convictions.
Hill envisaged another breakthrough: 'Probably it would soon be unnecessary even to await the opening of the door, as every house might be provided with a letter box into which the Letter Carrier would drop the letters, and having knocked, he would pass on as fast as he could walk.'
Support for Hill's proposals followed in enthusiastic waves as soon as his pamphlet appeared. Newspapers, who saw how much they would benefit themselves, were keen champions, and soon a government Select Committee was calling expert witnesses. Principal opposition arose from the office most criticised by the reformers. The Postmaster General, Lord Lichfield, complained that 'of all the wild and visionary schemes which I have ever heard or read of, it is the most extravagant!', but his voice was lonely and his criticism contained the one apt description of Hill's proposals that we still uphold today: visionary. The House of Commons voted in favour of penny postage in July 1839, and in the Lords even the Postmaster-General announced his grudging support due to 'universal' feeling in the country. A few weeks later, Hill was offered a post at the Treasury, and after a prolonged period of haggling over his salary and the power of his office, he undertook to change the nature of communication.
Hill was born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire, and later moved to north London, where his father ran a school and encouraged his son to consider issues of educational reform. He had no background in postal matters, although his skill at administration had been evident in his job as secretary to the government department that encouraged emigration to South Australia.
He was less skilled in the matter of design. How was the new stamp to look? The basics we now take for granted—the size, the monarch's head, the licking—were all to be formulated. Uniform Penny Postage was introduced four months before the new adhesive labels were ready, with handstamps from about three hundred towns being used in their place. There was an immediate increase in the amount of post through the system, despite some bafflement over the need to prepay. But there was an immediate incentive to grasp the new reforms: prepaid letters would cost one penny, whereas those paid on delivery would cost two.
The Treasury announced a competition to find a design for the new stamp. A notice in The Times requested that 'artists, men of science, and the public in general, may have an opportunity of offering any suggestions or proposals as to the manner in which the stamp may best be brought into use'. Particular attention was to be paid with regards to convenience of use, security against forgery and expense, and there were to be awards of £200 and £100.
There were more
than 2,600 entries, and although the Treasury committee praised the widespread ingenuity, none were considered exact or desirable enough to pass into production. Four £100 commendations were issued, including one to Henry Cole, who was already employed as Rowland Hill's chief assistant. In the end, the stamp was designed and produced by a group of professional men already known to Hill and the Inland Revenue for their role in the printing of bank notes and other official items. The Queen's head was drawn by the artist Henry Corbould, taking his inspiration from the relief portrait on the City Medal designed by William Wyon. It was engraved by Charles Heath and his son Frederick, while the words 'Postage' above the portrait and 'One Penny' below it were engraved by William Salter. The stamps were printed by the security printers Perkins, Bacon and Petch, on handmade watermarked paper (the watermark was a small crown) supplied by Mr Stacey Wise. The finished product was introduced to postmasters at the end of April 1840, with clear instructions on how the stamps should be issued and cancelled. A sample of two Penny Blacks was attached to the instructions, so that they could become familiar with the new postal currency. They also received an example of prepaid postal stationery, an envelope and lettersheet design by William Mulready containing images of elephants, lions, Britannia and people engrossed in their mail deliveries, an illustration rapidly and widely parodied by London stationers, the parodies themselves forming the basis of many new collections.
The stamps—the Penny Black and the Twopence Blue—went on sale on Friday 1 May 1840, along with prepaid envelopes, and a revolution got under way. They were not intended for use before Wednesday 6 May, although some were issued early. 'Great bustle at the Stamp Office,' Rowland Hill recorded in his diary on the evening of 1 May. On the following day he noted, '£2,500 worth of stamps sold yesterday'. By 6 May 22,993 sheets of 240 stamps each had been issued to 253 post offices, and on 22 May, Hill recorded, 'The demand for the labels is enormous, the printers supply more than half a million per day, and even this is not enough.'
There was a problem almost immediately: the red cancellations issued in a Maltese Cross design were easily removed and the stamps used again. 'All sorts of tricks are being played by the public,' Rowland Hill observed, and much time and effort was spent on finding an answer. Additives appeared on the stamps to hold the ink, and the red ink was later changed to black. But in the end another solution was found: the Penny Black would be replaced in February 1841 by another stamp that would be less open to abuse: the Penny Red. The problem with the Penny Red was, it didn't carry the same weight of history, it was lighter in weight and didn't feel the same in the hand, and it wasn't beautiful.
In 1843 Rowland Hill went to work for the London & Brighton Railway, but he returned to postal reform three years later, and his endeavours transformed the landscape. He campaigned among householders and carpenters to have his letterboxes installed, he greatly increased the number of roadside posting boxes, and he introduced the concept of London postal districts. By the time of his retirement in 1864, half the world had adopted his reforms; no one, with the possible exception of the railway Stephensons, contributed more to the global communication of ideas.
And beyond this, Hill may be credited with inventing an entirely new hobby. Sheets of Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues contained 240 stamps, and to limit forgeries and enable the tracing of portions of a sheet, each stamp had a letter in the two bottom corners. The rows running down the sheet had the same letter in the left corner, while the right corner progressed alphabetically. The first row went AA, AB, AC and so on, and thirteen rows down it went MA, MB, MC ... There were twenty horizontal rows of twelve, so that the last stamp at the bottom right-hand corner was TL. People who got a lot of post thought it would be fun to collect the set.
