Investment
The Royal Philatelic Society was privileged recently to hear an interesting talk on stamp collecting as an investment. The speaker made the point that the acquisition of rare stamps, necessarily in perfect condition, solely for investment as a hedge against inflation is a joyless occupation from a collecting point of view – this notwithstanding its soundness as a financial policy.

For most collectors the pleasures of seeing their treasures increase in value is tinged with chagrin as they see others which they covet being priced beyond their means.

Philatelic Societies
Before joining the Royal Philatelic Society I was intimidated by its title into believing that it was a society of aging experts with no place for a relatively inexperienced collector. I could not have been more wrong. As do other philatelic societies throughout New Zealand, the Royal welcomes all collectors, whether as visitors or prospective new members. Meetings are informal and friendly, and senior philatelists are always more than willing to share their knowledge and to help the beginner.

Competitions
Preparing material for display at a meeting, or for a competition or exhibition, provides the impetus to improve a collection. It impels the weeding out and replacement of unattractive specimens and the sorting of those envelopes and shoe boxes of stamps which have been accumulating for years. With Panpex 77 rapidly approaching, the time to begin is now. I have never regretted making the effort for Welpex in 1972; although it involved much time and application the resultant improvement to my collection it well worth while.

What to Collect
The fascination of stamp collecting is its many facets, and the choice of what to collect and the manner of presentation are decisions of the individual collector. The decision of what to collect is an easy one – collect what appeals most. If the future value of a collection is a consideration, the early issues of any well-established country, in fine condition, could become an asset.

Condition is of paramount importance, but it is up to the individual to decide whether there is a place for a defective stamp in his collection, or a space-filler is acceptable when it appears unlikely that he will ever be able to obtain or afford a perfect copy. The renowned 1856 1c British Guiana is a sorry specimen.

Most longer-standing collectors have progressed from a world collection to a simplified one of several countries, then to a specialized collection of one or more countries, and finally perhaps of one country, subject or even one issue. A collection may be developed by the addition of relevant postal history, postal stationery or Cinderella material. Any of these categories could become a specialized study in its own right, but even a few examples can add a new dimension to a collection.

Cinderellas
I can recall times during my early collecting days when, looking at friends’ collections, I would air my superior knowledge by pointing out incorrectly-identified stamps or stating with authority, “That’s not a proper stamp” if I recognized a “cut-out”, fiscal, or a Christmas seal. These, of course, were to be discarded out of hand.

Wiser souls than I who retained this type of material were in on the ground floor for collecting what are now known as Cinderellas. The term has probably as many interpretations as there are collectors. I favour the opinion that it encompasses anything of a stamp-like nature or of philatelic interest associated with postage, collection of revenue by governments, or fees by companies performing a carriage service where the receipt bears a similarity to a postage stamp – all beyond the scope of a standard stamp catalogue. Local stamps fall within this field.

Thematics
Thematic collecting has brought many recruits to philately, and allows a collector to combine a particular interest with a stamp collection. Displays of thematic material are visually attractive, and research into the subiect concerned is often considerable. Although some collectors of classic stamps may disapprove, thematics, attracting an ever-increasing number of devotees, are here to stay.

Republished by kind permission of the Royal Philatelic Society of New Zealand

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

1. Stamp Collecting in Indonesia (1976)
2. Society of Australasian Specialists/Oceania
3. Topical Stamp Collecting

In fairy tale land Cinderella is an abused stepchild forced to live by the fireplace: who emerges triumphant and becomes a princess. In the philatelic world, cinderellas are the stepchildren of postage stamps and achieve success when the function for which they were made becomes a reality.

