The term ‘Postal History’ originated with the late Robson Lowe, in the mid-1930s, I believe. Although I count myself privileged to be amongst the small band of surviving friends of both Stuart and Robbie, I confess I did not start collecting ‘postal history’ (other than postmarks on loose stamps), until 1952. But in that year, as an immature (and penniless) undergraduate, I had the chutzpah to challenge the very eminent Robson Lowe as to whether the term, Postal History, was altogether appropriate.
My point, (which I elaborated in print in a Paper in 1972), was that there is a well-understood academic distinction between History, by which is meant the past, as revealed by documents and other written records: and pre-history, which is very largely dependent on archaeological finds.??? What excited me – as well as Robbie, and I would guess most of my audience – are those aspects of postal communications which cannot be resolved by reference to official documents. There are some, of whom Stuart Rossiter was a pioneer, who rely as a starting point on post office and newspaper notices to the public, of changes to postal charges for, (to take one of Stuart’s fields), airmail rates from Kenya, for example. But any student worth his salt will concede that that is only the beginning. If everything is available from archives, such listing is worthy, and perhaps helpful to a small number of others; but hardly a discipline, or a research project. It only becomes important when where is an undocumented rate change, or a consistent departure from the ‘proper’ rate. In short, my view is that our hobby is only worthy of consideration as a serious attempt to interpret the past, when it explores the undocumented. This is what I like to call ‘Postal Archaeology".
My 1972 Paper as presented at Congress was entitled, "no flowers, by request", and was a sarcastic jibe at the pretentious juvenilia of ‘thematic’ collecting, as well as at the purely philatelic restrictions applying to presentations at international exhibitions: for example, the bar on reproduction of material in other collections, or in museums or archives; and on all artefacts not capable of being shown on an album page. I pointed out the absurdity of an Egyptologist not being permitted to show even a photograph, let alone an example, of a mummy, or a pyramid. In the ensuing 30 years there have been tentative steps towards addressing some of these absurdities, notably an Open Class, and so-called ‘Social Philately’ – another anomalous description, in that it has proved mostly to be an umbrella for showing unregulated Thematics. If it has a future, should it not be as a sub-set of postal history? Social History, alongside, (If not rather more important than), routes and rates, and marcophily.
So, to summarise the first part of my talk, I suggest that the worthwhile part of our studies is that which cannot be wholly explained by official documentation. It is therefore primarily concerned with interpreting the evidence on mail (and sometimes the unofficial recording in private letters or diaries), of what actually happened: but to be checked, of course, against the official account, where there is one. To take a final analogy, can we really imagine an authoritative study of Insider Trading in the equities market, if it was based solely on legislation, and the handful of legal cases which have been prosecuted: and thus ignoring the generally accepted estimate of hundreds of transgressions which have not been pursued, for lack of evidence which would stand up in court? My case rests.
I imagine that most of my audience came, not to hear my views, but to see some interesting covers. From more than 300 researched covers, any 20 of which would have suited my thesis, I selected a wide range of provenances, excluding only ‘parochial’ (that is, purely domestic) material; and preferring the unusual to the normal. There is a bias towards disinfection and quarantine, to satisfy my ‘groupies’; but I have not inflicted on you any of my 18th century letters, transferred from Russia to the west through German bankers who also acted as forwarding agents; much too complicated for a talk of general interest, so those who are interested must wait for the book I am writing for the Trust.
Among the collections of ‘postal history’ which I began in 1952, the most promising was of Pasquebot marks, world-wide. Once I realised that most of these had been catalogued by the late Brigadier Studd, and several researchers since, (notably Roger Hosking in this country), I gradually lost interest in ‘reinventing the wheel’. But I soon discovered that there was much of real interest in the largely unexplored fields of maritime receiving marks, before the U.P.U. recognised the category, in 1894.
