The secret history of rare stamps: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2006/08/27 > The secret history of rare stamps

The secret history of rare stamps
Sunday, August 27, 2006 - Reviewed by Kieron Wood
Blue Mauritius, by Helen Morgan, Atlantic Books, €26.45.

“A stamp collector, the possessor of a collection of 12,544 stamps, wishes to marry a lady who is an ardent collector and the possessor of the Penny Blue stamp of Mauritius,” read an advertisement in an 1891 edition of The Monitor newspaper.

Rather like the farmer who advertised in a lonely hearts column for a lady with a Massey Ferguson - ‘‘Please send picture of tractor’’ - the author of the ad knew what he wanted.

The Mauritius Penny Blue is one of the rarest stamps in the world, with one of them selling in 1997 for more than US$1.5 million. It’s a far cry from Ireland’s most expensive stamp - a 1935 mint 2d coil stamp (featuring a map of Ireland) which sold at auction three years ago for a mere €12,000.

But there is an Irish link to the Mauritius Blue, according to Helen Morgan, the author of this fascinating account of the world’s most sought-after philatelic trophy.

The Colonial Postmaster on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius in 1847, when the Mauritius Blue was issued, was James Stuart Brownrigg, an Irishman. We pass lightly over the fact that he was subsequently dismissed in disgrace after ‘‘certain accounting irregularities’’ were revealed.

Morgan relates the story of the stamps from the time of the original commission, given in 1846 to 31-year-old engraver Joseph Osmond. The Englishman produced 1,000 ‘letter labels’, as stamps were then called. About 500 copies of the penny red and 500 of the two-penny blue stamps were printed in 1847.

Stamps are so much a part of our life nowadays that we forget how recent an invention they are. Prior to the printing of the Mauritius stamps, mail on the island was not pre-paid. The cost was met by the recipient who often took a look at the letter before deciding whether it was worth the postage.

Often, the addressee felt that the letter wasn’t worth the cost, so it was returned to a pile of ‘dead letters’ which was occasionally burned to make room for more. The number of Mauritius Blues destroyed during those periodic conflagrations is impossible to estimate.

The biographies of 27 stamps are set out in the book.

But others may have survived.

During 1847, ships from Ireland passed through the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, and it is possible that among the mails carried back to Ireland were as-yet undiscovered examples of those early pieces of philatelic history.

This book is not just an entertaining and meticulously researched history of Mauritius and its stamps, but also an absorbing look at the early development of one of the world’s most widespread hobbies.

The Irish property market pales into insignificance beside some of the deals done by stamp collectors. For example, a pair of penny stamps used on a letter to the Bombay Auxiliary Bible Society were bought in an Indian bazaar in 1897 for stg£50 and sold to a dealer the following year for stg£1,600.

The dealer immediately resold the stamp for stg£1,800 - an increase in value in just one year of 3,600 per cent.

Who said philately will get you nowhere?