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Tizer
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21/08/2008
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10:17
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Do any OGFB members collect old postage stamps as a hobby, or have family members who do so? I discovered my childhood stamp album from the 1950s earlier this year and decided to start collecting again - nothing expensive, just filling in gaps. Main interest is Commonwealth stamps of George V and VI and to a lesser extent early QEII. My interest is for fun, not investment or obsessive collecting. You learn more geography and history and it's good fun going to a local stamp fair and meeting other people with similar interests and stories to tell! Judging from their comments, there aren't many children taking up the hobby these days - too much competition from computers and TV.
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moh
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Posted - 26/08/2008 : 20:57
Ramble all you like - makes interesting reading!!
Say only a little but say it well  |
Duckworth
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Posted - 27/08/2008 : 02:22
Thank you Tizer. Thank you Moh. Maybe I won't be so shy about posting from now on!
Previous posts reminded me of something I read in a Bill Bryson book some years ago. I no longer have the book. But going from memory... he wondered how someone like his mother could save a couple of spoonfuls of peas in a Tupperware container for another meal. But the same woman in a few short minutes of a cleaning frenzy could trash his childhood collection of baseball cards.
Thanks again!
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Tizer
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Posted - 27/08/2008 : 09:58
That's a typical pithy Bryson quote! He always hits the nail on the head. Mrs Tizer can't understand why I should be interested in these little scraps of coloured paper but she hoards pebbles, dead things (she calls them fossils) and bits of rocks ("geology").
(But I have to admit she has collected some nice postcards too.)
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melteaser
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Posted - 27/08/2008 : 21:19
Tizer - I can hold up my hands to stamp collecting. In my pre-high school days I used to go to stamp fairs along with a couple of other pupils and a teacher or two. I think my album is in the attic, my prized stamp was one of the Queen Mother's 80th birthday, if memory serves me, I paid £2 for it. This would be about 1982 or 83 I guess.
Mel
http://www.briercliffesociety.co.uk |
belle
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Posted - 30/08/2008 : 12:23
Hello mel, I thought you had melted, we've seen so little of you these days!
Even I collected stamps in my childhood, late 50's, it must have been almost compulsory to do some sort of collecting! My brother's did coins....can't think where any of my stamps went to, don't think i had any exciting ones.
Life is what you make it |
softsuvner
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Posted - 31/08/2008 : 10:50
Just caught up with this topic (been on holiday and Sunday Morning is a quiet time at work!).
I did the stamp collecting bit in the '50's, looking back now it looks a bit of a tame ocupation. Serious collectors used to collect whole sheets of identical stamps, not enough variety in that for me.
When Tizer says that kids today don't seem to do this sort of thing, he couldn't be more wrong. There are lots of different sets of "collectors cards" circulating amongst the young. Mind you they all seem to relate to fictional/alien characters rather than Comonwealth Countries! Just put "Pokemon" into Google!
Malcolm
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Tizer
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Posted - 31/08/2008 : 11:43
As a friend of mine used to say: "I know things have got to change but it's not the same is it?"
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panbiker
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Posted - 31/08/2008 : 12:17
When I was a lad in the fifties I used to collect stamps via the small packs you could get sent out of the boys comics. You know the sort of thing, 200 assorted Commonwealth stamps etc. I along with every other lad was waiting for the "Penny Black" to turn up in one of my bumper packs.
I used to stick them (with the little hinges) into stamp albums that you could buy at the Paragon Library at the top of Skipton Road. We used to pour over the Stanley Stamps Gibbon Catalogues in the library hoping to match our latest acquisitions with the rare and unobtainable within the pages, happy days.
My Grandfather and my Dad both collected stamps and out of the remaining siblings of the family I seem to have become the allocated keeper for posterity.
My Dad collected the pictorial first day covers that started in the sixties and continue to the present day. My dads collection commemorates just about every event with a commemorative stamp issue throughout the whole of the 1960's, 70's and just into the 1980's. All are franked on the first day of issue and most are full sets of all denominations of stamps issued. Many are on the special commemorative issue envelopes with associated notes to the event.
My Grandfather did a similar kind of thing but throughout a different era. His collection has a huge number of commemorations of pioneering air routes in Canada, USA inc Alaska, Australia and I think a few from Africa. My Grandad had a cousin, who lived in the USA and contacts in Australia, I think from his service alongside the Anzacs in Galipoli during the First World War. His collection comes from the 1920's and 30's when airmail routes were being pioneered across the globe. I have some fantastic and I would think now fairly rare examples of air postal deliveries to what was then the more remote areas of the planet.
When I was sorting out the estate when my parents died, I sent the whole job lot to a very prominent stamp dealer in London for evaluation. They did not offer me much for them so I refused their offer and kept them. Many are already in albums but many more are in bundles. I keep meaning to get them out and sort them into some kind of order but it's one of those jobs that I never seem to have the time to get on with.
Edited by - panbiker on 31/08/2008 12:20:02
Ian |
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 31/08/2008 : 17:52
I've been a collector all my life but have never specialised in anything. I call it the pack-rat syndrome. That's how I got my books and the stuff in the shed. When you think about it, my brand of history is the collecting of unconsidered trifles.
As for Duckworth and rambling, where would OG be without it? Any relation to the famous Lancashire wicket keeper?
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Tizer
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Posted - 01/09/2008 : 17:21
Ian, keep the stamps and covers etc - as you've found out, dealers don't give much for them these days. If they buy a collection it's usually for a few valuable stamps and the rest are superfluous. They don't want to be bothered breaking up the collection and selling the stamps individually.
One of my main reaons for collecting stamps and coins is the history link - they tell a story and get you asking questions and wanting more information.
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panbiker
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Posted - 01/09/2008 : 20:09
Won't be parting with them Tizer, some of the first flight airmail commemoratives definitely tell a story. It's hard to imagine that 80 or so years ago they were still pioneering routes to some of the more remote areas of the globe. Pilots risked their lives to deliver the mail.
We take an awful lot for granted nowadays with instant global communication.
Ian |
tripps
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Posted - 01/09/2008 : 21:10
Did you ever see any stamps from a place called Tana Touva? They were large, colourful and all sorts of shapes - triangular, diamond etc. Everyone wanted them - no one knew where it was. Just a little Pacific island I guess, whose main income was from stamps. Come to think of it that description might fit the UK in a few years!
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panbiker
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Posted - 01/09/2008 : 23:27
I remember the trianglar and diamond shaped stamps Tripps, can't remember where they were from though. Did'nt some of the African states produce some of these as well?
Ian |
Tizer
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Posted - 03/09/2008 : 11:47
A Cape of Good Hope trangular stamp of 1853 (described as "4d blue on slightly blued paper"). Not mine - picture from the Web! These were produced without perforations and alternating orientation to fill a sheet. A commemorative version was printed in 1926 in grey-blue and is common.
"First jet airmail flight" postal cover, 1946. This is the earliest of this type that I have got. Click for a larger picture. "General Electric Air Research Demonstration, June 22nd 1946, Schenectady, NY".
Edited by - Tizer on 03/09/2008 11:52:57
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 03/09/2008 : 18:18
And just who gave them the jet engine?
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Stamp collecting
