In one of my posts a few weeks ago I threatened that before
long I would be regressing into childhood, ransacking my past, stealing blog
themes from sprog memes, and regurgitating the autobiographically archaic. Not
to mention reincarnating the most groanworthy of ancient puns. Well, here we
go.
I was a little late coming to philately. Other kids did it,
but I couldn’t really see the point. I’ve always been a late adopter, a trait -
ironically – which I acquired early on. Collecting little bits of paper and
sticking them in a book, knowing full well that I was never going to get all of them; what was the point of that?
Impossible and, even if achieved, there wasn’t an album large enough to house every
stamp, nor a house large enough - unless it was called Buckingham Palace or the
National Postal Museum. Mine wasn’t.
My dad had collected stamps before the war, and he was keen
that I should take up the hobby, which would teach me about geography,
languages, history, design, and so on. I think it was on my eighth birthday
that I was presented with a stamp album, a magnifying glass with a red plastic
frame, some stamp hinges, and a packet of unsorted stamps from around the world
- I can’t recall how many, but at least a couple of hundred. One Saturday
afternoon I took the plunge and started going through the contents, feeling slightly
awkward, self-conscious. What, me,
doing this?
An immediate problem was that, if you have one stamp from,
say, Bulgaria, and you have no idea what it is – how old it is, whether it is a
part of a series, or what – and you have a whole page in the album headed
“Bulgaria”, where on the page do you stick it? Sensibly, not in the top left
hand corner or the bottom right hand corner, because though you don’t really
know, you suspect that there might be other items that come before or after in
time. Of course, you might never get another stamp from Bulgaria and so the
problem may never arise, but what you can
be sure of, though, is that before long, in some part of the album, representing
some obscure corner of our once-upon-a-time great letter-sending planet, you
will miscalculate, and there will be a clump of stamps that need to be squeezed
in where they won’t fit. As with almost
any collection of things that you are trying to sort into a sequence, you can
guarantee that something like this will happen. A law of nature, evidently,
perhaps a variant of Sod’s Law, and not unrelated to those mysterious occasions
on the motorway when the traffic slows, then stops, and then slowly starts
moving again, without any indication of the cause of the congestion. One of
those things, an invisible and unwritten law about stuff … cars, stamps, information.
An educational side effect of which my dad may or may not
have been aware, was the mental activity involved in building and structuring a
collection, such as the problem described above. Decisions on inclusion and
exclusion, on what goes where, deciphering Greek or Cyrillic scripts, knowing
what Helvetia, Sverige or Magyar implied, unobvious accompaniments to the main
business of acquisition. He would have known of my habitual dyspraxia and
therefore of the ordeals with stamp hinges lying just ahead; perhaps he hoped
for a philatelic cure, along the lines of the “flooding” technique used for
phobias. He also guessed, correctly, that very soon I would be hooked. I began
to acquire more stamps, voraciously, from anywhere and anyone I could.
Soon, I was “swapping” with friends during school playtime.
I discovered that many of my schoolmates were impressed by large, gaudy items
picturing Filipino butterflies, Polish footballers or Czechoslovak steelworks, and
by anything triangular and loud. They were less drawn to the more sedate,
delicate and even effete designs of the issues from Great Britain and what were
referred to as “colonials” – the kind of stamps I preferred. I was attracted by
the commonality of imperial design; the same king or queen, always with the
same “look”, the same kinds of words, shillings and pence, analogous series,
cross-references. An aesthetic sense as much as any other, even a vestigial
taxonomic one. Imperialist or not – yes, a vaguely proud sense of ownership by
proxy - it was above all this universality of style that I admired; variety
within sameness, or vice versa. Some people collect stamps as a financial
investment; some, because they have addictive personalities and completist
tendencies; my interest was primarily aesthetic – the design of the stamp, the
layout on the page, and the overall synergy, the whole greater than the sum of
the parts – Antigua, Bechuanaland, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Penang, Zanzibar – the
linguistic exotica upon which the sun never set.
There was a little lad called David, whose house I visited, near
the bottom of our road. His grandfather had actually been out there in “the
colonies”, hunting tigers perhaps, and had obtained incredible sheets of mint
stamps from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, from India and the Straits
Settlements (subsequently to be renamed Malaya, and then – most of it –
Malaysia). They would have been worth a fortune even then, but David didn’t
know that. I had plans for David. Wickedly I was leading him on with flashy,
low value items from the less artistically restrained parts of the world. Yes, I
would trade him these tasty morsels for the seemingly dull little specimens I
craved. Extremely annoyingly, however, his mother saw through my devious little
game, and I was evicted and banned. The glorious British colonials remained
his, or his grandad’s.
