The Members’ Day brought a vast array of different topics as usual. First up, we had David Carr’s display on ‘Royal Mail’ that showed a mixture of different postmark cancellations and markings, including the dreaded biro. David showed a couple of covers that went through the post which had a 24p forged Machin, and another with a Poached Egg stamp (a trial stamp/label for coil dispensing machines). He finished with a variety of labels over the years from Registered to Air Mail. David is pictured top left.
John Dicker (pictured top second from left) showed a variety of printings, papers, shades, overprints, and errors on stamps from the Falkland Islands and its dependencies.
John Lee (pictured top third from left) gave us a fascinating insight into the postal history of the Falkland Islands just before and after the Argentinians invaded showing us covers that were sent before and after, which carried interesting ways of how the argentines handled the post with the obliteration of the Falkland Islands and replacing it with the Islas Malvinas.
Michael Miller (pictured top right) displayed some of his local collection of Surrey, especially Cranleigh. Cranleigh is Michael’s home town so he was able to show us some of its postal history on covers sent, or received by the local dignitaries of the time. We were able to see the different cancellations used – duplex postmarks, temporary rubber postmarks, dated double and single circle postmarks, from the middle of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s. He also pointed out that Cranleigh had a railway station for the best part of 100 years from 1865 until the Beecham report deprived them. Michael also showed us some of the local post offices that are sadly closed from Abinger Hammer to Albury Heath, Holbury St Mary, and Coldharbour, which is where our past Chairman lives. And finally, we were treated with a little bit of history of the Postbus from Coldharbour which started in the 1960s to replace a rapidly declining local bus and rail service.
Roy Gilbert started the second half with a variety of ‘Postage Dues’ showing some interesting covers and postcards and the reasons why they attracted a postage due stamp.
We had some more Surrey local history from Roger Vaughan (pictured bottom left), but the theme was on the ‘Registered Post,’ which came into being in the 1830s. Roger displayed a variety of registered covers including the earliest, an 1889 Epsom cover. He also showed us a rare first day of operation of the registered post at Surrey University, which came into being in 1977.
Robert Prentice (pictured bottom middle) gave us a short history of Newfoundland, which is not surprising as he has family connections. He tells us that Newfoundland is the size of England and Wales put together with a population of about 600,000. Robert displayed Newfoundland’s first issue of stamps in 1857, printed by Perkins Bacon, along with the different type of papers, plus some forgeries. Perkins Bacon continued to print their stamps until 1865.
Lastly we had our past Chairman, Graham Mytton (pictured bottom right). He displayed a Hungarian collection from the pre-postal era, 1840 to 1945.This was a collection that Graham put together from the ‘Bryant’ collection that was donated to ‘Save the Children Fund.’ Graham is hoping that someone will buy the collection as a whole, so that the money will go towards the charity. Graham has been a great advocate of ‘Save the Children Fund’ charity, as he does every month with covers and stamps that he sells at the Club, and hopes to raise a sizeable amount from this collection and others that have been recently been donated.