Just as there are cinderella “stamps” so there are cinderella booklets, each with its own mission. At the 1936 SEPAD  (a stamp exhibition of the SouthEastern Pennsylvania And Delaware stamp clubs) a special booklet was issued to celebrate the Swedish-American Tercentenary. Inside are five souvenir sheets with one “stamp” in the center of each. The “stamp” shows Peter Minuit (he bought Manhattan for $24 for the Dutch West India Company in 1625) and Swedish settlers being greeted by Native Americans in Delaware, near what has become the city of Wilmington. The five souvenir sheets show the same picture but in different colors. Cinderellas, both “stamps” and booklets, are usually issued at large stamp shows. Figure 1 shows the front cover of the SEPAD booklet.

Figure 1 - Front Cover of SEPAD 1938 cinderella booklet

Many airlines issued airmail labels to stick on envelopes to indicate to the Post Office that special service has been prepaid. The labels usually indicated the name of the airline. The booklets have no price on the cover so it is assumed that they were given to their passengers. The Boys’ Athletic League, Inc. of New York City (see Figure 2) gave away booklets of “via airmail, special delivery, registered mail, and Send a Boy to Camp” cinderellas. They did not charge for the booklet but made it clear that contributions were welcome.

Figure 2 - Boys' Athletic League, Inc. front cover. A list of camps, recreation centers, and tot lots is on the back.

Christmas seals are cinderellas but have been given somewhat more legitimacy than other cinderellas because they are listed in the Scott Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps & Covers. It is easy to find their value. With other cinderellas you have to do quite a bit of searching to find their market value. Today, Christmas seals are issued in sheets, but many early seals were issued in booklets. Figure 3 shows a booklet pane from 1930. The practice was to mail the seals along with a request for a contribution.

Figure 3 - Christmas seal booklet pane from 1930

A curious cinderella booklet was issued by the Jersey Gold Creameries, Inc. of Shreveport, LA. It sold for $4.00 and contains coupons which are redeemable for $4.00 of the Creameries’ milk products. (“Jersey” in the company’s name refers to the type of cow that provides the milk.) This booklet was issued in the 1930′s when $4.00 was a week’s wages to many people. Figure 4 shows the front cover of the booklet which states “GOOD MILK HELPS BUILD SHREVEPORT.” Each of the coupons states the same. This is a true collectible and is offered by both antique and philatelic dealers for about $20.00. It is not known how much money, if any, was donated toward building Shreveport as a result of the sale of these booklets

Figure - 4 Front cover of Jersey Gold Creameries, Inc. of Shreveport, LA

At Ameripex ’86, the Booklet Collectors Club sold a souvenir booklet for $2.00. It contained four 22 cent stamps that were issued for the show (see Figure 5). The stamps were legitimate United States Postage stamps. The booklet covers were made by the Club, not by the United States Postal Service. When real stamps are combined with a private cover one must ask the question, “Is this a cinderella booklet?” Because the booklet was privately made, it is considered to be a cinderella even though the stamps are valid for postage.

Figure 5 - Inside Booklet Collectors Club souvenir booklet for Ameripex '86 showing postage stamps and a privately made cover.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

1. Prestige Booklets – from Stamp Booklets to Booklets with Stamps
2. Sales Control Stamp Booklets
3. Advertising in United States Stamp Booklets

Switzerland has issued ‘different’ types of stamps, including an embroidered stamp, a wooden stamp, one with braille so sight impaired people can read the value, stamps that smell (chocolate) and others. There are also many ‘Soldier stamps’ that many philatelists would call Cinderellas.

The subject of this post is the unique and official issues by Swiss post.

The Embroidered Stamp

On 21st June 2000 an embroidered stamp was issued. This was a CHF5 value and had a blue pattern embroidering. See picture.

Embroidered stamp

The blue coloured polyester thread was custom-dyed for this issue and used solely for it. The fabric is also high quality polyester.

The Chocolate Stamp

The swiss are famous for their chocolate so on 9th May 2001 a block of stamps were issued. Each stamp had a value of CHF0.90 and if gently rubbed the stamp released the sweet smell of chocolate.