The appendix to Vol. III of Robson Lowe’s ‘Encyclopaedia of British Empire postage stamps’ listed an oval SHIP LETTER mark, which could not be attributed to any specific port, given its rarity. In 1975 I acquired an example struck on a letter from Colombo to Madras, ‘per P & O steamer, via Galle’. The feint backstamp at top left shows it was transhipped at Galle, the day after posting. This suggests Madras as the likely place of usage; but given the volume of inwards mail in the 1880s, why is it so rare? Perhaps it was struck at an outport?
The Ceylon Manual of 1905 provided the answer. "Before the introduction of the regular service by steamer from Tuticorin to Colombo in 1892, the bulk of the mails was exchanged by mail Catamaran, between KANKESANTURAI and POINT CALIMERE. This service was suspended in January 1899 as a precaution against plague, and is not likely to be resumed." It seems unlikely that the catamaran service was provided with a postal marking for loose ship letters: but it may explain why the Madras mark should have been used so rarely, and only on letters from overseas, addressed to that city, prior to 1899.
Staying with maritime mail, the late Charles Jewell published an excellent article on the Por Vapor boxed cachet, of which he knew of only 20, all used on mail out of Bilbao in 1873. He understood the historical background, of course. By early February 1873, the Carlists had surrounded the port of Bilbao, but lacking artillery, they were unable to capture it. A Government army under the Duke de la Torre raised the siege in May. But meanwhile the City Governor had maintained commercial and postal relations with the rest of Europe, by chartering a small steamship to make regular trips along the coast, to the little port of Castro Urdiales. The problem, which eluded Charles, and myself for several years, is why almost all surviving mail is franked with a 10 centimos adhesive i.e. the normal single letter rate, despite documentary evidence that the Governor had announced the service with a warning that the rate would be 20 centimos. When I showed it to a Society with a Spanish member, he told me I knew nothing of Spain: clearly, the additional 10 centimos had to be paid in cash, to enable the governor to bribe the ship’s captain to run the gauntlet of artillery fire.
The evasion and distortion of U.P.U. regulations would be amusing to collect. Argentina was not one of the original signatories of the G.P.U. in 1875, but joined as soon as the financial advantages became clear. These included the right to levy a tax, of twice the rate on incoming underpaid mail, which then remained the property of the country collecting it. The Argentine P.O. had labels printed, to be attached to foreign-bound mail, advising that it was no longer mandatory to prepay postage to Argentina (i.e.. Argentina would pocket double the postage rate!). Another label was printed, strictly for domestic use, announcing that penalties up to 500 patacones, (silver dollars) would be exacted from anyone evading postal regulations. When this letter arrived from France in July 1878, underpaid at 35 c., the clerk who charged it 16 centavos made the mistake of using both labels, giving the game away. The addressee refused it, ‘No Danrazon’; so the Argentinian ‘spin’ earned them nothing, on this occasion.
In general, covers of the adhesive stamp period are much easier to interpret than preadhesive material. The later the period, the more likelihood of official decrees, postal treaties and regulations, which can confirm – or question – the circumstantial evidence, provided by the cover or covers. Postal charges and credits are also much more difficult to interpret in the earlier period, especially when the mail has passed through several administrations with different currencies. Almost all postal authorities considered a figure – whether a ‘1’ or ‘6 ???’ – to be sufficient, without stipulating the currency. Indeed, before the late 18th century, it is often difficult to ascertain whether a scrawl in the shape of a ‘5’, for instance, is a figure at all.
Witness an entire of January 1730, from Lipsia (Leipzig) to Florence. There is, below the name of the addressee, a crayon mark, which might be a ‘5’ the relatively large number of surviving letters into. I am reasonably confident that this letter was disinfected: it has clearly been soaked in a pervasive liquid. (The knife slits were made to admit a ribbon, enabling it to be sealed, and nothing to do with disinfection). We must therefore look at epidemiological records to see what was happening, and where. By 1730, plague had almost disappeared from Western Europe, (though there would be isolated outbreaks in Noja, in the Kingdom of Naples, and in the Ionian Islands in the early years of the 19th century). But there had been a major epidemic in Provence after the arrival in Marseilles ??of an infected ship from Syria, in 1720. This had sent shock-waves through Italy in particular, with an insistence by many authorities on clean Bills of Health for travellers, for much of the next decade.
