Title: Crown, communication and the colonial post: Stamps, the monarchy and the British empire
Abstract: Abstract This article investigates some of the possibilities for imperial history of using philatelic evidence. It explores the ways in which the British empire as a working world system was underpinned by the Imperial Penny Postage and the production and use of postage stamps bearing the images of successive British monarchs and other British imperial iconography. With particular emphasis on the reign of George V, who took an especially close interest in philatelic matters, it charts and discusses some of the ways in which British, dominion, Indian and colonial postage stamp issues (including their commissioning, design and public reception) reflected political and aesthetic judgments at home and overseas, and expressed sometimes unexpected notions of appropriate imperial, dominion and colonial imagery. It provides some cultural evidence supporting the contention that the apogee of the British imperial system may have occurred sometime in the middle years of the twentieth century. Acknowledgement Versions of this article were given to the Exhibiting Empire Conference (National Maritime Museum, October 1999), and seminars at London, Oxford, Swansea, UWE Bristol, and the Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Pacific at Deakin University in Melbourne. I also wish to thank Joan Beaumont, David Beech, Andrew Cook, Kent Fedorowich, John Gooch, Ronald Hyam, Ken Inglis, Joanna Lewis, Chris Lloyd, Rory Rapple, Michael Sefi, Gavin Souter, Andrew Thompson, Jock Phillips and, above all, Sally Visick for help and advice. The reproduction as illustrations of unpublished material is by courtesy of the following: Queensland Museum, Brisbane (Figures 2–3) and the British Postal Museum and Archive (Figures 12–13). Notes [1] Seanad Éireann Official Report, Vol.6, 3 March 1926, col.501. [2] Pevsner, ‘Style in stamps’, 464. [3] Similar claims can, of course, be made for paper money. See, for example, Gilbert, ‘“Ornamenting the facade of hell”’, 57–80; and Blaazer, ‘Reading the Notes’, 39–53. [4] Scott, European Stamp Design, 7 (emphasis in original). [5] McQueen, ‘The Australian Stamp’, 81. [6] Reid, ‘The Symbolism of Postage Stamps’, 223–49. This article is mostly devoted to an exploration of stamps of the Ottoman Empire and its successor states. The only British academic interest in philately I can discover is a University of Sussex ‘Philatelic Unit’ which existed in the 1970s. For further information contact Special Collections at the University of Sussex Library. In the United Kingdom, nevertheless, the scholarly study of philatelic matters is supported by the Royal Philatelic Society London, the British Library Philatelic Collections, and the British Postal Museum and Archive. [7] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 48–68. But see Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Tradition’, 276, 281, on the use of historical themes on stamps. [8] Reid, ‘The Symbolism of the Postage Stamp’, 225. In The Birth of the Modern World, Bayly is no better. While acknowledging that the nineteenth century was ‘the age of global communication’, and giving credit for this to the electric telegraph, the railway, the steamship ‘and, later, the telephone’ (19–20), no mention is made of postal services. He observes, too, the growth of newspapers as a means of mass communication (211), but without remarking on the postal privilege which they enjoyed, and which greatly facilitated their distribution at home and abroad. In 1895, for example, printed papers could be sent overseas at a rate of a halfpenny per two ounces weight (information from Whitaker's Almanack). [9] 20,973,535 telegrams; 1,008,392,100 letters; 87,116,300 post cards; 158,666,600 printed books and circulars; 121,049,400 newspapers (26th Report of the Postmaster General on the Post Office [C.2670], H.C. 1880, xix, pp.26, 27, 34). The figure for telegrams includes messages to foreign as well as domestic destinations; those for postal items only apply to domestic UK mail. [10] 2,804 million letters; 1,122 million newspapers and printed papers; 831 million post cards. Figures extracted from Board of Trade, Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom, 1906 to 1920 (HMSO, 1922 Cmd. 1774), 314–16. [11] E. A. Benians, ‘Imperial Finance, Trade and Communications, 1870–1895’, 200; and Graham, ‘Imperial Finance, Trade and Communications, 1895–1914’, 473. In a footnote, however, Benians added that in 1890 Britain agreed a uniform colonial