The chocolate block

The issue was released to mark the 100th birthday of the Association of Swiss Chocolate manufactures.

The Braille Stamp

To commemorate the centenary of the Swiss National Association for and of the Blind and the Swiss Library for the Blind and visually impaired, Swiss post issued a CHF0.70 value stamp. This stamp was embossed with raised dots.

Braille Stamp

The Wood Stamp
On 7th September 2004 The Swiss post issued a stamp made from (Swiss) wood. This was a CHF5 value and manufactured from sustainable forests in Switzerland.

The wooden stamp

The stamp is quite fragile and can be easily split along the grain.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

1. Switzerland Map (1935)
2. Switzerland Map (Gall and Inglis 1871)
3. American Helvetia Philatelic Society

Diphtheria serum was urgently needed, but since Nome was located 224 kilometres from the Arctic Circle, it was doubtful whether an airplane would make the trip in the harsh Alaskan winter.

Bush flying in Alaska was still in its infancy in 1925, and it was limited to only summer months as the planes were open and unreliable in cold weather.

A relay of dog teams was finally decided to take the serum from Nenana to Nome, a distance of about a thousand kilometres. The serum arrived in Nome on Feb 2.

Even if planes had been capable of making such a flight, it’s hard to imagine what role stamps could have had in the venture, and there appears to be no evidence to support the notion that these were used as charity labels.

Moreover, the similarity of the vignette at the centre of the cinderella to the design of stamps that Norway issued to fund a North Pole flight by Roald Amundsen is striking.

The fact that the Norwegian stamps (SG 167-173, Scott 104-110, Michel 109-115), the same year as the serum emergency, but almost two months after it passed, is a coincidence too remarkable to believe.

If one were to speculate, and apparently in this case, one does, then it is possible that a dealer or collector in or shortly after 1925 was aware of the publicised Alaskan emergency and the design of the Norwegian stamp. Having access to or owning modest printing facilities, he was able to produce these bicoloured labels in an amazing array of colours and papers, and in a popular philatelic format (the triangle), seeking to maximise sales of what is, after all, a single design. It is, nevertheless, quite an interesting one.

Related Video

Polar bears and dogs playing

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

1. World’s Oldest Stamp Design – Norway’s Posthorn Stamp Still Going Strong
2. Aalesund
3. Jens Rosing: Greenland’s Grand Old Man

Fig 1. First category of covers – Those without cancellations. Note stamps applied after cancellations.

The solution was thought to be provided in articles published in the philatelic press in the 1980s. This suggested that the stamps were overprinted by an Australian army officer by the name of Merrillus, who posted letters franked by these stamps from the troop ship OMRAH during World War I. The letters were written on Orient Line stationery and the addressee was assumed to be the writer’s wife. Unfortunately no records of an AIF officer by the name Merrillus could be found, and the articles were speculative.

The breakthrough came when I was corresponding with a Mr. R.S. Merrillees and mentioned my interest in Australian military postal history. He indicated that it was his grandfather who had produced the AIF over-prints. A careful reexamination of the name on the envelopes revealed that they were addressed to Mrs. Merrillees not Merrillus – the loops of the ‘EE’ were so fine that we had read the ‘EE’ as ‘U’!

Of course not all the correspondence from soldiers is addressed to relatives of the same surname. Most of the letters were addressed to Salisbury Street, Surrey Hills, Victoria. Could these letters have been sent to his wife? A search of service records at the National Archives of Australia produced the details of Captain (later Major) Crichton Raoul Merrillees, whose postal address at the time of enlistment was Salisbury Street, Surrey Hills. Now that we had the details of this officer it was possible to check the accuracy of other information.

The records indicated that Merrillees traveled to England on the Orient Line ship ORONTES (Not the OMRAH, as had been suggested earlier) and the dates on letters from various ports en route coincided with the dates the ORONTES called at these ports.

