Journal Articles Archive - Page 4 of 233 - Channel Islands Specialists’ Society

Town Post Office, Guernsey

On 20 May 2025, Guernsey Post formally announced that the Town post office, situated in the old Tourist Information Centre, would close on Friday 4 July and would be relocated to a new home at 7 Commercial Arcade – a familiar location that housed the Arcade sub-post office many years ago.

The decision to vacate the North Plantation building had to be made as it was to be re-purposed as the Victor Hugo Centre.

Three counter positions were in use at the time of the announcement, and these were to be dismantled and rebuilt at the new office at 7 Commercial Arcade. Consequently, while this took place, the post office moved temporarily within the North Plantation building, but with only two counter positions being available in the interim period.

The Town office had used three datestamps originally but, during the interim period, only the datestamps with Codes F and G were used. The datestamp with Code H was returned to Envoy House.

However, on close examination of the datestamps used on the covers obtained on the last day of opening, there is clear evidence that those datestamps issued and used when the office was opened in April 2024 had been replaced.

This is illustrated below (Figures 1 and 2) of like-to-like scans of the two datestamps with Code F inserted. On examination, it is evident in (Figure 2) that the date is much larger than in the original datestamp and GUERNSEY/POST at the foot of the datestamp is also larger, and the lettering spaced differently. This change has now been confirmed by Guernsey Post, although the specific date of the change is not available. It is believed that the new datestamps were issued sometime during 2025.

At 8.30am on Tuesday 8 July 2025, the new Town post office at 7 Commercial Arcade officially opened to the public. The new location would offer a full range of postal services in a more modern and central setting. The branch would also include Saturday opening hours. (Fig 3 below). The new office has three counter positions and therefore all three datestamps with Codes F, G and H are in use.

The photograph below (Figure 4) shows how this new type of datestamp arrives from the manufacturer. The main element of the datestamp is in blue ink and the date is in red ink.

It is Guernsey Post’s usual practice to only use black ink. However, as can be seen from the Special Delivery envelope below (Figure 5), cancelled on the first day of opening, this has not been the case as the “spare” datestamp with Code H inserted and returned from Envoy House, is in blue ink with the date in red ink. It looks most unusual!!

Guernsey Post also announced that a small Postal Museum would be located on the top floor of the building and would be open to visitors on Tuesday 29 July to coincide with the 200th Anniversary of the opening of Commercial Arcade on that day. The museum showcases the Island’s rich postal and philatelic heritage. An interesting new venue for our members to visit.

Last Day of the La Baissieres Sub-Office in Guernsey¸ 1966

The postcard illustrated below was franked with a 1948 Third Anniversary of the Liberation 2½d and a 1965 Churchill Commemoration 4d (on the first day of issue). The two stamps on the postcard are struck with the Type 1 date stamp, with a despatch date of 8 July 1965, and addressed to Miss F Flambard, Khyber, Les Baissières, The Vale, as the road running westwards has the St Peter Port-Vale parish boundaries through it.

A Type 1 registration label was issued for use from opening on 1 February 1952. Almost 1,400 registered letters were recorded but not many examples are known to have survived. This sub-post office closed on the 8 July 1968 after only 16 years of serving this area of western St Peter Port.

Coincidently, the 8 July datestamp on the postcard for the first day of use of the Churchill 4d stamp is also the closure date of this sub-office.

An Underpaid Cover from St Servan to Jersey, 1966

The scan of the cover below is another sent in by Henri Chartier.

It was posted at St Servan, a town on the semi-tidal River Rance which flows into the English Channel between Dinard and Saint-Malo to Jersey. It was posted in November 1965, franked at 30c instead of at 60c, and received a nice publicity cancellation for the town as a centre for sea activities, its camping sites and swimming pool. How does a 6d postage due charge in 1965 relate to an underpayment of 30c?

Thanks to Gerald Marriner, and Ken Snelson of the Postage Due Mail Study Group for commenting on the surcharge marking and postage charges.

At that time the French charge for UPU mail was 60c and the letter was therefore 30c underpaid. The calculation of the fee is as follows: 30c deficiency is 30/60 x 6d = 3d postage due, doubled to a minimum charge of 6d.

