British Guiana stamps: Magenta one cent, cotton reels etc.

The postal history of British Guiana (now Guyana)  is most interesting, starting with the 'cottonreels' - depicted below -

   

 

 

that were commissioned in 1850; a basic design was created using by the offices of Joseph Baum and William Dallas, printers and publishers of the Royal Gazette of British Guiana, which was  issued  Wednesdays and Saturdays in Georgetown. The Postmaster used local printers since service was to begin before stamps could  be supplied from Great Britain.

In a memoir by the American humorist Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, it is related how he came to be indentured as a compositor to the Royal Gazette in 1835. In the first part of "Experience during Many Years", serialized in The New England Magazine in 1893, Shillaber relates that “Mr. Baum … was a Pennsylvanian, and Mr. Dallas a light mulatto; and a more perfect gentleman and a better printer I had never met with. He was educated in Scotland and acquired the art of printing there, in all branches of which he was a perfect master. He was affable in the highest degree and always treated me with a kindness which rendered our relations very pleasant.”

The stamps produced in Baum and Dallas’s shop in 1850 were printed by an employee named Henry Mackay, according to Edward Chauncy Luard, the first prominent philatelist in British Guiana. They were circular, and in size and design so reminiscent of the labels found on the ends of spools of thread that they subsequently became known among collectors as “cottonreels.” According to The Postage Stamps and Postal History of British Guiana by W. A. Townsend and F. G. Howe, the cottonreels were printed on a Columbian handpress from individual settings of type. The simple frames were formed by pieces of printer’s brass rule, beveled at one edge and blunt at the other edge, bent into a circular shape and so soldered. Type from the regular case of the Gazette was then set within the circular frame: BRITISH around the top, GUIANA around the bottom, and 4 (8 or 12) Cents in the middle. The type pieces were secured in place with quads and other furniture (or perhaps with chewed paper), imposed and locked in a chase, inked, and printed. 

It is not known how many stamps were printed on a single sheet, but as Townsend has identified four distinct frames (based on thickness, shape, and flaws in the circular rules and by distinctive positions of the letter sorts), it is thought the stamps were printed in a horizontal row of four. The same basic setting of type was used to print stamps of different denominations: to change from one duty to another, the chase would be unlocked, the numeral sort carefully extracted, the new value sort inserted, the chase relocked, and the forme re-inked and printed. To easily differentiate between the values, the stamps were printed in black ink on different colored papers: the four-cent on orange (with a later printing on lemon-yellow); the eight-cent on green; and the twelve-cent on blue shades ranging from pale to indigo.

All examples of the 1850 cottonreels are initialed by Dalton or by one of his subordinates: James Belton Smith, a clerk in the Imperial Branch; H. A. Killikelly, a letter carrier; W. H. Lorimer, likely a railway clerk; and Edmond Dalzell Wight, a clerk in the Colonial Post Office, whose E.D.W. appears on the 1856 One-Cent. The initialing is thought to have been done to thwart counterfeiters, since anyone with a job press and a handful of type could have produced a reasonable facsimile of the Royal Gazette stamps.

While there is no record of how many cottonreels were eventually printed, it is known, based on a Royal Gazette invoice attached to a report that Postmaster Dalton submitted to the colonial legislature on 11 March 1851, how many were printed during the final six months of 1850: 656 12-cent blues, 1,200 8-cent greens, and 1,752 4-cent yellows. The charge for printing the stamps was 50 cents per one hundred regardless of denomination. Curiously, the three stamps survive in almost equal numbers, despite the disparity in the numbers printed, at least through the first half year of production.

[Below is a photo of the 2 cent cottonreel, SG#1/Scott#1]

 

Early in 1851, a fourth value was added to the issue of cottonreel stamps. A 2-cent denomination was printed to cover postal delivery within Georgetown. Postmaster Dalton again used a notice in the Royal Gazette, 22 February 1851, to introduce the new service:
By Order of His Excellency the Governor and upon the request of several of the merchants of Georgetown, it is proposed to establish a Delivery of Letters twice a day through the principal streets of this city, viz., Water-Street, Main-Street, their intermediate streets, and the Brick Dam, as far as the Roman Catholic Chapel. … Each letter must bear a stamp, for which Two Cents will be charged or it will not be delivered, and when called for will be subject to the usual postage of Eight Cents.
Deliveries began on 1 March and were set for 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon. The new stamps were available at the Georgetown Post Office as well as at five stores that were designated as receiving stations.
The 2-cent stamps were printed by Baum and Dallas on rose-colored paper using the same typographic frames as the three earlier values. All ten surviving examples are initialed—two by Dalton, two by Wight, and six by Smith.
Despite the encouragement of “several of the merchants of Georgetown,” this service was discontinued after a short period due to lack of support and the remaining stamps were retained, with some being used as multiples to pay the regular postage of four cents or higher. The 2-cent cottonreel was alluded to in articles over the years but it wasn’t until 1877 that a single specimen appeared in England from a collector in British Guiana. Two more copies appeared in quick succession from the same source and within a year an entire collection of British Guiana stamps arrived in Britain for sale. This collection, which contained the fourth and last single copy of this rarity found to date, was sent to E. L. Pemberton, who was very familiar with the colony’s stamps. Pemberton examined the 2-cent stamp and satisfied himself that it was a genuine copy. But that same collection also included a stamp that Pemberton had never before seen: a small octagonal 1-cent magenta stamp (Scott 13).

 

The whereabouts of the One-Cent Magenta for the last 141 years can be known positively. But the first seventeen years of its existence are shrouded in impenetrable obscurity. The stamp was purchased on or before 4 April 1856, the date it was postmarked, and affixed to an envelope or newspaper wrapper, most likely addressed to a Mr. Andrew Hunter. And sometime in 1873, the stamp was discovered—or recovered—by a nephew of Hunter, a budding stamp collector. For the years between those events, the stamp resided unrecognized and unappreciated on its cover in the tropical heat and humidity of British Guiana.

So there...the world's rarest stamp and its congeners from a small British colony, a nation of around one million inhabitants with but 83,000 sq mi. And to keep up with the history or producing rare stamps, the independent nation of Guyana today manages to produce many collectible issues, especially in the realm of orchids, of which it has no less than 500 stamps, including hundreds of stamps with images from Reichenbachia, collected for their beauty. A singular trait with the Guyana Post Office is the making of overprints, and collectors of this country are challenged with an excessive amount of surcharges and overprints that would drive most philatelists to the brink of madness. Recently I purchased the 1990 set of 8 orchids, after spending two years trying to acquire it; each effort I made was met with offers from dealers who had an endless array of overprints (and none recognised in the catalogues) honouring a plethora of famous people; one suspects that an unscrupulous dealer merely overprinted them himself to charge a premium on the set. It would not surprise me if there were to appear a rare overprint with Osama bin Laden, along with Kennedy, Roosevelt, and sundry other luminaries.

Glad I was to acquire the set without an overprint, which may prove to be the rare (and only genuine) state. [Scott 2359-66]. And I will cherish them until the day that Sothebys sees fit to auction them too! At least if I do not have the 1c magenta, I have 8 beautiful and long sought after stamps that I genuinely enjoy, one of them being vanilla, which appears on around 100 issues worldwide; of which I will be blogging more, I hope to publish a booklet on all such issues when I complete my collection (which is still missing Guyana 2370).