The Error World

by Simon Garfield

  Although Baillie kept careful records of every purchase, a prospective bidder for one of his items would have no idea of how much he paid and how much the stamp had accrued in value. In the first Baillie sale of Great Britain, the catalogue of which I had pored over for hours and learnt almost by heart, there were at least twenty classic errors I would have been proud to own. The stamp I wanted from him most, the 1961 is 3d Parliamentary, had probably been bought from David and Mark Brandon many years before, and soon I would have to compete with them at the auction to ensure they didn't buy it back. Richard Ashton knew the Brandons well, along with the other error collectors I would now have to regard as my opposition, and although he was a traditionalist he understood the appeal of missing colours and Queen's heads. He showed me some nice errors in the draft Australian catalogue on his desk, and then he told me about the time a woman came into his place of work with an item he had never seen before.

  In 1963, when he was still in his teens, Ashton was working at Harmer Rooke, an auction company owned by Stanley Gibbons. A nervous young woman was at the front desk of his office in Arundel Street, near the Strand. She said she had just bought a sheet of stamps from the post office and there was something wrong with them. When she took them out of her bag she showed Richard Ashton a set of British stamps commemorating the opening of the Trans-Pacific Cable (COMPAC: COMmonwealth PACific Cable). Almost nine million were sold, but in the central panel of this particular sheet, twenty-four of them were missing black, which meant the word 'Commonwealth' and the cable running around a blue globe weren't there. A senior buyer from Stanley Gibbons arrived within a few minutes to make her an offer. 'I can't remember how much,' Ashton says, 'but I do remember catching her on the way down as she fainted.' Gibbons exhibited the sheet at a big stamp show, and then sold it for £600; in 2006, just one of the twenty-four sold at auction for more than £3,000.

  Ashton, an owlish and affable man, did not grow up with stamps. He was born just after the Second World War. His parents had arrived in England penniless from the Channel Islands, while others in his family had been interned in Germany. His father was keen for his son to become an engineer, but after a day-release visit to Dagenham Motor Works from his technical college, Richard realised his calling lay elsewhere. He replied to an advert in a London evening paper for a trainee accountant, and the firm that answered was Stanley Gibbons. Inevitably, Ashton had collected stamps as a child, but his knowledge was limited. When, during his job interview, he was asked how he would detect a watermark on a stamp, his prospective employers were probably expecting an answer involving benzene and a tray. Ashton said he would hold the stamp up to a light, which is exceptionally ineffective. But he got the job, and started working at Harmer Rooke. He soon moved away from accounts to work in the stamp room, and found he had a photographic memory.

  After sixteen years with Gibbons, Ashton moved to Sotheby's. Sotheby's held its first big stamp auction in 1872, and sales continued until the First World War, but were discontinued when one of its experts failed to return at the end of it. It was decided to relaunch the philatelic department in the 1970s, and Ashton slowly worked his way up. His big moment came in 1982, when word reached him that Sir Maxwell Joseph wished to sell his collection of Cape of Good Hope. Ashton's eyes began to water as he told me the tale.

  And my eyes lit up. My father had once represented Sir Maxwell in a minor legal matter. It was big news at our house. Sir Maxwell was the sole owner and proprietor of Grand Metropolitan Hotels, and rarely a day went by when he didn't appear in the Evening Standard business section. He started collecting Cape of Good Hope for the same reason that most young people do—the unusual triangular shape. He then branched out to pre-stamp postal history going back to the Dutch settlement, and then to the end of the Boer War and the Siege of Mafeking. 'He would buy individual items at auctions, but like Count Ferrary he'd much prefer to infuriate his rivals by buying complete collections. It was a surprise when he decided to sell up.' Ashton only found out what lay behind his decision shortly before the sale.*

  Sotheby's had to bid for the honour of hosting the auction. Its principal rival was a one-man philatelic industry called Robson Lowe, a grand old patriarch of British stamps who knew more stamp people, and had seen more stamp things, and wrote more articles and books than any other. He also ran an auction house, and Richard Ashton knew it would be a challenge to persuade Sir Maxwell Joseph not to go with him. So before he and his Sotheby's colleagues went to see him in his office in Oxford Street they came up with an interesting proposal.