If this letter was carried by the Thurn and Taxis post, as I believe the ink scrawls reveal, it will have passed into the Venetian republic at Verona. We know from documents in the vast archives of the Republic, that prior to 1730, the Venetians opened suspect letters and simply "perfumed" them by exposing them to sweet-smelling blossoms and herbs. This would, of course, leave no obvious trace two centuries later. But new regulations, promulgated in 1735 and almost certainly practised several years earlier, required more rigorous treatment. We know from surviving mail into Venice that this seems to have meant dousing with a liquid disinfectant, followed by the application of heat. The regulations also called for endorsement on letters by the fumigator. A handstruck letter S (for Sanita, the Health Office) is found on Venetian mail from the 1760s. It seems probable that the crayon ‘figure’ on this cover is in fact an ‘S’, used as certification of treatment by the Venetian authorities. It would not have needed to go to Venice, but passed through Verona, where it could have been treated.
A letter of March 1, 1813 from St. Jean d’Acre, present-day Akko in northern Israel, has no cover and thus no address. It is very likely that it was under-cover mail, carried by a courier. The contents are of great historical importance, providing another instance of the official version of history being somewhat blinkered. Most historians seem agreed that, by this date, British forces had expelled all French elements from the area. But this is clearly a letter from a ‘mole’, in an important commercial as well as military stronghold. He writes to his master in Paris that, "despite the plague, the Greeks come to buy wheat, to be delivered at Haifa. A dozen ships have been loaded there since 1st January. They are supplied with clean Bills of Health by Greek officials in the islands of the Archipelago, saving them the need to serve a rigorous quarantine." The writer seems less concerned with the threat to the health of Europe than to the unfair advantage enjoyed by the Greeks over the French, in a lucrative trade. Given the regular import into Europe of winter wheat from Galilee, and that such was not available from ‘the archipelago’, i.e. the Greek Islands, this was a transparent fraud.
But this letter was also clearly disinfected, and in a distinctive manner. When folded to ‘back-pocket’ size, it has a pattern of diagonal slits, extending from the four corners almost to the centre. This pattern is well-known to specialists, but has only been seen on mail treated at two very different locations: the island of Menorca, clearly not relevant here; and at Kostainitza, on the frontiers of the Ottoman and Austrian Empires, (and now on the Serbia-Croatia border). The Austrians maintained a quarantine there, astride the mail route from Constantinople to the Adriatic, from where the post was sent by sea to Venice.
The service across the Balkans was taken over by the French after a successful campaign, and the boxed Prepaid handstamps they issued for letters from cities like Smyma, Constantinople and Salonica are well-known. Many of these exhibit this pattern of slitting, and there have handstamps or manuscript notations of Kostainitza. This has enabled the location of the treatment of letters, whether in the regular mails or carried by courier to be pin-pointed.
The most important disinfection station on mail from the Ottoman Empire – if not in the world at large – was the Austrian stronghold of Semlin, (now Zemun), across the river from Belgrade. Thousands of covers survive of its treatment of mail: but as at least 100 different handstamps were used there, as well as three dozen wax seals, every cover is worth looking at carefully.
The one I chose to show is of a well-known type. It reads, NETTO DI FUORA E SPORCO DI DENTRO – literally, ‘Clean inside, dirty outside’. A singularly unhelpful message, one might think, for the recipient. It was only a cover without contents, but the addressee’s name and location seemed worth exploring. Even in 1827, an address in ‘Spring gardens’, with no mention of ‘London’ or ‘Great Britain’, would be unusual for a letter from Constantinople. And why no British rate charge? The letter was marked ‘Private Cons’ple’, with the date: it also has the sender’s initials at the bottom-left corner; all combining to suggest that this was sent ‘home’ by the diplomatic bag. Arriving at Semlin, the ‘bag’ (if there was an actual pouch) might be opened, but letters would have been sacrosanct. However great the risk of an epidemic, the most the Austrians could do was to punch it full of holes and fumigate it externally – hence the cachet, ‘dirty inside’, to reassure the British that Diplomatic immunity for correspondence had not been breached.
