Brendan and the Shared House

New Month Old Post: first posted 3rd February, 2019. (Not that old, but few current followers will have seen it).

I always assumed we would see each other again one day. We would go to the pub and get pissed and laugh about the people and the good times in the shared houses in Leeds. But it was not to be.

We would remember Ron, the guy who never stopped talking, notorious for ‘ronopolising’ the conversation with his mind-numbing ‘ronologues’ which always began “Did I tell you about the time I …”, and if you had ever been somewhere, done something or seen something, he had always been somewhere, done something or seen something better. He used to leave his towel draped over the hot water cylinder in the bathroom and it stank. He never washed it. You would think a hospital bacteriology technician would have been worried about bugs.

And Pete, who gassed the place out with the peculiar aromatic smell of Holland House pipe tobacco. He smoked even when it was his turn to cook, speckling the plates with ash. He once accidentally tipped the thing over my food and instead of being sorry just laughed and got on with his own unconcerned. Anyone would think he owned the place. Actually, he did. He was always asking “Can I trouble you gentlemen for some rent please?”

Then there was Nick, who could swear like only someone from the back streets of Manchester could, and Larry who made himself dainty little jellies and custards every Monday and lined them up uncovered on the kitchen table for several days (we had no fridge). And Roger, the Ph.D. student with his clever cryptic comebacks, and Paul with the outrageous ginger beard and silly Lancashire accent. And Gavin who was so well organised you had to make an appointment three weeks in advance just to ask him something. And Dave, the Geordie, who did an animated rendition of The Lampton Worm, and was on holiday when the electoral register form came, so we put his middle name down as Aloysius.

And who could forget ‘Pervy Pete’, the television rent collector, who came each month to empty the coin box, greeted us “hello mensies”, and lingered uninvited to take an unseemly interest in which bedrooms we slept? That television always ran out of money right in the middle of Monty Python or just before a punchline in Jokers Wild.

The others came and went, but Brendan and I stayed longest. We were from ordinary Yorkshire backgrounds, shared the same sense of humour and had under-achieved our ‘A’ Levels. Brendan was the liveliest among us, and the best looking. In his long Afghan coat, with his smooth young face and long centrally-parted hair, the kids in the street called him “that lad who looks like David Cassidy.” He made us laugh with his silly puns and deliberate misunderstandings. He could play guitar better than me and instantly put chords to almost any song at all. He could throw a lighted cigarette in the air and catch it the right way round in his mouth. He had an impossibly beautiful girl friend who was training to be a doctor.

We were both desperate to escape our mundane jobs, me from an accountants’ office and Brendan from a veterinary laboratory, and did so around the same time in 1977, me to university and Brendan on Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). He dreamed of some idyllic tropical paradise where nubile young girls danced to the drum-beat naked in the twilight, and was dismayed to be sent to sub-Saharan Africa, to an isolated rural village in Northern Ghana called Pong-Tamale, around 400 miles from the coast. It was not even much of a change of job: he went to run a laboratory in a veterinary college.

Pong-Tamale in 2010 (click to play)

In those days, people still wrote letters, and I looked forward to his aerograms dropping through the letterbox with their exotic stamps and tales of distant Africa. Things were not easy. It was oppressively hot. He suffered tropical ailments and diseases. They were short of supplies and equipment. He asked to be sent books as there was little to read and no television, not that they always had electricity to run one.

Yet, after an initial term of eighteen months, he decided to stay. He found a salaried post for three years with the Overseas Development Ministry in the city of Kumasi, about two hundred and fifty miles to the south. Then, after a year back in England, he found a post at Mtwara in Tanzania, and then another at Morogoro. It sounded like a television wildlife documentary: horses, Land Rovers, lions, zebras, and trekking in the Ngorongoro highlands.

I saw him a couple of times over these years during his brief visits home. He was now married with children, and I was busy with my life too. Letters became less frequent. He suggested I visit them in East Africa but it was never the right time.

