York Stamp Fair was agin, one of the best shows of the year for me, turning up once again some superb items to add to the Barbados collection and displays. This time round, the star of the show as a lovely ‘philatelic’ cover that I hadn’t expected to find.
Early in January this year, I had spotted a cover for sale on David Druett’s Pennymead website. David is the ‘go to’ guy for pretty much all philatelic literature but few people realise he also has a stamps, covers and postmarks section on his site with some really interesting items for sale, inducing a lot of Barbados material.
In January I had spotted a particular cover which, although philatelic, was a useful addition to my growing George V ‘Stamps & Covers’ display, showing, as it does, the values from ¼d up to 1/-, but missing the last two ‘high value’ stamps, the 2/- and 3/-.
This is the cover that I bought from David:
When it arrived, I set about researching the cover and duly wrote it up for my display, the sheet for which is shown here:
Whilst at York Stamp Fair this weekend, I asked one of the dealers if he had anything, to which he brought out several nice items, including this cover:
At first, my reaction was “I’m sure I’ve seen one to this address before, perhaps I’ve already got it”, but a quick check overnight on my online records and I realised that it was the sister to the cover I purchased in January.
Whilst the date on this cover is 11th May 1914 as opposed to 28th January 1914 on the other cover, it is not known whether these were simply sent four months apart or if there are a similar pair extant with the high values dated January and the low values dated May.
Either way, I knew that I had to have it and now the display has another page added to it and a much better feeling of completeness that was missing before.
There’s lots more to share from the show in due course, but for now it’s worth remembering that you should always ask dealers what they have, even if you think it’s going to be nothing, as you never know until you look.