  'I was terrified,' Ashton recalls. 'He was sitting behind this huge desk, and he sat back and said, "Well, you better tell me how you're going to sell my collection.'" The Sotheby's people said that for maximum impact they proposed to offer it as one single sale, about a thousand lots over three days. Robson Lowe had told him it would be four or five auctions. Sotheby's also proposed issuing a hardback catalogue, something it had only done about half a dozen times before.

  Sir Maxwell thought this was a novel approach, but then posed the inevitable question: 'What are you going to charge me?' This was the clincher; an average vendor's commission was 15 per cent, although this would decrease for a major sale. The Sotheby's team said, 'After the auction you pay us the commission that you think we've earned.' Richard Ashton remembers Joseph looking straight at him as he said, 'Done.'

  Then they asked him why he was selling. 'Put it this way,' he answered. 'If the day should come when I die, I've got three children, and I don't want them falling out over my stamp collection. It's indivisible, but the money from it can be split three ways.' This was the same reason offered by Geoff Hurst when he was asked why he was selling the shirt he wore when he scored the hat-trick in the World Cup Final: he had three daughters and how on earth would they split the shirt when he died? Sir Maxwell didn't tell Ashton that he had already been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

  Unfortunately, Sir Maxwell died a month before his sale. In the few months between striking the deal and the design of the catalogue, his cancer had spread. He was confined to bed for much of the time that Ashton was pricing the estimates for each lot, and he died on the day the catalogue was published. Ashton sent a copy to him at home, and he heard from Lady Joseph that he did get to see it.

  In the weeks before the auction, Sotheby's received a lot of criticism for selling the entire collection in one go, rather than spread over a year; buyers will be overwhelmed, people said, and run out of money. But Sotheby's sold every lot, one of the few sales at the auction house that fetched over £1 million. The Lear-like disposal of the collection had given his daughters financial security, and philatelists throughout the world had gained from the dispersal. But Ashton's celebrations were muted, for he still had to see Sir Maxwell's executors about the commission; they were not stamp people, and contractually they owed Sotheby's nothing. But they liked the boldness of the existing arrangement, and they offered a handsome percentage. Ashton told me Sotheby's probably would have settled for no commission at all, being satisfied with the buyer's premium alone and the great privilege of selling one of the greatest collections ever assembled.

  After that, many other fine sales followed, but none rivalled the immense challenge and privilege of curating the Baillie collection. Lady Baillie thought it might be worth £800,000 rather than the £11 million Sotheby's estimated. Dealers—there may have been about thirty Baillie bought from regularly—were equally surprised, as many thought they were his main suppliers.

  Ashton first met Baillie around the time of the Sir Maxwell Joseph sale, and he began to think of him as a friend as well as a client. He was deeply saddened when he died at the end of 2003, and he was keen to ensure that his stamps were handled well. All the big auction houses have staff employed primarily to keep track of the changing fortunes of great collectors. Obituaries are studied carefully; contacts are pursued among divorce lawyers. Richard Ashton confirmed the benefit of a subtle approach: Is there anything we can do
to help? 'It sounds rather macabre,' he told me, 'but if you don't do it, someone else will.'

  But before Sotheby's competed to handle the Baillie sale, he was called in for a probate valuation. He was astounded. 'It didn't matter which book I picked up,' he remembered, 'every one was a gem. There were items I remembered from auctions twenty years ago and didn't know who had bought them, and there they were.' Ashton told Lady Baillie that Sotheby's were going to show people what a wonderful accomplishment it was that her husband had formed this great collection. The catalogues would end up being a memorial to him. Lady Baillie said, 'the wider the distribution the better'.

  And so here, on 1 October 2004, was my chance.