Then we lost touch. We both moved within a short space of time and I no longer had his address. Due to a downturn in the property market, we rented out my wife’s house where we had been living, and it was ten years before we finally sold it. In emptying it we came across various papers stuffed at the back of a cupboard by tenants, including a ten year old unopened letter from Brendan.

Replying after ten years seemed pointless. Perhaps I should have tried to find him, but didn’t. Did I fear the collision of past and present? We had surely both moved on.

But, it was already too late, as I distressingly discovered yet another decade later. Out of pure curiosity, I typed his distinctive name into a genealogy web site and was shaken to find a record of his death in 2001. It took more time to find what had happened. They had returned permanently to England in the nineteen-nineties, and Brendan had died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the age of 49. He had been living less than ten miles away. All that time ago, and I had no idea.

We’ll never have that drink now.

Pounds, Shillings and Pence

The new ‘Turing’ £50 note brings yet another change to our U.K. currency. There seem to have been so many in recent years.

They used to be rare. When my grandpa gave me this set of Queen Elizabeth II coins in 1953, their denominations and basic appearance had remained more or less unchanged for decades. In theory, some coins in circulation were over two-hundred years old. Their nicknames – tanner, bob, florin – were part of popular culture.

My dad put the Queen Elizabeth coins safe in his black metal box and took them out now and again to let me look. I liked the lady in armour with her fork and shield (“Britannia,” he told me), the elaborate sailing ship (“The Golden Hind”), the different lions of the English and Scottish shillings, and the young Queen on the ‘heads’ sides. The penny and half-crown were biggest, but my favourite was one of the smallest, the tiny farthing with a “robin” on the back [as pointed out in the comments, it is a wren, and a sixty-eight year old misconception].

They were shiny bronze and silver then, but, like me, they have tarnished. Those whose packaging has also failed to preserve them will tell you there were twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings, 240 pennies, to the pound. We can still, in our heads (Weaver?), do things like add 14s 10d to 11s 8d to get £1  6s 6d (i.e. fourteen shillings and ten pence to eleven shillings and eight pence, often written 14/10 and 11/8). It was a great way to bamboozle foreigners.

The only recent change to the coinage had been the introduction of the twelve-sided yellow threepenny bit in 1937 in place of a smaller, round, silver coin that was discontinued in 1945. The last significant change before that had been almost a century earlier with the introduction of the two-shilling piece in 1849. As one-tenth of a pound, it had been created with decimalisation in mind – a rare example of a government planning well ahead.

Since 1953, the only thing not to have changed is the Queen. Changes were slow at first but since then most coins have changed twice. First to go was the farthing which became so insignificant that none were minted after 1956. They were removed from circulation in 1961. The halfpenny (‘aipny as we called it) followed in 1969, and the half-crown in 1970, although that was to prepare for decimalisation in 1971, fifty years ago.

Decimalisation put paid to most of the rest. Pennies (‘d’) were superseded by New Pence (‘p’). One New Pence was worth roughly two and a half old pennies. Five new coins came in (½p, 1p, 5p, 10p and 50p) and the old ones were gradually withdrawn.  For six and a half months we used the old and the new side-by-side and became adept at switching between. That’s why we’re mentally nimble. One pound six shillings and sixpence? Easy! £1.32½. Some of the old coins had exact decimal equivalents, the lowest common factor being 6d which was worth 2½p, so provided you used the old coins in sixpenny clusters you were fine.

What came next? It’s nigh impossible to remember but I’m one of those sad people who look things up and make lists. 

• The old sixpence, shilling and two shilling coins remained in use after decimalisation as 2½p, 5p and 10p coins. In fact, the new 5p and 10p coins were identical in size and weight to their older counterparts and had been introduced in 1968 to get us used to the idea. The sixpence lasted until 1980, and the shilling and two shillings until the early 1990s.
• Also in 1968, a seven-sided 50p coin had replaced the paper ‘ten-bob note’.
• In 1982, the inscription ‘NEW PENCE’ was changed on all coins to show the denomination, e.g. ‘TEN PENCE’. 
• A seven-sided 20p coin was introduced 1982 and a round £1 coin in 1983.  
• The ½p coin was withdrawn in 1984 and the paper £1 note in 1988. 
• Three of the original decimal coins were replaced by smaller versions: the 5p in 1990, the 10p in 1992, and the 50p in 1997. 
• A £2 coin was introduced in 1998, the first bi-metallic coin in Britain since the 1692 tin farthing. 
  