and Indian postage rate of two pence halfpenny per half ounce. Graham's ‘sixpence-a-word cables’ was a pipe dream. Telegram rates to Canada (the cheapest dominion destination) were 3s. 8d. a word in the 1890s, 1s. in the 1920s and 7d. in the 1930s (information from Whitaker's Almanack). [12] E. H. H. Green, ‘The Political Economy of Empire, 1880–1914’, 347. [13] Ronald Hyam, Britain's Imperial Century, 108 (emphasis in original). Hyam does, however, mention imperial mail in ‘The British Empire in the Edwardian Era’, 49. [14] Porter, The Lion's Share, 41. [15] Lloyd, The British Empire, 225. [16] Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 103. Cannadine makes some remarks about British commemorative stamps in his chapter, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual’, 155. [17] And scholars too, as John Iliffe has testified to the author. [18] Morris, Pax Britannica, 58–60. [19] In Australia, for example in 1912 there were 77,663 government railway employees; 29,914 post office employees (as well as 4,458 mail contractors); and 19,237 teachers in state schools: Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, No.7, 1914 (Melbourne, 1914), 639, 678, 772. [20] Post Office archives are a valuable and much-underused resource by general historians. For some comments on the British archives see Jeffery, ‘Letters, Bombs and Local History’, 207–20. Gary Magee (University of Melbourne) and Andrew S. Thompson (University of Leeds) have been investigating remittance flows in the ‘British world’ using information from the Post Office archives. [21] An analogy may be found in the state identifiers in e-mail addresses. In the country (the United States) which pioneered this form of communication they do not carry ‘.usa’. [22] See the discussions of cabinet and monarchy in Bagehot, The English Constitution, 59–120, and the lucid introduction to this edition by Richard Crossman, itself containing some revealing remarks regarding the contemporaneous ‘English’ constitution. [23] See, generally, Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, but especially the introduction (by Hobsbawm) and the chapter by David Cannadine, 1–14 and 101–64. [24] Quoted in Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas, 252. [25] For Mulready, see Heleniak, William Mulready. [26] Unless otherwise noted, the details concerning British and Commonwealth stamps are based on the information and images in Stanley Gibbons Postage Stamp Catalogue Part One: British Commonwealth 1968. There is a useful discussion of the monarch's head on British stamps in Scott, European Stamp Design, 17–19. [27] The apparent paradox in the differing treatment of the monarch's image on British stamps and coins (which is not confined to Queen Victoria) would be worth exploring. On stamps, despite their high turnover, the monarch remains young; on coins, with their rather longer ‘shelf life’, she ages. In contrast to Britain, however, Victoria ages on some colonial stamps, such as Canada and India. [28] With one exception: the 5d. stamp of 1887 also included the royal coat of arms. [29] There were two exceptions: the King George V high value stamps (2s. 6d., 5s., 10s. and £1) of 1913–36 (but which do show Britannia, with trident, in a horse-drawn chariot); and the 2½d. Universal Postal Union Congress stamp of 1929. [30] Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, 152. [31] Crisp, Australian National Government, 111. [32] Both men personally claimed credit for the imperial penny post in their Who's Who entries. [33] See, for example, his interventions in the House of Commons, 10 and 22 Sept. 1886, Hansard, 309 H.C. Deb. 3d ser., col.14, 1260–61; and his daughter's account of his campaign in Porter, The Life and Letters of Sir John Henniker Heaton, 174–82. [34] Heaton, ‘Imperial Postal Services’, 312. [35] See Ottawa–London correspondence, Sept.–Dec. 1897, Canadian Post Office records, National Archives of Canada (NAC), RG3 vol.2749, file 6. [36] J. S. Coulter (deputy postmaster general, Ottawa) to Sir Spencer Walpole (secretary to the Post Office, London), 20 Dec. 1897, ibid. [37] For a good account of the Imperial Penny Postage campaign, concentrating on Canada and William Mulock, see Pike, ‘National Interest and Imperial Yearnings’, 22–48. [38] A uniform empire (and later commonwealth) letter rate, significantly lower than that for foreign destinations, survived into the early 1970s. [39] The Times, 24 Dec. 1898. [40] ‘Letters, post cards and other articles’ despatched from the UK to British colonies, shown in pounds weight: 431,800 (1897–98); 989,000 (1903–04) (Heaton, ‘Imperial Postal Services’, 314). [41] With the exception of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Rhodesia and some distant islands, to which the charge was two pence halfpenny. [42] Whitaker's Almanack 1906, 466, 469. [43] Minutes of conference on postage within the British empire, 12 July 1898, NAC RG3 vol.2749, file 6. [44] ‘We hold a vaster Empire than has been!