The ORONTES was one of the ships in convoy 28. It departed Sydney 9 December 1916, Melbourne 23 December 1916, Fremantle 29 December 1916 and arrived in Portsmouth England on 17 February 1917.

At the time the Suez Canal route was not being used because of the danger in the Mediterranean from enemy submarines. After May 1916 ships generally sailed to England by the Cape of Good Hope calling at Durban, Cape Town, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, for coal.

Covers are known cancelled at Pietermaritzburg near Durban on 12 January 1917 (Fig.2) and Freetown 30 January 1917 (Fig.3). These dates coincide with the arrival of the ORONTES at these ports.

The covers known can be divided into 3 categories.
1. Those without cancellations (Fig.1)
2. Those posted whilst on the troopships (Figs.2 and 3)
3. Those posted in Belgium in 1919 (Fig.4)

Fig 2. The second category of cover posted whilst on the troopships through civil post office at Pietermaritzburg near Durban in South Africa. Postage paid by 2½ d South African stamps.

Soldiers travelling on troopships generally posted mail on board. This mail was censored, then bagged and delivered to the main post office at that port for sending to Australia on the next ship. On reaching Australia the mail was cancelled. In Melbourne this mail was cancelled with marks reading AIF FREE to avoid it being taxed, because soldiers were entitled to free mail.Soldiers on leave at various ports also posted mail through civil post offices. The free mail privilege no longer applied and letters had to be franked with stamps of the country to pay postage.

Thus we find envelopes from Merrillees posted with foreign stamps paying the postage and the AIF overprints paying no postage – they are labels, as we call them today, Cinderella stamps.
Captain Merrillees had been appointed as a member of the AIF on 23 August 1915 and served in various military hospitals during the six months prior to embarkation. He sailed as medical officer in the 16 Field Ambulance.

The ORONTES commenced its voyage in Sydney and on arrival in Melbourne remained there for 10 days. This lengthy stay is important for it indicates that there was time for Merrillees to produce these stamps, or have them produced, before the ship departed. As medical officer it is likely that Merrillees went abroad before the troops embarked on inspections (a total of 533 boarded in Melbourne including troops, nurses and civilian munitions workers). It is likely that the overprints were made onboard, using the ships printing press used for printing memos, etc.

Previous writers have assumed that all covers were posted and that the covers without cancellations had not been cancelled, because postal officials recognized that the stamps were illegal. The volume of troopship mail through the Melbourne GPO was so large that machine cancels had been introduced specifically for use on troopship mail. This makes it unlikely that a few letters would have been removed from the bags of mail for special treatment. With the ship in port for so long, a more likely explanation must be that the letters were given to Mrs. Merrillees personally either by her husband or by someone else.

Fig 3. The second category of covers posted whilst on the troopships through the civil post office at Freetown, Sierra Leone. Outline of smaller stamp which presumably paid the postage is clearly seen.

The use of a troopship censor mark on the covers is another indication, in addition to the use of ship stationery, that covers originated from a ship. The standard troopship censor mark had a space in which the censor wrote the troopship’s transport number – usually an ‘A’ number e.g. A34. These covers, however, have a number 6081 added by the censor. Previously it had been suggested that this was the regimental number of the officer censoring the mail – in this case of Captain Merrillees. How-ever, officers did not have regimental numbers. The number is, in fact, unallocated in the sequence of the regiment’s troop numbers. But why did not Merrillees use the ship’s number? The answer is simple. The ORONTES was not a fitted troopship requisitioned by the Admiralty (those serving Australia were numbered A1 to A74), but a ship still managed by its owners on account of the government. Not being troopships they had no number. At this stage of the war shipping losses had been high, but the government saw the necessity of maintaining a civilian shipping service, even though it was much reduced, and used them to transport some troops.

The use of the unallocated numbers suggests that Merrillees wished to remain anonymous.