• The original round £1 coin was replaced by a twelve-sided bi-metallic coin in 2017. It looks like the old threepenny bit and doesn’t seem to buy very much more.
• There have also been several changes in the physical size and design of banknotes over these years, most recently between 2016 and 2021 when paper banknotes were replaced by polymer ones which slither and slide restlessly in your pocket and refuse to stay folded.
  

My grandfather probably thought the 1953 set of Elizabeth II coins would be a good investment. Not so. Even if the packaging had preserved them in mint uncirculated condition, which it hasn’t, despite not being opened in sixty-eight years, you would do well to get back the inflation adjusted equivalent of their face value: £9.50 for 7s 4¾d (seven shillings, four and three farthings).

Anyone would think it just a cynical ploy by the Royal Mint to make money from making money. I hang on to them only because they are things of beauty. They still live in my dad’s black metal box. These too:

1965 set issued on the death of Sir Winston Churchill, including a rarely-used five-shilling coin, the ‘Churchill Crown’. This was the first time an image of anyone other than a monarch had appeared on a British coin, showing the extreme high regard in which Churchill was held.

Another pre-decimalisation Queen Elizabeth II set dated 1966.

Crowns (five-shilling coins) commemorating the 1951 Festival of Britain, the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and the 1981 Royal Wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer.
(Obverse ‘heads’ sides above, reverse ‘tails’ sides below). 

Carolus II Dei Gratia Mag Br Fra et Hib Rex

(first posted 5th May, 2015)

It is by a long chalk the oldest thing I own apart from the worse-than-senseless blocks and stones in the garden - a 1668 Charles II silver shilling. It is quite worn and the King’s face is damaged but the images are clear. A cautious numismatist would probably describe it as being in F or ‘Fine’ condition, just short of VF or ‘Very Fine’.

The ‘head’ side or obverse is inscribed “CAROLUS II DEI GRATIA” – Charles II by the grace of God – which continues on the ‘tail’ side or reverse, “MAG BR FRA ET HIB REX” – King of Great Britain, France and Ireland. The claim to France was historical but one of the shields on the reverse still displays the fleur de lys, the emblem of the King of France. The other shields portray the three English lions passant (i.e. walking, some heraldrists hold them to be leopards), the Scottish lion rampant (i.e. standing) and the Hibernian (Irish) harp. I think the shilling is the variation known as ‘second bust’ but I have insufficient experience to be sure.

The coin was struck – literally because it is a hammered coin – almost three hundred and fifty years ago, which is so long ago it is hard to imagine. It is dated ten years after the death of Oliver Cromwell and a couple of years after the Great Fire of London. Pepys was writing his diary, John Dryden was Poet Laureate, and Isaac Newton was discovering the calculus or ‘fluxions’ and about to be appointed a Cambridge professor of mathematics. England would soon be at war with the Dutch.

I can tell you how I came by it. My dad swapped it for a pair of boots with a farming acquaintance who found it by chance at the side of a newly ploughed field, the exact location now unknown. It was rare chance because this was well before the days of metal detecting. By now the boots will have dulled and decayed, but the shilling still shines.

A collector wanting a similar example for his or her collection today would have to pay around a hundred and fifty pounds – it could be two or three times that without the damage to the face. I don’t really care. Why sell it?

But what was it worth in the seventeenth century? It depends how you estimate it. In terms of purchasing power it would be the equivalent of around just seven pounds fifty today, but in terms of what someone might earn it would be worth between one and two hundred pounds. It depends whether you use retail price inflation or earnings inflation.

I turn it in my fingers and wonder what other hands held it, and how many. Placing it in history is easy but we can never know who owned it, who it was passed on to, what it bought, who lost it, what its loss meant, how it was lost or for how long it lay in the Howdenshire field where it was re-discovered.