/Nigh half the race of man is subject to our Queen,/Nigh half the wide, wide earth is ours in fee,/And where her rule comes all are free.’ Notes on the 1898 map stamp (ibid., file 4). [45] This dramatically enlarges features the closer they are to the poles, so that Canada (3.8 million square miles in area) appears larger than the entire African continent (11.7 million square miles). [46] See for example, Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience. [47] Berger, The Sense of Power, 259. [48] See Jeffery, ‘Kruger's Farmers, Strathcona's Horse, Sir George Clarke's Camels and the Kaiser's Battleships’, 188–202. [49] In the L'Strange collection of stamps, Queensland Museum, Brisbane. I am most grateful to Chris Lloyd for showing me this material. [50] Collins and Fathers, eds., The Postage Stamps of New Zealand, 194. This exceptionally valuable work draws extensively on official Post & Telegraph Department documentation, which has not survived in the New Zealand National Archives. A catastrophic fire in 1961 destroyed the departmental records, a warning perhaps against housing government departments in wooden office-buildings. [51] See Jeffery, The British Army and the Crisis of Empire, p.1, line 1. [52] Rose, King George V, 40–42; Wilson, The Royal Philatelic Collection, 5–44. [53] The Times, Hail and Farewell, 158. [54] Rose, King George V, 185–86, 305–06. [55] Hardie, The Political Influence of the British Monarchy, is, however, curiously silent on this application of the royal prerogative. [56] McQueen, ‘The Australian Stamp’, 81. [57] See Best, Humanity in Warfare, 338 n.23. The wider context of this debate may be followed in Gavin Souter's ‘history of sentiment’, Lion and Kangaroo; and, for other visualisations of Australia, see McDonald, Federation. [58] Both designs survived for some years, but by the mid-1920s the king's head had supplanted the kangaroo for lower-value stamps. The quest for the ideal Australian philatelic icon continues, see Humphries, ‘The Gladdy Stamp’, 126–27. [59] Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal. [60] See correspondence between the colonial secretary and the postmaster general, Dec. 1917–Apr. 1918, Public Archives of Newfoundland (PAN), GN 2/5/356. [61] Note by J. A, Robinson, n.d. (c. March 1918), British Postal Museum and Archive (London) (BPMA), De La Rue Newfoundland correspondence (microfilm), vol.1, fol.98. [62] Ibid. [63] Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, 189. [64] Deputy colonial secretary to postmaster general, 4 Dec. 1918, PAN, GN 2/5/356; Boggs, The Postage Stamps and Postal History of Newfoundland, 93. [65] This account is drawn from Collins and Fathers, eds., The Postage Stamps of New Zealand, 380–82. [66] Ibid., 381. [67] See Crown Agents correspondence with Bahamas, 24 May 1919, and Barbados, July–Aug. 1919, BPMA, De La Rue-Crown Agents correspondence (microfilm), vol.68, fols.38 and 62. [68] Colonial secretary, Bermuda, to Crown Agents, 29 Oct. 1919, ibid., fol.194. [69] For the West Indian experience, see Howe, Race, War and Nationalism; Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War; and Joseph, ‘The British West Indies Regiment 1914–1918’, 94–124. [70] Howe, Race, War and Nationalism, 191–92. [71] For a brief account of the exhibition in the context of changing British–imperial relationships, see Keith Jeffery, ‘British Isles/British Empire’, 13–41. [72] See Crown Agents to De La Rue & Co., 2 Dec, 1916, and Wilfrid M. Wigley (acting administrator, St Kitts) to Crown Agents, 22 Sept. 1919, both noting royal approval for proposed stamps, BPMA, De La Rue–Crown Agents correspondence (microfilm), vol.68, fols.193 and 150. [73] Berriedale Keith, The King and the Imperial Crown, 358. He also added inaccurately that ‘no longer is any attempt made to apply this rule to the Dominions’. As is noted below, royal approval was asserted for silver jubilee issues. [74] Sir Warren Fisher (permanent secretary to the Treasury) to Sir Evelyn Murray (secretary to the Post Office), 10 Dec. 1923, quoting a letter from Sir Frederick Ponsonby (treasurer to the King), BPMA, POST 