And what of the initials, ‘P.C.S.'? On a hunch,, I thought the sender might be a relative of the addressee, sharing a surname beginning with ‘S’. The addressee proved easy to identify. Sir James Scarlett, M.P. was the Attorney General. ‘P.C.S.’ was his son, Peter Campbell Scarlett, a junior attaché on ambassador Sir Stratford Canning’s staff at Constantinople, from 1825.
The disinfection of mail received an enormous boost in most of the civilised world with the advent of Asiatic cholera from India, via Persia and Russia, in 1831. The first preventative measures to control the supposed spread by mail were made by Prussia, in June of that year. Within a few months, international mail was being disinfected not just once, but often by two or even three authorities in succession. This is not always easy to detect.
A letter of 2nd June 1831 was written in Smyma, for long a hotbed of plague, but whose mails were not caught up in the new measures being taken, against cholera. It travelled by road through Semlin, where it received a different handstamp to the letter of 1827. It was certified as clean inside as well as outside, NETO DI FUORA ET DI DENTRO, indicating that it had been opened for fumigation, rather than being awl-punched. It travelled through Austria, (as attested by a crayon charge-mark, and into Bavaria for its second treatment. The circular cachet, KONIGLICH BAYERISCHES SANITAETS SIEGEL, was used at the frontier quarantine of Freilassing. But the grey cartridge paper adhering to the back flap hints at a third fumigation, in newly independent Belgium.
In Verviers, to which this letter was sent, and possibly all the other nine entry-towns assigned this role, the authorities had printed heavy grey labels, headed COMMISSION SANITAIRE. From the four extant complete examples, we know that there were variants in wording, but all are apologies for the damage that might have been done to the sender’s wax seals, or ‘cachets en cire’, during heat treatment against cholera, in the presence of officials. Any such labels, stuck over the letterfold, would normally be torn away when the letter was opened. This explains the rarity of complete examples. But the unusual grey paper is a give-away, even a fragment, especially when, as in this example, the ‘ch' or ‘cachets’ is still just discernible.
From mid-1831, mail from Scandinavia to western Europe or American can often by found with a pattern of holes made by one of several rastels employed in the various post offices in Hamburg. Very little is known about the measures, if any, taken by the Scandinavian kingdoms themselves, on outgoing mail. The Danes had reconstituted a Quarantine Commission in 1831, which had ordered the building of Rogninsansalt, (‘smokehouses’) in four ports, Elsinore being one. They were charged with fumigating the mail pouches and clothing on suspect ships held for observation. One paragraph states, "Wrappings or packing material, paper or other disease-carrying materials are to be thrown into the ocean, or cleaned by fumigation." Whether this meant disinfecting individual letters was not altogether clear.
My letter, from an American ship’s master to the owners in Boston, provides an affirmative answer. He writes, from Elsinore, "this letter must go through Vinegar and smoke before it can be put on board …. the brig Samos." It is also noteworthy that local Forwarding agents, Belfour, Ollah, Rainals & Co. were entrusted with the letter on the day it was written, maybe to see if safely through the disinfection process. (The feint red ‘banner’ mark over the address is the relatively common SHIP over ‘6’ mark of Boston, authorising collection of the 6 cents ship letter fee, as per the Act of March 2nd 1799.)
The next entire is rather an exciting item. It was posted in London for Calcutta, inscribed ‘P. Overland Dispatch to Marseille’ in manuscript and handstruck. CARE OF MR. WAGHORN/ALEXANDRIA, in letters 4.5 mm high. There is a French ‘Angleterre par Calais’. It is not difficult to trace its journey, with the survival of most of the French mailship timetables. It must have caught the s.s. ‘Scamandre’, leaving Marseille for Malta on the 11th May, 1838. There it was transferred to the s.s. ‘Ramses’, sailing to Syra; and thence to Alexandria, on the s.s. Minos’, on the 21st May, arriving on the 24.