Two covers posted from the troopship are known to me. The first (Fig.2) has a two half pence South African stamps added to pay postage on a letter posted at a civil post office. The second (Fig.3) has a stamp missing, but the outline of the stamp can be clearly seen and it is smaller than the AIF overprinted KGV stamps. It is likely this was a Sierra Leone stamp paying postage on a letter posted from a civil post office in that country.

A cover has been reported cancelled on arrival in Australia 13 February 1917. This item would have been posted onboard the ship, bagged and returned to Melbourne where it was cancelled, the date suggests this could have been sent from Sierra Leone.

No covers have been seen by me posted between January 1917 (at Sierra Leone) and early 1919 when covers are known posted from Belgium. For an explanation we need to look at Merrillees’ war service.

On disembarking at Portsmouth in February 1917, he was employed at a convalescent depot and AIF headquarters in London. In September 1917 he proceeded to France with the 13 field ambulance. On 28 January 1918 he was promoted to Major. After leaving Britain, he returned to the front in France. He was clearly in the thick of the fighting, being wounded on two different occasions (7 May 1918 and 5 August 1918). He returned to active duties in September 1918 and remained until the end of the war as medical officer to the 13 battalion.

The armistice in November 1918 did not suddenly reduce his workload. Concerned that the enemy might not abide by the terms of surrender, the troops carried on as if a state of war still existed. In November and December 1918 the battalion was continuously on the move, spending very short time at each town it passed through. On 26 November 1918 they arrived at Florennes in Belgium, where they stayed for some weeks. Covers with AIF overprinted stamps are known posted from Florennes civil post office on 25 and 28 January 1919 (one cover is addressed to Merrillees himself and one to a fellow officer in another camp Fig.4).

Fig 4. The third category of cover posted from Belgium in 1919 on plain envelopes

Why the time delay between posting covers on the troopships and posting them from Florennes? Did Merrillees find another printing press and have more stamps overprinted.

Chris Ceramuga was kind enough to examine enlarged photocopies of the stamps and offer an opinion. His opinion is that: 1. Overprint on both the early and late covers, as well as the mint stamps, are all the same; 2. The overprint was made using probably a simple setting, one stamps at a time.

Ceramuga’s opinions supported my view that Merrillees sent these latter covers franked with stamps still in his possession when he was able to relax for the first time once the war was over.

It is possible that there may still be more to this story. Are there more covers yet to be recorded? Was Merrillees a member of any of the Victorian Philatelic societies?

Thanks
I express my appreciation to the following:

Andrew Johnson, who encouraged me to write this article and made available material from his collection for illustrations’

David Collyer, who from time to time has corresponded with me on this subject.

William Cochrane, who has given advice and assistance on research.

National Archives of Australia, who provided Merrillees’ war records.

Chris Ceramuga, for an opinion on the overprinting of the stamps.

Staff in the research center of the Australian War Memorial, who took the time to assist me on several matters.

References
Emery, Australian Imperial Forces Postal History 1914-18 – July 1983
Emery, Australian Imperial Forces Postal History 1914-18 Supplement – Feb 1988
Rosenblum, Stamps of the Commonwealth of Australia – 4th Edition 1936
Hornadge, Cinderella Stamps of Australia – 1974
Tregarthen, Sea Transport of the AIF prepared for the National Transport Board – Government Printer Melbourne

Auction Catalogues
Rodney Perry 6 Dec. 1979
Rodney Perry 30 Aug. 1979
Ronald M. Lee 27 July 1990

Articles
W. Humphreys – The AIF overprints on KGV stamps – two articles in the Cinderella Philatelist in 1988
The Australian Stamp Monthly July 1948 – p.507
Mike Hill A.I.F. Overprints (unpublished)

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

1. Alfred George ‘Dick’ Salisbury and the 6th Australian Philatelic Exhibition
2. The Australian Commonwealth Specialists’ Catalogue, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II 1952-1966
3. The Nyasaland 1938 King George VI £10 Revenue Issue