One of the first mentions of the new hobby appeared in a German magazine in 1845, which noted, much in the manner of comedian Bob Newhart describing Raleigh's attempt to promote tobacco, how the English post office sold 'small square pieces of paper bearing the head of the Queen, and these are stuck on the letter to be franked'. The writer observed that the Queen's head looked very pretty, and that the English 'reveal their strange character by collecting these stamps'.
The first collector history is aware of was a woman known only as 'E.D.', who is identified in an advertisement in The Times in 1841: 'A young lady, being desirous of covering her dressing room with cancelled postage stamps, has been so far encouraged in her wish by private friends as to have succeeded in collecting sixteen thousand. These, however, being insufficient, she will be greatly obliged, if any good-natured person who may have these (otherwise useless) little articles at their disposal, would assist her in her whimsical project.' There were two addresses to send the stamps, one in Leadenhall Street in the City, one in Hackney. There are no further records of E.D.'s collection, nor are there pictures of her room, which must have been a shade on the dark side. These days her room would be bought by Charles Saatchi. By the following year she had competition. Punch noted that 'a new mania has bitten the industriously idle ladies of England ... They betray more anxiety to treasure up the Queen's heads than Harry the Eighth did to get rid of them.'
Stamp collecting as we understand it probably began in the school classroom, practised by schoolboys and encouraged by teachers of history and geography. We have long been familiar with the strange collecting passions of the playground—marbles, soldiers, Batman cards, Pogs, Pokemon—but we should ask ourselves whether the passions are more perverse than the trend observed by S. F. Cresswell, a master at Tonbridge School in the late 1850s. Cresswell informed the periodical Notes and Queries that a boy had shown him a collection of between three hundred and four hundred different stamps from all over the world, and he wanted to know whether there was a guide listing every stamp available and a place in London where one might buy and exchange them. Subsequent issues of Notes and Queries offered him no help, but S. F. Cresswell was only slightly ahead of his time, as we know from one of the earliest published histories of the hobby by William Hardy and Edward Bacon. The Stamp Collector, from 1898, listed the large number of philatelic societies that had sprung up since Cresswell had first looked for them forty years before. There was the Stamp Exchange Protection Society of Highbury Park, London, the Cambridge University Philatelic Society, and the Suburban Stamp Exchange Club of St Albans, Hertfordshire. There were also societies in Calcutta, Melbourne, Ontario, Baltimore and Bucharest. Hardy and Bacon identified the key moment that always defines the coming of age and ultimate validation of any serious collecting hobby: the publication of a catalogue. This told collectors that they were not alone, and it set the boundaries of a collector's ambitions. The Stamp Collectors' Guide: Being a List of English and Foreign Postage Stamps with 200 Facsimile Drawings by Frederick Booty was published in 1862, three years before the price-list produced by Stanley Gibbons. Booty's pamphlet consisted of fifty pages, and begins with a statement observing that 'Some two or three years ago, when collectors were to be numbered by units, they are now numbered by hundreds.'
Within five years of the Hardy and Bacon book, philatelic literature had come of age. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were not only many books, albums, glossaries and catalogues, but also the surest indicator that there were considerable sums to be made from attaching oneself to the hobby's coat-tails. There were pocket magnifying glasses, many different sizes of ready-gummed mounts, a 'tuck case for the waistcoat', and an early set of tweezers called 'The Philatelists' Vade Mecum' ('An Entirely New and Original Invention for Enabling Collectors to Mount Stamps without Handling Them, a multum in parvo of Philatelic Requisites'). There was what was almost certainly the first philatelic novel, The Stamp King by Messrs Beauregard and Gorsse, an adventure in which two rival philatelists set off from New York to find the world's rarest stamp, taking in London, Paris and Naples en route, and recommended by Vanity Fair as 'excellently got up' and by the Spectator as 'a diverting extravaganza'. As for the availability of stamps themselves, in 1900 one
could buy 500 stamps of Europe, all different, at 7s 6d, or 105 from Australia and 100 from Central America at the same price. One dealer offered an impressive all-world collection, already mounted on sheets, of four thousand stamps at £18.
In 1902, the prominent English philatelist Edward J. Nankivell wrote a pamphlet called Stamp Collecting as a Pastime, and in it he tried to identify quite what it was that caused the whole of Britain 'and almost all the world' to be in thrall to the mysteries of postage. People 'are thunderstruck at the enormous prices paid for rare stamps, and at the fortunes that are spent and made'. He observed how 'it has steadily developed into an engrossing hobby for the leisured and the busy of all classes and all ranks of life, from the monarch on his throne to the errand boy in the merchant's office'. Nankivell took his cue from physicians: a hobby was good for the heart, and no wonder it was becoming 'more and more the favourite indoor relaxation with brain-workers'. Already, he observed, the pastime had its own bons mots, and the most popular was, 'Once a stamp collector, always a stamp collector.'
By 1902, the debate over whether stamps represented a good investment had established itself on familiar tracks: Nankivell advised that rare stamps were always a good bet, while almost all of those that emerged mint from the world's post offices would be unlikely to accumulate for many years, if ever. Today this seems absurd, for we know that many late Victorian stamps are extremely valuable, particularly in unused condition; blocks or sheets of high values can provide for a secure retirement. But the author's premise was based on the belief that 'in stamps, as in every other class of investment, the foolish may buy what is worthless instead of what is valuable'. The same holds true today for those who, ensnared by the Royal Mail's literature suggesting that new stamps may be a reliable heirloom, believe that they are buying anything other than intricately designed and elaborately marketed postage. 'There are stamps specially manufactured and issued to catch such flats,' Edward Nankivell wrote more than a century ago, 'and they are easily hooked by the thousand every year, despite the continual warnings of experienced collectors.'
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