Uniquely amongst Waghorn covers, I think, it was disinfected there and cachetted on the flap, Lazzaretto di Alessandria, of which one other strike is known, (on a very badly wormholed Egyptian letter). That it should be struck on an eastbound letter, from cholera-free London to disease-ridden Calcutta adds irony to this remarkable survival, the earliest recorded instance of any Egyptian Health Office cachet on mail.
We now know that there were two other cachets used in Alexandria, in succeeding months, one in the Old Harbour and one in the new, (uffizio sanitario / in / Porto Nuovo.) Though of differing dimensions, all are clearly from ‘the same stable’, each being an oval with a rope-pattern surround. That treated at the New Harbour office, (the only recorded example), poses several questions. It originated in the French Consular office at biblical Tarsus in Turkey, and went in a diplomatic bag to Alexandria. There it was disinfected, and released to the French post office on 27th November, 1838. It must have travelled on the s.s. ‘Sesostris’ to Syra the same day. From Syra it went on the s.s. ‘Rhameses’ to Malta, arriving on 4th December. It was disinfected there a second time, with characteristic slitting, and cachetted PURIFIE AU LAZARET / MALTE on the address panel.
As it was endorsed ‘Service public’ it should have travelled without charges within France, so that the ‘6 Fr.’ On the front was subsequently deleted, after the Chamber of Deputies and two Paris postmen had failed to deliver it. (They applied their route handstamps, E.16 and E.88, on the 17th, presumably of December.)
But the charges, which seem to have been misunderstood in Paris, have defeated me, too. On the face, at the top left, where the weight is normally indicated, there are two small figures in different hands, clearly ‘30’ and ‘55’. These are quite unlike the large ‘6 fr.’ which was crossed out. The sum, ’25.85 + 6.00 = 31.85’ must surely be related to the postal charges. It would stretch coincidence too far, when we have a rate of 6 (francs) on one side, and the two small figures on the other totalling 85, (presumably centimes). But that exhausts my interpretation.
My next is a true mystery. On 21st August 1839, a letter was sent from Constantinople to London. It travelled overland via Semlin, in the usual manner, being opened for fumigation, resealed in the lazaretto and cachetted as ‘cleaned, inside and out’. The second epidemic of cholera had already run its course, and would not emerge from the Indian sub-continent again before 1846. But the old enemy, plague, had flared up in Constantinople in 1839, so the Austrian precautions are understandable.
We know that after Semlin this letter travelled via Vienna to Huningue, bear Basel, where the French exchange office applied a red datestamp on the face, indicating receipt from Austria. The mystery lies in the otherwise unknown oval cachet of a second treatment, LAZARET / TR-2. Not just unknown: quite unlike any disinfection cachet I or any other specialist has ever encountered. Nowhere outside France used cachets in French, (other than Malta, which was clearly not involved with this letter.) From Huningue there was a regular mail serve to Paris, where mails were bagged for London, via Calais. In the absence of any other marking between Huningue and London, it seems certain the LAZARET cachet was struck at the frontier office. Although France had health offices in major ports which treated and cachetted mail, there was no such arrangement at any terrestrial entry-point. So this would seem to have been an unauthorised marking. What does it mean? The most obvious meaning of TR-2 is that it indicated the second tranche, or batch, treated at the lazaret, presumably that day. (A not dissimilar system, which sequential manuscript batch numbers throughout the year, is known to have been used in certain Austrian lazarets.)
We can only guess what happened at Huningue, but given the uniqueness of the cachet, only one hypothesis fits, I think. An over-zealous official at the frontier office, hearing of the emergency of plague at Constantinople, set about treating mail already fumigated at Semlin, without waiting for instructions from Paris. He did not dare break the Semlin wax seal, so his treatment was at best external, and possibly no more than a visual inspection: but he had had made up a rather primitive handstamp to show that any delay to the mail was for a valid reason. This cachet would prove his undoing, as it would be apparent within hours that he had exceeded his authority, and the practice would have been ordered to cease immediately. Only if an example of TR-1 materialises, will we know whether his John Bull printing outfit was ready when he made his initial bold but ill-judged decision to ‘do it my way’.