  The 1961 1s 3d Green Parliamentary Conference without the blue Queen's head. Baillie's example consisted of a progressive row of three stamps (the first perfect with the blue present, the second with the blue half-gone, the third with the blue gone altogether), and the estimate on it appeared to me to be quite reasonable. I could afford even the top estimate of £2,500 plus a buyer's premium of 17.5 per cent. I doubted that anyone could be as determined to buy it as I was. A total of 5,760,000 were printed in their perfect form, six were imperfect, and now there was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to realise an ambition.

  I set two alarms on the morning of the sale, even though it began at 10.30 and my lot probably wouldn't be on the block until 1 p.m. I didn't tell anyone where I was going. I had three credit cards in my pocket. I arrived early and signed up for a bidding paddle, but there was a lot of other business to be got through before the QE2 errors, including many fine blocks of George V Seahorses, the stamps that had done for me in the school stamp competition. This was a bad omen, and not the only one in the saleroom that morning. Many of the hundred or so other people present, far more experienced than me, were startled at the steep prices that many of the lots were reaching, some of them twice or three times the upper estimate. Several dealers I knew spent much of the morning tutting and shaking their heads. This was a terrible indication.

  The two major QE2 errors before mine each went very high. The Post Office Savings Bank without black attained £13,000, £4,000 more than the upper estimate, while the European Postal and Telecommunications Conference strip, in which the green dove erroneously turned white, went for £6,000, more than three times the estimate, to a bidder on the phone.

  And now it was my turn. I knew that the £2,000–£2,500 estimate was going to be much too low. I thought I could afford £6,000.

  The bidding began slowly. After a few bids we were at £4,000 and the interest seemed to be petering out. I thought to myself, 'I'm going to be okay.' I put up my paddle. The auctioneer said, '£5,000, new bidder.' For a moment there was silence. This was going to be a great day for me.

  Then a white-haired woman at the very front, seated by a desk, said '£10,500'. I knew who the woman was. It was Mary Weekes, a stamp agent acting on behalf of anonymous clients. Her bid of £10,500 was the amount she had needed to clear the under-bidder. I may have imagined it, but I think that at that moment a movie cliché happened in the saleroom: there was collective sucking-in of breath. And then the gavel came down and I felt empty inside, like an amateur who has just discovered hidden rules in a professional game.

  I'd failed to buy my favourite stamp and I might never have the chance again.

  And yet what had I missed and what had I saved?

  The answer to the first: a small piece of paper, gummed on one side, produced in 1961 at the printing works of Harrison & Sons of London and High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, whose machinery had for one second run out of blue ink.

  The answer to the second: about £6,000, the price I was prepared to bid up to, roughly three times the estimate.

  Rationally, financially, a good outcome. Yet I was morose for a week. I would have been elated to have got it, but also guilty at having spent so much. So there was a problem: stamps were no longer making me happy.

  The Error World

  I have decided to sell my stamps. This could be an error. Unfortunately, I have little choice.

  Everyone has their own story of how they fell out of love with stamps, and many can remember the exact date. For some it was 13 February 2001, the day picture stamps went self-adhesive. Not for me. I've always been a great fan of pictures of dogs in baths and cats in shoulder-bags, and the set that appeared on 13 February was satisfying. There was a dog in a bath, a cat in a bag, a dog on a bench and a cat in a sink, all black and white and arty, ten first-class stamps in a booklet that you peeled off and applied like sticking plaster. They made me wonder what had taken Royal Mail so long to get its act together.