33/2205A, M13984/35. [75] ‘Instructions to artists for preparation of designs for stamps’, 16 Jan. 1924, ibid., M1432/28. [76] Minutes of Stamp Design Committee, 19 Feb. 1924 (ibid.), and Note by Eric Gill, 31 Jan. 1924, BPMA, POST 33/4840 M13984/35. Gill, ironically, had reviled both industry and monarchy, but he did not let his beliefs stand in the way of a commission (MacCarthy, Eric Gill, 271). [77] Lord Stamfordham (private secretary to the King) to Murray, 28 Feb. 1924, BPMA, POST 33/4840 M13984/35. [78] Not just stamps, but coins and medals too: at the silver jubilee celebrations on 6 May 1935 at Kakamega, western Kenya, the district commissioner observed that ‘King George was present, even to the meanest of his subjects, in his image on their coins, on the medals of their chiefs’ (John Lonsdale, ‘State and Peasantry in Colonial Africa’, 113). [79] Minute by G. L. M. Clauson, 30 Jan. 1934, The National Archives (TNA, formerly the Public Record Office), CO 323/1274/5; copy in British Library Philatelic Collections (BLPC) Crown Agents file G/1288/23. [80] Minute by R. V. Vernon, 30 Jan. 1934, ibid. Vernon had been assistant secretary to the Irish Convention in 1917–18. [81] F. G. Lee (Colonial Office) to A. Napier (Post Office), 14 Feb. 1934, BPMA, POST 33/4646; draft copy in CO 323/1274/5. [82] Minute to postmaster general, 16 Feb. 1934, BPMA, POST 33/4646, and postmaster general to colonial secretary, 28 Feb. 1934, CO 323/1274/5. Only one commemorative issue, for the 1929 Postal Union Congress, had been produced in Britain since the Empire Exhibition. [83] Memo by Sir Donald Banks, 8 June 1934, BPMA, POST 33/4646. [84] Memo for artists, 30 July 1934, ibid. [85] Submissions from Gill, Farleigh & Howard, 15 Sept., 8 and 15 Oct. 1934, ibid. MacDonald Gill was Eric Gill's eldest brother. [86] Minutes by A. R. Kidner, 21 Sept., 25 Oct. and 22 Nov. 1934, ibid. [87] Bates, ‘1935 Silver Jubilee’, 15. [88] Colonial Office to Crown Agents, 9 Aug. 1934, BLPC Crown Agents file G/1288/23; draft copy in CO 323/1274/5. See also correspondence in Crown Agents Commemorative Issue file, Aug. 1934–Dec. 1935, BPMA, microfilm reel no.78. The printers concerned were Bradbury Wilkinson, Waterlow and De La Rue. The descriptions which follow of the proposed designs are taken from material in the Royal Philatelic Collection. [89] Frederick Wall, ‘The Silver Jubilee Stamps’, 144–45 (emphasis in original). [90] Government of India Department of Industries and Labour to secretary of state for India, 7 Nov. 1934, British Library, India Office Records, L/F/7/2132, fol.50. [91] See papers in ‘Introduction of Air Mail Postage Stamps’ file, ibid., L/F/7/2129, fols.1–86. [92] Hoare to Lord Willingdon (viceroy), 23 Nov. 1934, ibid., L/F/7/2132, fol.38. [93] Willingdon to Hoare, 9 Dec. 1934, ibid., fol.23. [94] Memo from New Zealand Prime Minister's Office, 8 Nov. 1934, BPMA, POST 52/543. [95] Undated minute, ibid. The artist's design and the design as used are illustrated in Collins and Fathers, eds., The Postal Stamps of New Zealand, 390. [96] The phrase is F. L. W. Wood's; see Ross, ‘Reluctant Dominion or Dutiful Daughter?’, 28–43. [97] Postmaster general draft letter to the press, March 1935, Australian Archives, Victorian Office (Melbourne), MP341/1. [98] For the Anzac stamp, see Cochrane, Simpson and the Donkey, 224–5; and the stimulating remarks in McQueen, ‘The Australian Stamp’, 86–87. [99] High commissioner, London, to prime minister, 1 Nov. 1934, Australian Archives (Melbourne), MP341/1 1935/6377. [100] Martin, ‘Was There a British Empire?’, 562–69. [101] 4 Aug 1920, Crown Agents to De La Rue, BPMA, De La Rue–Crown Agents correspondence (microfilm), vol.70, fol.99. [102] Berriedale Keith, The King and the Imperial Crown, 452. [103] For a stimulating exploration of the Irish experience, see Morris, ‘Our Own Devices’; and, for the postal aspects, Dulin, Ireland's Transition. [104] In the House of Commons, Sir Charles Oman complained about the new Irish government defacing stamps ‘by blocking out the head of His Majesty by an inscription in Erse’. He also asserted (inaccurately) that the word which was ‘believed to mean “Provisional” [sealadac] and which is stamped across His Majesty's head is by a mistake in the dictionary a word which really means “preposterous”’. The postmaster general declined ‘to enter into a dispute with my hon. Friend on this point’ (Hansard, 7 Mar. 1922, 151 H.C. Deb. 5th ser., col.1058). Oman (who may have been wilfully misled) was confusing sealadac with seafoideac, which does mean ‘preposterous’ or ‘ludicrous’.