The ugly but fascinating, grey, over-sized envelope I showed next has no postal markings, save a London datestamp including prepayment to Beyrout, stated in manuscript to be the very high figure of 11/8d. Armed with the rate structures of the British and French post offices, we can identify not only its adventures, but even hazard a guess at its exact contents.
The size of the linen-lined envelope, the high cost of posting it and the address, "the Anglican Lord Bishop at Jerusalem", suggested that this was an important dispatch from Head Office, in London. As to contents, it is addressed "care of Heald Esq., Beyrout". Heald were bankers in Beyrout, who acted as agents in the Holy Land for several churches. Only a transfer of cash would require a lined cover, if it were sent in coin. A London rating of 11/8d. required a sending of just under 2 1/2 ounces, according to the G.P.O. Notice of December, 1845 which combined English and French rates for prepaid letters …..Six gold sovereigns weigh 2 1/4 ozs.
The cover has two slits, for disinfection against cholera. The third pandemic hand peaked in London late the previous year, and was still active. Most French chisels used at Beyrout then were quite small. These slits measure one inch, and by chance I have just found another cover of the period, from Malta, with identical slits. Two swallows don’t make a summer, but perhaps H.M.G. representative in Beyrout was undertaking the treatment of British mail?
But what of the wavy hold between the first two lines of the address, not even reaching the back? Surely the work of termites, which are not found in Jerusalem … I bought it from the husband of the great-niece of the bishop, who had taken his correspondence with him when he moved to Guiana; including a Heavenly delicacy – wrapped fine linen – for local insects!
Twenty years ago, I had first pick of a run of correspondence from London to James Cooper, a tTransported felon, who, after serving his term went on to become mayor of Sydney. This I did not know at the time. My interest was the manner in which the mail reached N.S.W. The British government service had collapsed, and Australia was served between 1850 and 1852 only by private ships, with Great Britain demanding 8d prepayment for a single letter. On top of that, N.S.W. imposed a 3d single, 6d double-rate, inwards ship letter charge. The colony was very short of funds until the discovery of gold, and this was an easy way to raise revenue.
Some of this mail had a cachet of London shipper Marshall & Edridge: some, one or other of two Plymouth forwarding agents. None had been prepaid, but all showed the Sydney c.d.s. and either the 3d or 6d charge. A clear case of entrepreneurial ingenuity, using a forwarder – in this case, "J.B. WILLCOCKS / Shipping & Emigration agent / PLYMOUTH’ – to avoid prepayment, but declaring mail on arrival, thus legitimising it. The original letter was sent the same way by the Lydia, Capt. Spratt, from London on 20th June 1852: this ‘duplicate’, by the Kate, Capt. Grieves, sailed from Plymouth on 3rd July. Fever had broken out among the emigrants on board, resulting in her quarantine on arrival in Sydney on 11th October.
The flat-topped handstruck ‘3’ was not then recorded in any work on Australian philately, I think, so I checked with Rigo de Righi, doyen of British collectors of Australia. He had two examples in his collection, written-up as English marks. When I pointed out that all mail into Sydney seen by us had a mss. ‘3’ or ‘6’ until mid 1852, and a handstruck ‘3’ or a mss. ‘6’ from then to 1854, he agreed it must have been rated on arrival. A small mystery remains: why the handstamp only for the single-rate? The answer may lie with the arrival on 3rd August 1852 of the P & O Chusan, the first steamship to reach an Australian port. It was celebrated there with a public holiday. I like to think that the postmaster, tired of writing ‘3’ on almost all the incoming letters, slipped over to the print-shop and bought or borrowed two slightly different large 3 s, of a style more often used for newspaper headlines. These 3 s were incorporated in the subsequent books on N.S.W. markings, but no explanation was offered as to when a ‘3’ stamp was adopted; nor why a ‘6’ wasn’t. Alas, no proving ‘Chusan’ cover has yet been seen.