Both Ken and Gerald commented that the green charge mark 258 was struck at Dover.

“Merci”, Henri, for the scan, and to Ken and Gerald for their interpretation.

PSJ Clark

In the September 2024 issue of Les Iles Normandes, member Roger Cichorz was trying to get to grips with who P S J Clark was.

Peter Sidney John Clark was born on 31 March 1921 in Caterham, Surrey. His father was Sidney Clark. In 1939 he was living with his parents and older brother, Jack, at 52 Foxon Lane, Caterham, Surrey.

In 1941, he joined the Royal Regiment of Artillery with the service number 1817689. In 1952, he married Annemarie Katharina Van Kempen (1925-2011).

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was the Honorary Secretary of The British Businessmen’s Club, with an address at Tannenstrasse 8, Düsseldorf, Germany.

As a Member of the Institute of British Engineers he used the postnominal M. Inst. B.E.

Peter Clark was an expertiser, and from 1961 he was a member of the Bund Philatelistischer Prüfer E.V., the leading German association for the examination of philatelic collectibles. His areas of expertise were of the German Occupation of the Channel Islands, Lundy Island, and Propaganda Forgeries. It was within these philatelic categories that he issued expertisation certificates.

In Surrey, he was at 122 Eldon Road, Caterham and he later moved to 68 Norman Avenue, Sanderstead, South Croydon. This address was one he used as a return address for items of post he had sent Poste Restante.

On 16 December 1990, Annemarie Katherina Clark and Peter Sidney John Clark were appointed Directors of Palex Consultants Ltd. This business services company was registered on 23 June 1988, and it was active until 31 March 1991.

Peter and Annemarie lived at 68 Norman Avenue until the end of their lives.

Peter Clark died on 23 March 2010, and Annemarie died on 26 October 2011.

Other than as an addressee on items of mail, Mark has found no references to a Patricia Clark associated with Peter and Annemarie.

Switzerland to Jersey: Compulsory Re-registration on Re-direction

Summary

Mail re-directed from the address on an item of mail but dropped in a letter box was treated as ”Posted Out of Course” and was compulsorily re-registered for delivery to the new address.

Original posting

The letter shown below was sent from Hagendorn (Canton Zug) in Switzerland on 26 February 1948, franked with a 60 centimes stamp for 30c letter rate + 30c registration fee (Figure 1).

It was addressed to the Ritz Hotel, St Helier, Jersey and received the oval registration arrival mark REGISTERED / JERSEY CHANNEL IS. / 2 MR 48 on the back (Figure 2).

Re-redirection

Following delivery, the letter was re-directed to the Montfort (House) Hotel, Great Union Road, and apparently dropped in a letterbox without payment of an additional registration fee. The fact that the cover was marked with the usual blue cross was sufficient for the post office to re-register it compulsorily. The partially adhesive label was attached (Figure 3) with the explanation, and the cover was struck with the boxed cachet TO PAY POSTED OUT OF COURSE with the Jersey main post office identifier 409 at bottom left and 3 (pence) inserted in manuscript for the standard registration fee.

The Hotels

Both the Ritz Hotel (Figure 4) and the Montfort House Hotel (Figure 5) were developed in the heyday of Channel Island tourism in the 1930s but both were closed as part of the sector’s general decline in the 1980/90s.

German Ultimatum for Jersey’s Surrender in 1940

In September 2024 I made the most important and exciting find of my entire Channel Islands collecting career. The item has no exciting cachets or postmarks but is one of three copies of the most important German document of the occupation dropped by air over Jersey on 1 July 1940. It is a copy of the German ultimatum for Jersey’s surrender in its original envelope, found at the airport and thought lost for the past 84 years. It is also the first German airmail of the Occupation

At 05.40 on 1 July 1940, three pouches trailing red and blue streamers were dropped over Jersey by a German aircraft. Two pouches landed in St. Helier and the third landed at the airport. The pouches contained envelopes bizarrely addressed “On the Governor of the Isle of Jersey” (sic) and in them was a two-page typed ultimatum itemising the terms of surrender for the island. The Jersey Airport Controller, Charles Roche, found the letter dropped at the airport (Figure 1) and telephoned the Bailiff of Jersey, Alexander Coutanche, who ordered him to keep it and remain at his post as he had already been given two dropped on St. Helier. The German ultimatum demanded that by 07.00 on 2 July 1940, white flags and white crosses should be prominently displayed in the town and at the airport to indicate total surrender. (Figures 3 & 4) The States ordered a translation of the ultimatum be printed and posted immediately (Figure 5) and a translation appeared on the front page of that afternoon’s The Evening Post.