Could it have been lost in drunken reverie? Perhaps it was some unfortunate farm labourer’s wage for the day, or a ‘King’s shilling’ taken by someone newly enlisted in the army or navy. Or did it belong to someone for whom the loss might have been a little more bearable, accidently dropped perhaps by a rich landowner and his farm foreman while paying a group of workers?

Some things we can never know but one day there may be an answer my final question, “Where will it be in another three hundred and fifty years, in 2370?” That is a date that seems like science fiction.

Beer Mats

Another blogger (the multi-talented Yorkshire Pudding) posted about a beer mat he had designed for his daughter’s recent wedding. One commentator said her grandfather collected beer mats but she thought that “In England they don’t seem much of a feature.”

Well, Ursula, my group of friends collected them in our youth. I stuck mine on the wall of a room above the garage at my parents’ house. This is part of a black and white photograph taken in 1970:

Most are English but a few came from exchange trips to Belgium (where you could drink alcohol in cafés at sixteen). I can make out the following:

Belgian mats: Maes Pils, Cristal Alken, Pela, Siréne, Barze, juni vakantie maand, Orval, Gereons Kölsch, Kess Kölsch, Diekirk, Falken, Sester. I can’t make out the mat with the bell which appears across the top and several times lower down, nor the one with the black horse – it isn’t “Black Horse”.  

English mats: HB (Hull Brewery), Brewmaster Export Pale Ale, Whitbread Tankard, Whitbread Forest Brown, Tetley, Flowers Keg Bitter, Bass Export Ale, Have a mild Van Dyck cigar with your Bass Blue Triangle, Brown Peter for Strength, Strongbow Cider, Woodpecker Cider, Barnsley Bitter, Alpine Lager, Whitbread Trophy Bitter, Whitbread Pale Ale, Calypso, Youngers Tartan, Duttons Pale.

And among my box of colour slides and black and white negatives were these slightly later beer mats. Commodore Pudding will surely be delighted to see the one from The Travellers Rest at Long Riston, just three miles from his childhood village. Can’t remember my visit to the establishment though.

 

Cartophilic Concerns

My mother’s grandfather died when she was ten. She remembered his speech being difficult to understand following a series of operations to remove parts of his tongue. Born in the eighteen-seventies, he had smoked from a fairly young age, beginning with a clay pipe and later transferring to cigarettes.

One of his legacies, so I believed, was a box of around fifty complete sets of cigarette cards stored in ten-cigarette packets of the time. There were athletes and sportsmen, plants and animals, military uniforms, battleships, film stars, garden flowers – together they made what seemed like a complete encyclopaedia. Who was it who observed that children miss out on so much knowledge these days by not smoking?

As I so obviously enjoyed taking out the cards and turning them through, my grandma gave them to me. Very soon, for an eight year-old, I had developed a prodigious expertise in film stars, household hints, flags of the world, ships of the British Navy, and so on, all without realising the peculiarly antiquated nature of my wisdom.

Inadvisably, I took the cards outside to the yellow shed where I played. They looked pretty impressive lined along a ledge in their packets. There was the bearded Hero sailor inside the Players Navy Cut lifebelt with Nottingham Castle on the back, the red with white oval of Carreras Craven “A” bearing a trade mark in the shape of a black cat, another Carreras brand actually called Black Cat which claimed to be made from choice, unadulterated, matured tobacco, and the earthy brown packet of W. D. & H. O. Wills Capstan Full Strength with its seventeen prize medals on the back. I wondered what the medals were for: Loudest cough? Greatest production of phlegm?

Most of the sets were gum-backed so that, when moistened, they could be stuck into albums. Of course, it was damp in the shed, and within a few weeks the contents of most of the packets had turned into solid cardboard blocks. If it happened now, I would at least try to separate the individual cards with steam or by immersing them in water, but my mother simply threw them out. Because of their associations, I suspect she would rather I had never had them in the first place.

