The Error World (10 page)

'You must have made some mistakes over the years,' I suggested.

'Oh, all the time,' Mark Brandon said. 'Everything I sell is too cheap. It's the same story—I wish I had most things I sold ten years ago because they're worth twice as much.' He talked about the Post Office Savings issue. He bought the original block of thirty stamps before it was split up into three strips, and sold it in 1988 for £20,000. If he was to sell that now it would be £60,000 or £70,000. 'But you have to live and eat,' he pointed out, 'so you can't hoard the stuff.'

I told him of my lust for the is 3d Parliamentary, and asked what my chances were of acquiring one. 'Not great,' Mark Brandon said. 'Unless you're very lucky and one comes up for auction.'

David Brandon mentioned some of his celebrity customers, including Arthur Negus ('came into the shop a lot, charming gent'), Adam Faith ('a great friend'), Lee Marvin Junior ('looked just like his dad') and Leslie Crowther ('couldn't stand him'). His biggest customer was a man named Sir Gawaine Baillie. I had become aware of him shortly after his death in December 2003. Sir Gawaine achieved fame racing Jaguars and Fords alongside Stirling Moss in the late 1950s, and became wealthy through his company H. P. C. Engineering, which he ran for more than forty years. On his mother's death in 1974 he inherited the estate surrounding Leeds Castle (the Castle itself was bequeathed to the nation) and it was about this time that he rediscovered his fondest boyhood hobby. His obituary in the
Daily Telegraph
didn't mention his interest in stamps, which is some omission, because he devoted four hours each day to his passion, and in the process formed arguably the greatest private collection of modern times. It was valued at about £11 million, and contained items that made even the coolest dealers drop to their knees. His collection showed a mastery of the British West Indies, the Australian States, British Africa and Rhodesia, British North America, New Zealand and all outposts of the British Empire. And then there was Great Britain—the Victorian colour trials and plate proofs, mint blocks of Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues, a unique sheet of the 1880 2s brown, and the famous 2d Tyrian Plum, which, following the death of King Edward VII in May 1910, was never issued. And then there were the Great Britain errors, including the 1966 Birds block missing black, blue, bistre and reddish brown, and the orange Minis without the Jaguar, which was said to be Sir Gawaine's personal favourite. 'He died far too young, just 69!' David Brandon told me in an email. 'He was an absolutely charming, kind, understanding and altogether lovely man. He had come to my house many times and we had some great days together on stamps.' Needless to say, if ever parts of the Baillie collection came up for sale it would make paupers of all who bid for it.

And within a few months, penury beckoned. Sir Gawaine Baillie had died. His entire collection was to be sold by Sotheby's in ten separate auctions. When the huge and beautiful catalogue accompanying the first sale arrived at my house one morning in August 2004, I made a phone call cancelling a meeting after lunch and retired upstairs with it to my bedroom. On
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, lot 1061, was the stamp I had wanted more than any other, the 1961 is 3d Seventh Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference missing the Queen's head. Apart from light wrinkles on the gum, it was a perfect example, a strip of three. There were only four perfect examples in the world. The estimate was £2,000–£2,500. I remember closing the door and spending the next three hours in rapture.

Men and women began collecting stamps in 1840, the same year that stamps began. These days it is easy to regard the earliest collectors as eccentrics and obsessives, more so, indeed, than we may regard the stamp collector in the modern age. But the Victorian collectors were also celebrationists. They were witnessing another great advance in communications, as significant as the birth of inter-city railways a decade before. They knew this because they were the immediate beneficiaries of this transformation. Further, they had helped bring it about: in 1840, the postage stamp was not just an attractive and intricate piece of paper, it was also a symbol of the popular will.

Before the Penny Post, the postal system was reliable but complex and costly; after it, letters arrived not only faster and more cheaply, but in vastly increased numbers. In 1839, one year before reform, the number of letters carried in the UK was 75,907,572. In 1840 the number more than doubled to 168,768,344. Ten years later the number was 347,069,071. How was this done? With foresight and zeal.

In the early nineteenth century it cost 4d to send a light letter from one end of London to another. The same letter would cost 8d from London to Brighton, 10d to Nottingham and at least is to Scotland. The prices had been raised frequently to pay for the Napoleonic wars, and varied according to whether they were carried by mail coach or coastal steamer. The Post Office was well organised and managed all but the final yard of the delivery with efficiency. But then there was a problem, as postage was usually paid by the recipient, a slow enough process even if the recipient was available when the postman called; it was like paying a utility bill every day. As a revenue-raising scheme it was first class; as a democratic form of communication it was fraught with difficulty and corruption. Members of Parliament had long resisted reform because the system suited them well: they received free postage on signature, and they accepted paid seats on company boards in return for signing everything that left the company's offices.

As disquiet about these inequities grew, the outgoing Secretary of the Post Office, Sir Francis Freeling, began to feel cornered. In a private note he wrote, 'Cheap postage—what is this men are talking about? Can it be that all my life I have been in error?' He complained that throughout his career he had run the most efficient service possible, and carried out his duties to the letter. 'Where else in the world does the merchant or manufacturer have the materials of his trade carried for him gratuitously or at so low a rate as to leave no margin of profit?'

This would not have brought much sympathy from Robert Wallace, MP for Greenock, elected through the extension of the franchise in the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act, and a fierce opponent of the current postal service. Where Freeling saw efficiency, Wallace saw mismanagement and delay. His speeches came to the attention of a civil servant named Rowland Hill. With Wallace's assistance Hill conducted his own research into the postal system, and he published his proposal for improvement in that most Victorian of campaigning methods—the pamphlet. Hill noted the abnormalities and corruptions, and showed that revenue from postage had been gradually falling in recent years despite the huge potential profits to be made.