At 07.00 the following morning, Oberleutnant Richard Kern, the 25-year-old pilot of a Dornier Do 17z flew over Jersey and observed the displayed surrender signs. He promptly landed at the airport to be the first German to ‘capture’ Jersey and was met by Charles Roche who informed him that Jersey was ready to accept the occupation terms. Oberleutnant Kern returned to base to report his actions and in the afternoon eight Dornier Do 17z aircraft and two Junkers Ju 52/3m troop transporters landed at the airport with German assault troops and Luftwaffe officers led by Hauptmann Gussek. The German occupation of Jersey had begun.

Charles Roche had kept the airport letter and endorsed the envelope in pencil with the location, time and date of dropping but in the heat of the moment he initialled and dated it 1/6/40 (rather than 1/7/40). Order 5. of the ultimatum demanded that “Representatives of the Authorities must stay at the Airport until the occupation.”, so obeying Coutanche’s order, Roche had remained on duty to await the arrival of the German troops.

Roche was not a Channel Islander; he was an Englishman born in 1897, and a retired First World War R.A.F. lieutenant. His previous R.A.F. career should have rung alarm bells with the Germans but despite it they foolishly kept him in his crucial role managing the Airport where he was credited with destroying at least 28 German aircraft and crew by cutting the runway grass to an unsafe short level so that aircraft would skid and crash on landing. The Germans remained unaware of his sabotage regime, but it was nevertheless curtailed in 1942 when he and his wife Mary were deported to Biberach internment camp in Germany along with most of the other English born residents in Jersey. (Figure 2)

Charles and Mary were in their late 40s when they were deported, but they must have been in ill health because Mary was repatriated to England on the first Red Cross mercy repatriation via neutral Sweden of the elderly and infirmed in September 1944, and Charles followed on the second in March 1945. They were reunited in England and eventually able to return to Jersey after the liberation when Charles resumed his old job as airport controller until his retirement in 1957.

The three German ultimatum letters were the first and probably the most important documents of the occupation. They can also be regarded as the first airmail of the German occupation, but none of the three copies has ever been on public display. The two dropped on St. Helier and handed to the Bailiff remained in the Coutanche archive but the history of the letter dropped at the airport is more obscure.

When Coutanche told Roche that he did not need the letter dropped at the airport as he had already been given the two dropped on the town, Roche may not have realised its significance as he may have thought there were others. He is unlikely to have taken it with him into internment but there is no record of him giving it to someone for safe keeping or hiding it until his return to Jersey. It has always been assumed that it was destroyed or lost.

America in 2024 saw the first two parts of a charity auction of the Alfred F. Kugel military postal history collection, a philatelic collection of worldwide military mail dating from the late 1800s to modern times, valued at several million dollars. There were only two lots from Jersey in the auction; one was a genuine set of the “Swastika Jersey 1940” overprinted King George VI stamps along with the Bigwood trial, and the other, a poorly photographed envelope that purported to have contained the German ultimatum dropped on 1 July 1940.

I recognised that the envelope might be the missing Roche letter and attempted to authenticate it before the auction closed. I obtained good photographs of the envelope and its contents and approached various authorities in Jersey who might have seen the other two letters. Only two people had.

Damien Horn, owner of The Channel Islands Military Museum had seen one of the letters complete with its pouch and ribbons that had been kept by Coutanche, and he thought a second one was also in the Lord Coutanche collection.