  Some years earlier, the Penny Black had used its 'cement' to keep it attached to envelopes. Removing it was rather easy, as it wasn't very sticky and its application was thin. One reason for the rapidly inflated price of the Penny Black to collectors, apart from the fact that it was the first in the catalogue and every collector had to have one, was because so many of them never made it to their destinations, dropping off in transit—mail-coaches, mailbags, sorting depots—and swept away a few days later. The adhesive dried out and cracked easily, it tasted foul, and its varying colour—from off-white to light brown—hinted at the inconsistency of its manufacture. The adhesive, known as 'British gum', was applied by hand with a brush. It was made from potato and wheat starch heated to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and after a few years the recipe was enhanced by bovine gelatin and two coats were applied. Not long after the appearance of the Penny Black, the story arose that licking the gum gave you cancer of the tongue, and in 1852 a Select Committee felt obliged to scotch the rumour by listing its ingredients, whereupon Charles Dickens wrote an essay in Household Words entitled 'The Great British Gum Secret'. From 1847 gum arabic—the sap of acacia trees grown in the Sudan and Nigeria—was sometimes used as a substitute, and applied to the stamp before printing, which often resulted in the stamps being printed on the gummed side, and thus failing to stick at all.

  Before the cats and dogs appeared in 2001, the popular adhesive was polyvinyl alcohol gum, a chemical formulation coated by machine, often with an additional anti-bacterial agent. This pleased vegetarians, who could now lick without remorse. When I was young, my mother would discourage the licking of stamps the way she would discourage the eating of the cone part of ice-cream cones: just too much human dirt. I never had cause to lick many stamps in succession, and when I helped my parents with their party invitations or charity mailings I learnt how to dip my fingers into a small glass dish of water and then wet the stamps. I longed for one of those dampened sponge rings they had in post offices, but they were probably limited to industrial use. Whenever my maternal grandmother kissed me pungently on the cheek, which happened much too often (she would kiss me, but also have a small handkerchief ready to wipe it off, as if she were spraying and cleaning a vanity mirror), my mother would always say, 'You could lick a whole book of Green Shield Stamps with that!' Irreversibly dry in all other ducts and crevices, she generated enough saliva to cool Mount Etna.

  Up until December 2005, I had never, as far as I can remember, been kissed passionately on my neck. But when it finally happened I felt my world ignite and fall apart at once, and I began an affair with a woman from my past, and my marriage of eighteen years dissolved. Within a year many things that I had never had to think about before came into focus. I had to find a new place to live, a new car, a whole new way of life. I had to forge new relationships with my children and friends. And I had to sell my stamps.

  When I first met Richard Ashton and he mentioned the Three Ds—death, debt, divorce—that kept the auction houses going, I didn't think that any of them would apply to me for quite a while. But a few months later two of them had become a reality, and there I was with my errors, totalling up.

  Several times during this period I looked at my stamps in a new way. I began to question again why I collect at all. What was the thread that tied my love of stamps and Costello and Tube maps a
nd Chelsea badges? Perhaps it was a birth defect, or a disease acquired when young. I had been keeping myself well by fulfilling a physiological need, much as my youngest son Jake injected insulin for his diabetes. There is no use asking, 'Why me?'; a gene mutates and you just have to get on with it. There was little evidence of a genetic inheritance from my parents, but sometimes it just skips a generation: my maternal grandfather, a dentist, collected teeth and dental impressions (all dentists did this to some extent, but he went beyond, taking them home and displaying them to guests after dinner in glass cases).

  Jean Baudrillard has observed that 'what you really collect is always yourself', and sometimes this makes vague sense to me—these were the things I loved, and I wanted to surround myself with them. And sometimes Baudrillard's comment explains the whole story—afraid of losing things, I wanted to hold everything close, to say 'this is mine, this rare thing. You will not take it from me until I see fit.' It had much to do with safety and security, which also explains the great importance I placed on protection and albums and cabinets.

  At ground level we are all collectors. We satisfy our thirsts and hungers in literal ways—the shopping lists add to our food stores, our wardrobes house this season's collections. When we travel we gather passport stamps and photographs and stories. At work we collect contacts and experience. Freud classified three collections beyond his antiquities: his case histories, his dream texts and analyses, his Jewish anecdotes laden with world-weary lessons and wisdom. If we maintain a diary or a blog we want to remember or be remembered, and we offer up a collection of events and opinions that record diversity.