Let’s get philatelic

Earlier this year I flew back to England and finally opened the boxes I'd left behind when I moved to Australia.

I hadn’t meant to abandon my stuff. I’d always thought my family (and my things) would eventually migrate to join me, but for decades they didn’t come and then one day it was too late: my mum was dead. In the week of her funeral, my stepdad hauled down my boxes from the closet in the spare room. Packed inside were the remnants of my adolescence and childhood: my vinyl record collection, frozen in time in the mid-1980s, and my stamp collection, untouched since the early 1970s.

I leafed uneasily through the Stanley Gibbons Jet Age Stamp Album, published in 1966, the year that England won the FIFA World Cup. The print date seems significant. As a boy, I learned of the existence of other cities from the football results, and the presence of other countries from my stamp album.

The album is a loose-leaf binder. Its cover design is a collage of stamps from Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Niger, Israel, Bulgaria, Hungary and Upper Volta, featuring rockets launching, aircraft soaring and satellites blasting into space. Who today remembers the optimism of the Jet Age? Or, for that matter, Stanley Gibbons, the pioneer of philately, ‘by Royal appointment’, no less?

I learned so much from stamps, and the education survived when the teacher was forgotten. Tiny facts stuck in my mind: ‘CCCP’ was the Cyrillic abbreviation for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; ‘Magyar Posta’ was the imprimatur of Hungarian Post; republics that were not democracies were the only nations to call themselves ‘democratic republics’. So I always knew that the USSR used an exotic alphabet; the word ‘Magyar’ pertained to Hungary; and East German and North Korea were communist dictatorships.

At the head of each printed section in the Stanley Gibbons Jet Age binder is the name of the stamp- issuing nation’s capital city and currency, and often a single-paragraph profile of the country. The entry for Great Britain named London as ‘the largest city in the world’ (it’s not even in the top 10 anymore) and reminded young philatelists that ‘traditionally no British stamps bear the name of the country’, a convention that dates from 1840, ‘when Britain issued the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, the famous “Penny Black”’.

Australia, meanwhile, was a British Dominion, home of the ‘kangaroo, kookaburra and duck-billed platypus’ and a major producer of ‘meat, wool, butter and cheese’. As I browsed my album, I was buffeted by a storm of memories I had never previously revisited — of buying bags of 50, 100 or 200 ‘mixed stamps’ from the local newsagent, emptying the packets, spilling out my treasure onto a desk built by my grandad, sifting the stamps into countries, panning for a Penny Black.

At school, philately was considered an introverted but not eccentric interest — although boys whose only hobby was hurting other people would sometimes ask, ‘Do you collect stamps?’ and if you said ‘yes’ they would stamp on your foot. (The same boys baited a similar trap for numismatists, by asking if they wanted a pound.)

My mum’s oldest sister migrated to the land of the kangaroo, kookaburra and duck-billed platypus and sent back airmails labelled ‘par avion’. At first, I trimmed around the perforations to cut the stamps from her letters and later I steamed them off over the spout of a gas kettle.

As a novice, I used to paste stamps into my album, until I heard that glue damaged the stamps and careful collectors used hinges. I began to buy packets of hinges from the newsagent too, and acquired arcane tools such as tweezers, whose purpose I can’t recall, and a watermark detector, although I don’t remember ever detecting a watermark — or why anyone would want to.

Later, my grandad gave me a new, leatherbound Stanley Gibbons album, its cardboard pages tiered with slide-in mounts to obviate the need for hinges. But the new album was for the display of mint-condition stamps, which I couldn’t afford to buy with my pocket money. My grandad used to give me presents of new sets of British stamp issues, but his generosity took the prospecting out of collecting and I began to lose interest.

When my mum left my dad, we moved into a flat with my stepdad, who also had a stamp album, and I guess that kept the conversation going for a while, but I think the hobby was over for me by the time I turned 12.

It hurts me now to think that my grandad might have been disappointed, or felt me ungrateful. My own grandchildren, if I ever have any, will never use a postage stamp — or a coin, or a newsagent. The Jet Age will look like the Dark Ages to them.

The last foreign stamp I was ever given was issued by the People’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam and featured Viet Cong guerrillas in action during the Vietnam War. It was presented to me by my careers teacher when I left school in 1979. He called it ‘the school prize for subversion’.

Less than 10 years later, I left England for good, to spend years travelling a world that I had first heard of from stamps. When I came back home for my stamp album, the most important things that I had left behind had gone: first my grandad, and then my mum.

Mark Dapin is a novelist, historian, true crime writer, journalist and screenwriter. His article on library tourism appeared in Openbook Summer 2022.

This story appears in Openbook spring 2023.