Georgie Bois, Archives Officer of Jersey Heritage confirmed that they held the Lord Coutanche Collection containing one of the letters with the original pouch, but the collection was not yet catalogued, and the letter was not on display. As the collection is not catalogued, this raises the possibility that the collection holds both letters dropped on St. Helier.

Nobody was able to offer me any more information about the third letter and the auction house knew no more provenance although it was thought Kugel had acquired the letter from a German collector in the 1980s along with the swastika over-printed stamps. After some strong bidding (I was not the only person to have recognised the letter’s significance), I managed to acquire the letter in the American auction in September 2024, and I’ve since displayed it at the CISS 75th Anniversary Display at the Royal Philatelic Society in January, and again during our weekend visit to Guernsey in April this year.

A very important German occupation document and first occupation airmail letter has at last seen the light of day.

New Acquisition – 1921 Havre-des-Pas Registered Letter

Very recently, I purchased the above Registered Letter on ebay which was sent to Hanover, Germany, on 21 December 1921. The 5d embossed stamp shows that the registration fee was 3d plus 2d for postage, and was uprated by a further 2½d with the addition of a KGV blue definitive to make up the 7½d overseas rate. The stamps were cancelled by a 25mm single circle datestamp with Code Binserted. Also shown on the front, is a London Hooded registered circle in purple for 24 December 1921. On the reverse is a smart Hanover receiving mark for 26 December 1921.

The registered label is a CType small sheet label recorded as used from this Town office in 1921. This shows JERSEY in small upper-case letters and the office number 3 inserted in manuscript. This label is illustrated in David Gurney’s The Postal History of the Jersey Sub-Post Offices.

La Rocque, Jersey – Type D Registration Label

I recently acquired this registered letter sent from the La Rocque sub-post-office with a previously unrecorded label from that office. Shown at Figure 2 is a registered letter dated SP 8 09 from La Rocque to Cannanore (or officially Kannur) in the state of Kerala, India. The registered label (Figure 1) is Type D and has a single circle Code C datestamp from the same day.

On the reverse side is a Malabar arrival postmark dated 26 September 1909.

These type D labels were issued in 1907 for small offices that could not justify the expense of printing personalised labels. They were printed in the form of perforated sheets of fifty labels numbered in series from 1 to 50. It should also be noted that the R and the number are on the right-hand side. On delivery of these labels it was required that each label be stamped with the office datestamp but with the date and code removed. In this instance, the sub-postmaster did not follow these instructions. This example is a very early usage, as in 1910 the position of the R and the number on the label was moved to the left side to comply with UPU rules.

A Cover to Jersey during the Franco-German War

The postal history of the Franco-German War of 1870 and its consequences is a matter of special interest to me, so I was pleased to receive a scan of this cover from Henri Chartier.

The cover (Figure 1 above) from Chartres to St Helier was posted on 13 November 1870, at the beginning of the German forces’ occupation of Alsace-Lorraine and much of northern France.

It was incorrectly franked with an 1867 Issue 20c Napoléon lauré instead of at the correct rate of 40c. The framed AFFRANCHISSEMENT INSUFFISANT cachet (insufficiently franked) in black was added and twice the missing 20c charged at 4 décimes (40c.).

The letter took a month to arrive and was backstamped on 13 December 1870 on arrival (see Figure 2).

The Guernsey Double-oval and Crown Handstamp

In 1799, the Ship Letter Office was established in London with the necessary Parliamentary enactment. The double oval and crown replaced the previous two-line handstamp. The Crown handstamp sent to Guernsey in 1802 had two periods of use, from 1802 to 1815, and again from 1844 to 1849. Because the ship letter charges were strenuously opposed by the islanders as they were seen as a levy on incoming mail from private ships, little mail was ever handed over to the Post Office. As a result of this, the double oval Guernsey ship letter handstamp lay idle for most of its life. Consequently, to date only five or six examples for the 1802 to 1815 period of use are known to exist. A few more are known from the 1844 to 1849 period. The rare entire shown dated 30 December 1814 (first period of use) sent from Rotterdam to Guernsey and bears a Type 2 double-oval/Crown/GUERNSEY handstamp applied at the Guernsey post office. Notably, the letter was charged at the short-lived 6d ship letter rate.