I was very pleased to be able to attend this meeting in London after some time with all the intermittent railway strikes and thoroughly enjoyed myself catching up with old friends. There were 14 members present at the meeting with a further four members joining the afternoon displays via Zoom.
The room auction in the morning comprised some 64 mixed lots which were well bid by a number of attendees in competition and was very successful with some 43 lots selling well either at reserve or in some cases well above reserve reaching total sales of £470. I was lucky to obtain an illustrated hotel advertising envelope which will fit into my collection very well. The auction was then followed by short displays by three members showing some interesting postcards, stamps and postal history.
Simon Burke provided some very interesting items relating to Herm, including seven scarce Tuck picture postcards and four postally used postcards, all cancelled either with a Herm double-ring datestamp for 1925, 1927 or 1934. Unfortunately, the date on the fourth item was unclear. This scarce double circle datestamp was used from 1925 – 1938. Simon also showed three items addressed to A. Toplis on Sark and a Sark registered first flight cover carried by Imperial Airways on its inaugural flight across the north Atlantic. Examples of the 1¼d postal stationery cards were also shown, along with a copy of a King George III Act of Parliament titled “Duties on Coal, Culm and Cinders and the Exportation of Salt, Pepper and Wine to Guernsey, Jersey and Sark.”
Nick Martin showed six items of mail sent from Guernsey to France via St Malo and Nick Stuart showed two postcards sent from Jersey bearing hotel cachets for the Hotel de L’Europe and Grand Hotel du Palais de Cristal. These two hotels formed part of the private postal service of French hotels in Jersey (for further information about this service see the book Delivered by the Hotel’s Care by Roger Harris available in our book list shown on the inside back cover of this Journal).
However my real surprise and delight was in the first display of the afternoon broadcast on zoom as well, given by our Treasurer, Bryan Elliston, on early Guernsey postal history which revealed a 1796 entire letter from Guernsey to Inverness in Scotland endorsed care of Mr Hugh Fraser/ Merchant Inverness N.B. (North Britain), in the address. At first my immediate thought was a Letter Forwarding Agent whom I did not know, but on reflection I realised it was not and reference to my books on Forwarding Agents worldwide showed the name was unknown. I am now
able to show a scan of this entire letter courtesy of Bryan Elliston to whom I am most grateful in which the endorsement is clearly ‘care of…………’.
(Bryan Elliston collection)
This most interesting display of early postal history was then followed by our Secretary, Richard Flemming, displaying Gerald Marriner’s destination mails also going out on zoom with some quite fascinating and interesting letters and postcards to and from all corners of the globe.
I have long felt in this difficult time today that finding interesting and unusual Channel Island items has become so difficult and this is where our Society auctions come into play, both our Room auctions and Postal auctions, where items can often be obtained for rather less than buying from commercial sources. Our Packets are also good sources for the more common items especially postcards.
So do bear in mind that attending these meeting auctions can be very rewarding and further enables one to meet and converse with other members present. The important facet of the room auction is that it is only available to those actually attending the meeting and some very good bargains have been acquired by several members over time mainly because our auction material is mostly drawn from deceased members’ estates so some material can be very scarce indeed.