Next an official envelope, for sending health reports from Ottoman ports and frontier posts to the Health Board in Constantinople. Although most are rare, they are known used from nearly 100 offices, normally with the little intaglio seal, reading ‘Official Registered mail’.
But Hodeida, on the Red Sea, was special. After the 1865 International Sanitary Conference, the Ottoman government sent a commission to appoint health officials in six Red Sea ports, where ships landed pilgrims from the Haj, or might put in for water. The important one was Kamaran, designated to be the official quarantine port, but still not ready by the end of the Haj in January 1878. Envelopes were produced stating the station only as ‘the Yemen’, and sent to Hodeida, to which ships carrying pilgrims with symptoms of cholera were diverted, in an emergency. The blue, bilingual OFFICE SANITAIRE * HODEIDA was used in that year.
The late Basil Owen, a dealer with knowledge of several Indian scripts and Arabic, found a pair of covers of 1880, from Tarsus, near Mersin, to Aleppo in Syria. Both had French stamps on the front, and Turkish on the back, but Basil doubted they were true combination covers: ‘probably Turkish stamps used as postage dues’. The route, thought difficult, seems clear. A French steamship of the Ligne de Syrie called weekly at Mersin, en route for Alexandretta, Beyrout and Alexandria, before returning to Marseille. At Alexandretta, letters parcels and merchandise could be loaded onto camel caravans for the journey across the desert to Aleppo.
The senders, a firm with offices also in Mersin, had a supply of French adhesives. These were not cancelled there, but on arrival in Alexandretta, with an oval B.M. alongside, showing that they had been cleared from a ship’s box. The Alexandretta c.d.s. and the B.M. were applied together: both are struck in the same bluish ink. (Incidentally, Salles did not record a B.M. for Alexandretta.) The senders would also have had access to Turkish stamps, of course; but did they put them on? I think we can ‘prove’ that they did.
Letters from most middle-eastern countries, and some in south Asia, were often sealed by the sender, long after the custom withered elsewhere. When postage stamps were introduced, it became customary to use them in place of a personal seal: to this day, postage stamps are found along the joints of many letters from Pakistan, for instance. Both these Tarsus letters have stamps, (cancelled in Aleppo), affixed across the seam or letter fold. This would have seemed sensible to the sender. But if the Turkish stamps were postage dues, attached in Aleppo, it made no sense. Indeed, the recipient might suspect they had been put there to cover up a ‘break-in’. These are true combinations covers, French and Turkish.
With the onset of the 20th century, most governments accepted that disinfection of mail was an outmoded absurdity – except in the case of smallpox, a dangerous disease, so infectious that a tiny fragment of a scab in the air or on a cover or paper could cause death. When many people were taken to hospital in Launceston, Tasmania, in May 1903, it was not diagnosed for ten days, and "the General Hospital was thoroughly fumigated" only after two deaths, 45 days after the arrival of the Indian performer who carried it, according to local newspapers.
Three days later, on June 26th, they advertised "To allow for fumigation, the mails close two hours earlier than usual." All mail out of the town was then cachetted as DETAINED FOR FUMIGATION. The rarity of the cachet probably reflects its failure to reassure recipients, resulting in rapid burning of the suspect letters: fewer than two dozen are known to survive.
Next, a postcard: one of the earliest to join my ship-post collection. Dr. Wortman, doyen of Russian specialists, transliterated the postmark for me more than 40 years ago, advising that it reads PARAKHOD, (i.e. steamship) BULGARIA, of a shipping Company unknown to him. He was unable to state whether it was Russian or Bulgarian, though the latter was more likely …..Ten years later, I was shown another example, which I photocopied for Alfred. He asserted immediately that the shipping company was Bulgarian. One letter in the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet does not appear in the Russian. That letter was not employed in my postmark: but the month in the second example included it. ‘Elementary’, he assured me.