King George V Jubilee Album
(see below for the full album)

One set survives in an album: ‘The Reign of King George V 1910-1935’ (Wills, 1935) which was issued to commemorate the Silver Jubilee. Five non-gummed sets survive in their packets: ‘Famous Film Scenes’ (Gallaher, 1935), ‘The Navy’ (Gallaher, 1937), ‘Trains of the World’ (Gallaher, 1937), ‘Garden Hints’ (Wills, 1938) and ‘Aeroplanes’ (Gallaher, 1939). These dates I found on the internet.

The dates give me a problem. All the surviving sets were issued after my great-grandfather had died in 1934, and from what I can remember of them, so were the sets that were thrown out. So there must have been another smoker. Not my grandparents – they were rare non-smokers. So who collected the cards? Did my great-grandfather collect any at all, or is that just a myth?

When sets contain forty-eight or fifty cards, even just one full set demonstrates grim perseverance and dedication. You would have to puff your way through at least five hundred cigarettes per set, assuming one card per packet of ten and enough serious fellow smokers to be able to swap your duplicates. You would have to be at least a regular ten or fifteeen a day man (women being far more sensible) to collect fifty sets.

One person who might fit the profile is my grandmother’s brother. He was secretary and treasurer of the village football and cricket clubs, held similar positions in the local football leagues and involved himself in a great many other clubs and social activities. He would have had plenty of acquaintances eager to swap duplicates. Was he the card-collecting smoker? If so, why did my my mother let me think it was her grandfather rather then her uncle? Was it because he died in a similarly hideous way at the age of only thirty-three? I don’t think she wanted to talk about it at all.

There are questions and questions you wished you’d asked at the time after it’s too late to ask them.

click to follow link to full set

I do remember collecting sets of cards ourselves when I was little. One was the exciting and mysterious ‘Out Into Space’ set issued from 1956. After that it was wild flowers. But these were tea cards rather than cigarette cards. Even though the larger packets of Brooke Bond PG Tips gave you three or four at a time, you had to drink gallons of the stuff to complete a set.

I still do: four or five pint-mugs per day. Excessive tea drinking can deplete your calcium levels and may not be all that great for prostates, but provided you let it cool a bit, at least it doesn’t give you tongue cancer.

The complete King George V Silver Jubilee album (click to enlarge):
(I especially like number 36)

Vulgar Money Bags

When you start your first job there are all kinds of bewildering things you don’t understand and daren’t ask about. On my first day, two people proof-checking newly-typed accounts by reading them out loud to one another were pronouncing the numbers in a strange and mystifying way – “eight-tie pounds” instead of “eighty pounds”, “four-tie pounds one and three” instead of “forty pounds one and three”. It was just one of a number of strange rituals I hoped would make sense before too long.*

So when I was sent to work with Les and it was time for our lunchtime sandwiches, I didn’t question why he was sorting through bags of coins. It seemed odd and eccentric, but I tried to take all the jingling and clinking in my stride as if it were as normal as reading the newspaper.

“Wow!” he said jubilantly, breaking the verbal silence, “Nineteen-eighteen Kings Norton.”

I had no idea what he meant.

“That’s two this week. I got a nineteen-o-two low tide yesterday.”

I owned up to not having a clue what he was talking about.

It turned out Les was a coin collector, actually quite a knowledgeable and civilised one, but at lunchtimes he became an uncivilised, vulgar profiteer. A couple of times a week he would go to the bank, change £5 into copper or £20 into silver, and sort through it for rare coins.

He explained what he was looking for. In some years, especially 1912, 1918 and 1919, the Royal Mint had been short of capacity and outsourced some of its production to two Birmingham companies, the Kings Norton Metal Company and Ralph Heaton and Sons. The pennies they produced are identifiable by mint marks in the form of the tiny letters ‘KN’ and ‘H’ to the left of the date, and these coins are sought by collectors.