His suggestions were revolutionary. He proposed a uniform postal charge of one penny per half-ounce for any letter sent within the British Isles, and submitted that the cost should be paid in advance. To this end he drew on a previous idea of Charles Knight for a prepaid letter envelope, but his second idea was the one we remember him for: 'A bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp, and covered at the back with a glutinous wash which the user might, by applying a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter.' Hill's 'stamp' was reference to the proof-of-postage design that had yet to be decided upon; the whole sticky square was known initially as a 'label'.

Scholars and pedants like to argue that others also have a claim on the invention of the stamp—there is a Lieutenant Treffenberg of Sweden (1823), James Chalmers, a bookseller from Dundee (1834), and Laurenz Kosir from Austria (1836). Their claims are well founded but almost irrelevant. It is never difficult, after the event, to claim that you were the one who had the idea for 'Eleanor Rigby' or a boy wizard's adventures at school. By fortune of circumstance and the energy that inspiration brings, Rowland Hill was the one who made it public and made it happen. Despite the haughty air visible in the most popular engraving of Hill, his biographers do not portray him as an arrogant man or even an unduly self-interested one; there is certainly no evidence of stealing another's ideas for credit, and he emerges keenly focused on the common good. Perhaps this explained his popularity. His reforms, which seem to us today both elementary and long overdue, were still a leap into the unknown. People were not used to paying for the postal service in advance; but they trusted Hill and his practical convictions.

Hill envisaged another breakthrough: 'Probably it would soon be unnecessary even to await the opening of the door, as every house might be provided with a letter box into which the Letter Carrier would drop the letters, and having knocked, he would pass on as fast as he could walk.'

Support for Hill's proposals followed in enthusiastic waves as soon as his pamphlet appeared. Newspapers, who saw how much they would benefit themselves, were keen champions, and soon a government Select Committee was calling expert witnesses. Principal opposition arose from the office most criticised by the reformers. The Postmaster General, Lord Lichfield, complained that 'of all the wild and visionary schemes which I have ever heard or read of, it is the most extravagant!', but his voice was lonely and his criticism contained the one apt description of Hill's proposals that we still uphold today: visionary. The House of Commons voted in favour of penny postage in July 1839, and in the Lords even the Postmaster-General announced his grudging support due to 'universal' feeling in the country. A few weeks later, Hill was offered a post at the Treasury, and after a prolonged period of haggling over his salary and the power of his office, he undertook to change the nature of communication.

Hill was born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire, and later moved to north London, where his father ran a school and encouraged his son to consider issues of educational reform. He had no background in postal matters, although his skill at administration had been evident in his job as secretary to the government department that encouraged emigration to South Australia.

He was less skilled in the matter of design. How was the new stamp to look? The basics we now take for granted—the size, the monarch's head, the licking—were all to be formulated. Uniform Penny Postage was introduced four months before the new adhesive labels were ready, with handstamps from about three hundred towns being used in their place. There was an immediate increase in the amount of post through the system, despite some bafflement over the need to prepay. But there was an immediate incentive to grasp the new reforms: prepaid letters would cost one penny, whereas those paid on delivery would cost two.

The Treasury announced a competition to find a design for the new stamp. A notice in
The Times
requested that 'artists, men of science, and the public in general, may have an opportunity of offering any suggestions or proposals as to the manner in which the stamp may best be brought into use'. Particular attention was to be paid with regards to convenience of use, security against forgery and expense, and there were to be awards of £200 and £100.

There were more than 2,600 entries, and although the Treasury committee praised the widespread ingenuity, none were considered exact or desirable enough to pass into production. Four £100 commendations were issued, including one to Henry Cole, who was already employed as Rowland Hill's chief assistant. In the end, the stamp was designed and produced by a group of professional men already known to Hill and the Inland Revenue for their role in the printing of bank notes and other official items. The Queen's head was drawn by the artist Henry Corbould, taking his inspiration from the relief portrait on the City Medal designed by William Wyon. It was engraved by Charles Heath and his son Frederick, while the words 'Postage' above the portrait and 'One Penny' below it were engraved by William Salter. The stamps were printed by the security printers Perkins, Bacon and Petch, on handmade watermarked paper (the watermark was a small crown) supplied by Mr Stacey Wise. The finished product was introduced to postmasters at the end of April 1840, with clear instructions on how the stamps should be issued and cancelled. A sample of two Penny Blacks was attached to the instructions, so that they could become familiar with the new postal currency. They also received an example of prepaid postal stationery, an envelope and lettersheet design by William Mulready containing images of elephants, lions, Britannia and people engrossed in their mail deliveries, an illustration rapidly and widely parodied by London stationers, the parodies themselves forming the basis of many new collections.

The stamps—the Penny Black and the Twopence Blue—went on sale on Friday 1 May 1840, along with prepaid envelopes, and a revolution got under way. They were not intended for use before Wednesday 6 May, although some were issued early. 'Great bustle at the Stamp Office,' Rowland Hill recorded in his diary on the evening of 1 May. On the following day he noted, '£2,500 worth of stamps sold yesterday'. By 6 May 22,993 sheets of 240 stamps each had been issued to 253 post offices, and on 22 May, Hill recorded, 'The demand for the labels is enormous, the printers supply more than half a million per day, and even this is not enough.'