A little Swiss envelope is one of a handful of survivors of a curiously ‘modern’ scare, which occurred in the 1920s. Localised outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease amongst cattle resulted in police in Canton Berne being issued with ‘Krespol’, a saponated solution containing 40% Cresol. A Federal law of June 1917 had enjoined "thorough disinfection of hands, clothing, and everything which may have had contact, directly or indirectly, with diseased animals". The police in the Munchenbuchsee area appear to have doused everything in sight, including letters. There is no record of the issue of a Desinfiziert handstamp to reassure those whose mail had been stained. Examples like this one, posted at Dieterswil, north of Bern, in June 1923, must have been marked as the result of a local initiative.
The Australians, understandably anxious not to import diseases into their remarkably healthy continent, kept several quarantine stations open until after the Great War, chiefly to hold any unvaccinated arrivals on ships on which a case of smallpox had occurred. The Sydney station was at North Head, near Manly, and QUARANTINE / N.S.W. postmarks used there are found – occasionally – on covers with the corners clipped to admit a gaseous fumigant. This example, of 9th September 1930, can be traced from local health reports to the arrival of the K.P.M. liner, Nieuw Zeeland, from the Dutch East Indies. Local newspapers explain that she had landed a passenger with symptoms of smallpox at Brisbane. On arrival in Sydney on 4th September ‘she was escorted to North Harbour by the Captain Cook. Early in the evening, the vessel was fumigated. About 20 passengers are expected to be released tomorrow."
The Nieuw Zeeland sailed for Melbourne on 6th September, leaving a number of passengers, suspected of incubating the disease, to remain at North Head. The rarity of these postmarks, in use for over 60 years, is explained by the instruction that the Quarantine P.O. should only be opened for the convenience of detainees, when ships were held for five consecutive days.
My final example was not even postal, though I happily include it in my Open or Social History Class exhibit, of ‘Quarantine’. It is one of the cards issued to all passengers on ocean liners in the pre-war years, to present to Immigration officers at ports like Honolulu and Cristobal, to show that they had been examined and found free of infectious disease.
I have a pair, issued to a Gilbert and Hylda Fenton, seemingly in early 1940. Mr Fenton’s shows that he was issued with it at San Francisco, and ‘Admitted’ to Cristolbal. Hilda’s was stamped at Honolulu. But only Gilbert’s has the elongated cachet with Japanese characters, which I recognised as censorship, but could not read or explain.
This Paper has been intended primarily to show how wide we all need to spread our nets if we are to understand the full implications of our own material. I recalled the excellent work on mail from p.o.w.’s in Japanese hands by Nigel Watterson, and with his help, put together the background story. Gilbert Fenton was Postmaster General of British North Borneo. He and his wife had been ordered to report to the Japanese H.Q. in Jesselton on 12th May 1942. The cards seem to relate to their return from home leave a couple of years earlier, when they had left San Francisco on a Dollar line steamship for Jesselton, via Cristobal in the Panama Canal Zone, and Honolulu. Why the ship health cards were still in their possession when they were interned by the Japanese will probably remain a mystery.
The women were held at Batu Lintang camp, south of Kuching, from January 1943: the men, separately, Gilbert Fenton must have ‘declared’ his card to the Japanese, who applied the long cachet, translating as ‘BORNEO / Civil Internment / Canp / Censored’, and returned it to him. Hylda’s card has no censor mark, probably because the women’s compound was not routinely searched, so she saw no need to declare it.
To summarise: the most interesting history is not what was legislated or ordained, but what actually happened. Postal historians are very well placed to conduct the detective work, or archaeology as I prefer to call it, to uncover the full story. Those who think ‘research’ means only philatelic knowledge – when a handstamp was first put into use or recut, or knowing the precise distance by road between towns at a particular date, for instance – are neglecting the wood, for that tree in their own back yard. We all need to ‘think beyond the box’, immersing ourselves in as much of the geography, customs, even politics, which determined what happened to material in what we think of as our specialist field. As most of the examples I have shown illustrate, there is seldom just one story to be disinterred. Who could have forecast that a quarantine inspection card used at Cristobal would be of real significance in understanding the Japanese conduct of internment camps two years later?
I have, of course, left myself wide open to sniping. There is probably not one of the examples I have shown that is not susceptible of deeper analysis than I have managed. But then, I look forward to your telling me just was I missed.