1918 Kings Norton and 1919 Heaton pennies - the mint marks can be seen to the left of the dates

There were other rarities too, esoteric variations in design. 1902 ‘low tide’ pennies and halfpennies were known as such because the sea level on the reverse side of the coin was lower than the point at which Britannia's legs join, rather than level as in the examples above. Still more obscure was the 1926 ‘modified effigy’ penny in which the head of King George V was struck slightly more faintly than usual, identifiable by the absence of full stops in the engraver’s initials ‘BM’ on the King’s neck, and by the ‘I’ of the word ‘DEI’ pointing directly to a rim tooth rather than a space between. The first person to spot these minute differences must have had extraordinary powers of observation. Other rarities included the very valuable 1933 penny, and even some relatively recently minted coins, such as the 1959 Scottish shilling (Scottish shillings had one standing lion on the back, whereas English shillings had three walking lions). The list went on and on, but all these varieties were sought by collectors who would pay good money for them.

It sounded good – vulgar profiteer that’s me – so I decided to have a try. I brazenly walked into the National Provincial Bank in Park Square and requested £5 in pennies.

“Are you a customer, Sir?”

“Well, no, but ...”

“Sorry Sir, we only provide change for customers.”

The “Sir” was particularly irksome, an apparent display of respect that wasn’t.

Things went better after that. It seems I simply picked the wrong branch on the wrong day. None of the other banks were obstructive; they changed notes into coins without question, and then back again when I returned with rarities removed and replaced, not that I found many.

Halfpennies in a Whitman Folder

I never did make anything out of it. I still have the few rare(ish) coins I found – an 1876 Heaton penny and a handful of 1912, 1918 and 1919 Heaton and Kings Norton pennies. Within my limited means, I also collected some complete sets of halfpennies 1902-1936 and 1937-1967, mounted them in Whitman Folders and advertised them for sale in Exchange and Mart, and got a couple of orders which at least covered the cost of the advert. But none of the half-dozen 1926 pennies I kept have the modified effigy and I never did find a 1902 low tide. What I did find and keep had been in circulation so long that their condition is generally lower than collectors are looking for. Perhaps they’re worth a total of around fifty pounds at best, and that’s at today’s values.

Things are slightly better with silver coins – i.e. ‘silver’ threepenny bits (which preceded the twelve-sided nickel-brass ones), sixpences, shillings, florins (two shillings) and half-crowns (two shillings and six pence). Before 1920 these coins were 92.5% silver, and from 1920 to 1946 they were 50% silver, thus irrespective of their rarity to collectors, they are worth well above face value simply because of the silver bullion content. At today’s prices, pre-1920 half-crowns are worth around £4.50 each, and ones dated between 1920 and 1946 around £2.50. When you consider that is only around twenty times face value for the 50% silver, then any put away around 1970 have hardly kept pace with inflation.

By the time I was looking in 1969 and 1970, very few pre-1947 silver coins remained in circulation and practically none from before 1920. I have a little bag of around a dozen pre-1947 half-crowns. Goodness knows how I could afford not to spend them.

Queen Victoria 1890 Shilling 1890 and 1891 Half Crown

My dad revealed he had played the same game many years earlier when there was still a fair amount of pre-1920 silver around. Most of his squirrelled-away silver is very worn and worth only bullion value, but among it are two nice Victorian examples, an 1890 shilling and an 1891 half-crown, although even to collectors they’re worth no more than around £25 together.

At least searching hopefully through bags of coins seemed a relaxing and constructive lunchtime diversion. No pointy fingers for taking full and proper lunchbreaks in those days.


* They pronounced the numbers in this way to avoid potential errors, so for example "four-tie" meaning "forty" would not be misheard as "fourteen".

Philately will get you nowhere (unless you’re Dennis J. Hanson)

 

The ads were irresistible: 

ALL FREE OVER 200 STAMPS PLUS THE FAMOUS PENNY BLACK & CAPE TRIANGULAR FACSIMILES The famous 1840 British “PENNY BLACK” and the 1853 “CAPE TRIANGULAR” facsimiles (originals worth about £45) plus a genuine dealer’s mixture of 200 unsorted stamps (Catalogued over 30/-.), all ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just ask to see our New Approvals. (Please tell your parents.)