I decided that, while I had occasional abstruse cravings for
stamps from other countries (Guatemala was one unlikely brief passion) I would
focus on Great Britain and its Empire and Commonwealth. That would surely be
feasible. But no, not even that. With a little encouragement from my dad, who
could perhaps see where all this was going and knew where his surviving philatelic appetites lay, my horizons shrank to Great
Britain itself. I was taken on occasional Saturday trips to London, and on at
least one visit we ventured into Stanley Gibbons in the Strand, at Number
399 the most famous stamp shop in the world, the holy temple of philately. Here
I ogled some Penny Blacks, and was suitably intimidated, not only by the
augustness of the premises and its salespersons but by the sheer quantity and
expense of it all. How can you be ambitious for the unattainable? We fled,
embarrassed and empty-handed, skulking off to munch our tired sandwiches in the
Embankment Gardens.
Some people, I knew, went in for very specialised thematic
collections, or sought out rare defects and variations. Not many serious
collectors tried to tackle the lot. King George V had famously started a royal
stamp collection, an endeavour rumoured to be continuing in some remote office
under the auspices of the present monarch. If you were the king or queen you
could collect “everything”, at least all the stamps from Great Britain, and
probably the Commonwealth as well. You could command a personal specimen of
everything that was issued, employ a minion to do all the fiddly stuff with the
stamp hinges, and every now and then you could just breeze in and have a jolly
good gloat. “Mine, mine, all mine”. Well, that wasn’t going to happen to
ordinary mortals, and it certainly wasn’t going to happen to me. The National
Postal Museum in St Martin’s le Grand, which I once visited, had a “complete”
collection of GB. The Tapling Collection in the British Museum, I discovered
was similarly impressive and depressing.
So why did I need to be involved? Perhaps
I didn’t.
Several factors started to erode my boyhood enthusiasm.
Firstly, I was “growing out of” what parents sometimes called a fad, a phase,
or a craze, simply because of age. Admittedly, stamp collecting wasn’t in the
same ephemeral and vulgar league as hula hoops or bubble gum - no, it was a far
more legitimate, respectable and enduring pastime - but interests were changing
in more fundamental ways, as the insistent hormonal horrors of adolescence
began to intrude.
A second factor was a peculiar feeling of uncertainty about
the validity of how the hobby was
conducted. I recall going to our local post office to buy an 11d stamp.
Elevenpence, what an improbable word, and how obscure an artefact? Well, it’s
so obscure that – contrary to the overall trend - mint elevenpenny stamps are
not worth as much as used ones. This is because any fool could go into a post
office and buy one, but fewer people were in the position of receiving one that
had been sent through the post for some legitimate reason. Questions thus arose
about collecting stamps in the right way.
If you were very rich or, indeed, the monarch, you could acquire the whole lot,
easily – but where was the fun in that? What was different about doing it the
hard way? Back to the original doubts, and difficult dilemmas for which I now had
no time or patience.
The third factor, which pretty much killed off my interest,
was that, into the early sixties, the Post Office began to produce special
issues to celebrate all kinds of occasions – perhaps most substantively the
death of Churchill in 1965 – but many other events and anniversaries that
bordered on the contrived and the trivial. Previous to this, most of what could
be collected consisted of the regular denominations to cater for domestic and
international postage of letters, postcards, and parcels of all shapes and
sizes, plus very occasional special issues, typically for a coronation or a
jubilee, plus the regional issues from around the UK.
As more and more special issues were released they lost some
of their novelty value. Some of the early designs were spectacularly ugly too,
such as those for the Red Cross Centenary Congress (1963) and the opening of
the Forth Road Bridge (1964). Fairly abruptly my enthusiasm waned. My dad,
however, as already implied, had had some of his old interest rekindled by my hobby,
and over many years, far into the future,
he routinely went along to the post office and bought all the new
issues. By then my fascination had long gone. He stuck them in an album for me,
but – churlish and ungrateful - I rarely looked at them.
Wobbling doubts, competing attractions. Why bother? I suppose
one day I evolved an argument something
like this: stamps exist, I know they exist, and I can go to various places and
look at them for myself, but I don’t have to personally acquire, own, possess
or hoard them. They will happily survive under someone else’s care, adequately
catalogued and safely housed in temperature-controlled air-conditioned luxury. I can look at photographs of them, in
the Stanley Gibbons catalogues or in other guides. I don’t have to own them
myself. I suspect there are wider implications of this insight.
What I think I found was that satisfaction in stamp
collecting, as in any other acquisitive hobby, has to be based on an acceptance
of limitation, of being less than perfect. The pleasure is strongest when the
collection is partial, incomplete, when the goal lies ahead but within striking
distance, the analogy being with one of those journeys where it’s more fun to
be still travelling towards one’s destination than actually arriving there.
Once you’ve got the lot – if you can
– then what do you do with it? Visit it, royally, as it were, once in a while?
Show it to your friends and relatives, who yawn and ask stupid questions? Live
in fear that it will be stolen or consumed by fire? Put it in a bank vault and
pay to have the same fears perpetuated?
A few years ago, passing through Singapore, I visited the
Philatelic Museum in Coleman Street and bought a small catalogue so I could
drool over images of those classics from the Straits Settlements. The old
instinct was still there. It still is. Yes, I think I could be persuaded, the further
I pass into my second childhood.
Mine, mine, all mine