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.
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