This old PENNY RED and approx. 500 stamps for only 1/-. Here’s a super bargain that no collector can afford to miss! Send only 1/- today for this guaranteed and unsorted collection of about 500 stamps, often containing scarce and unusual stamps, plus this Great Britain 1d. Red issued 100 years ago. ... This very valuable offer ... is to introduce our Latest Approval Books. Please tell your parents when sending for Approvals.

This famous BLACK SWAN plus 213 stamps all FREE! The 213 are all DIFFERENT and include 14 Special Stamps (catalogued at over 10/-) such as the 80 year old British ‘Penny Lilac’. Whole collection is catalogued at over 45/-, yet it will be sent FREE to all who ask for our New Approvals. Please tell your Parents.

Wow! Two hundred FREE stamps! Five hundred for a shilling! ‘The Children’s Newspaper’, ‘Meccano Magazine’ and most comics were full of such offerings from a massed approval of stamp dealers – heaps of stamps free, or for just a few pence, if only you would ask to see their Approvals. The most prolific pedlars were the Bridgnorth Stamp Company and - undoubtedly the best because it was just along the road from where I lived - Dennis Hanson’s Philatelic Services of Eastrington. Some of his promotions took the form of a super stamp quiz. 

The quiz is from 1963 but for anyone who fancies submitting a late entry (at the time of writing I believed the business still exisited) I’ve added my answer attempts below at the end. I suggest you increase the value of the 3d. stamp to take account of inflation (second class should do it), and oh yes, don’t forget to tell your parents.

Dennis Hanson started buying bulk stamps while still at school in Scarborough in 1935, sorting them into small packets, and selling them to his school friends and also through his father’s general store. He moved to Eastrington two years later and over the years has traded under a variety of names including Philatelic Services, D. J. Hanson, The Stamp Club and The Universal Stamp Company. He was still in business seventy-five years later although he has never gone online. Over this time, dozens of Eastrington ladies have found agreeable employment fixing stamps into Approvals booklets and posting them out to customers.

Dennis Hanson and his staff in 1993 (from Howdenshire History)

As one of those customers it’s not easy to explain the appeal of stamp collecting to the screen-fixated youngsters of today, yet it used to be among the most popular childhood hobbies for both girls and boys. You could spend hours in exaltation, sorting through piles of stamps, carefully separating them from their envelope corners in a bowl of water, and drying them out between sheets of blotting paper.

The attraction was of course in the sheer beauty of the stamps, their vivid colours and stunning art work, and the way they captured the imagination by association with the history and geography of the world - conflict in Europe, communist revolution, African exploration, colonial independence. Looking again at my old stamp album (having just retrieved it from the loft where it was in a brown paper parcel wrapped up long ago by my dad). I’m amazed to see how much time I must have spent drawing little maps and transcribing information about different countries.

Stamps from Aden, where my aunt and uncle lived for a time, overflowed their page very quickly

 

Dennis Hanson clearly had a great knack for marketing. The whole purpose of the give away offers was to entice you into spending your pocket money on his Approvals which were mouth-wateringly presented in little chequebook sized booklets. Even when you managed to resist and return them all unpurchased it wasn’t too long before another booklet arrived, and then another, and you had a job to stop them coming.

A wadge of approval booklet pages from which the stamps have been removed show that I didn’t resist. I spent a small fortune – around 60 empty pages with a total value approaching £5 (which would have a purchasing power of around £100 today, and more than double that in terms of earnings): “Very scarce set of 6 mint & used Albania 1917 Koritza Eagles 2/-”, “Complete fine-used set of 2 Hungary 1952 Railway Day (catalogued 1/6d.) 9d.”, “Handsome set of 6 mint Paraguay 1958 President Stroessner 1/6”. And then a page in red ink: 

Superb stamps given Free. They are not for sale they are FREE . . . Set of 3 unused Herm Island 1954 Triangular Sea-Birds, local stamps with a face value of 1/2d., from part of the United Kingdom. Now obsolete and scarce. . . . YES, ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE. If you purchase 5/- worth or more from this Approval Book you may take this page right out of the book and keep it. These grand stamps will add lots of value and interest to your collection! It’s our way of showing our appreciation of your valued patronage.

This doesn’t count yet more pennies expended at the corner shops that also plied philatelic produce in racks of cellophane packets.

Very soon, my spring-backed, loose-leafed Movaleaf Stamp Album, bought one afternoon from Clifford Moss of 31 Woodhouse Lane on a trip to Leeds with my dad, was bulging with stamps from all the old countries, many no longer in existence, such as “Jugo-Slavia”, the Weimar Republic of Germany, and British colonies such as Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. 

Still more interesting is my dad’s 1930s Triumph stamp album where among many other surprising things we find Queen Victoria’s head adorning stamps from the six Australian territories which issued stamps separately until 1913. It’s also surprising to note that my dad must have continued to collect stamps into his twenties and thirties because his album contains lots of Elizabeth II issues.

As with most people, my interest waned as I grew older, although losing myself in my album now, in reverie, I could easily imagine taking it up once more, becoming expert in a specific area, something unfashionable and politically incorrect, perhaps stamps of the British Empire, assimilating all the lessons from history they bring with them.

What began to turn me off was in fact the antics of the very same Dennis Hanson who so altruistically cultivated my interest in the hobby in the first place. His bulk packets of unsorted stamps contained far too many cheap and flimsy ones from far eastern countries, and a disproportionately high number portraying the grim bespectacled face of King Baudouin of Belgium who looked like the dad of one of my friends.

Even more unforgivable were the Approvals that weren’t really proper stamps at all. The Herm Island stamps mentioned above were one example, used only for a private postal service from Herm to the nearest official post office on Guernsey, and obviously printed as a commodity to sell to tourists. But it was the stamps of South Molucca that really annoyed me.

“These Stamps will never be catalogued” it said on the front of one booklet. On another “Stamps of the South Moluccas Republic and the Forgotten War. ... although not listed by Gibbons, they are undoubtedly of philatelic interest.” And although they may have looked magnificent with their colourful images of the mammals, birds, fish, butterflies and plants of a small group of Indonesian islands, the republic never gained independence. Some stamps were issued by a would-be government in exile in the Netherlands, and others were produced without authorisation by a German stamp dealer. None were ever postally used and no reputable dealer should ever have touched them. Four pages crammed-full of bogus Republik Maluku Selatan stamps in my album show I was well and truly taken in. 

So, Mr. Hanson, having worked up a fury over being diddled fifty years ago, I’ve decided to send in my quiz answers even if you are over ninety. I’ve just now posted them off. It will be interesting to see whether I get any response. Sadly I can no longer tell my parents.

My quiz answers: 1 – Twopenny Blue; 2 – No; 3 – British Guiana 1 cent Magenta; 4 – Yes; they are produced for collectors but many avoid them; 5 – Sweden; 6 – Yes, they bear the name Grønland; 7 – Yes; 8 – Hungary; 9 – Yes; 10 – No, they are for guidance only.

POSTSCRIPT  - No reply at all. Not even a facsimile.

SECOND POSTSCRIPT
In early August 2015 I received the following email:

My name is Charlotte Hanson I was googling my Grandad Dennis Hanson and came across your recent post. My Grandad sadly passed away on 29/07/2015. I know he would have loved to have read your post and give you a personal response to your quiz questions if it wasn't for his ill health this year. It makes us proud to find so much information about him on the Internet so thank you.

I replied to say how sorry I was to hear of her grandad's death, and thanked her for not jumping on my rather irreverent post. Dennis Hanson made a go of doing his own thing – an example for us all I think. A notice appeared in the Yorkshire Post and other regional newspapers, and an obituary on the East Yorkshire Local and Family History blog.


Other Hanson items (right click and open in new tab for full size):

In the comments below is a discussion of a box of around 200 unused approvals booklets sold on ebay in August 2017 for £227. Here are the images associated with the listing (click to enlarge) (if you are the owner of these images and object to me reposting them here then please get in touch and I will remove them):