Great Britain Victorian Mixed-Franking Covers to India
A 'gold standard' cover from 1869
One of my favourite philatelic books in recent times is Great Britain Victorian Mixed-Franking Covers Illustrating Postage Stamp Development by Ray Simpson and Karl Louis (2020) (Figure 1).1
The book expertly bridges philately and postal history and makes philately fascinating for the postal historian and vice-versa. In addition, the 400-odd illustrated covers, with colourful stamps and postal markings, make it a visual delight.
Simpson has been interested in stamp perforations for a long time. He co-authored, with Peter Sargent, Stamp Perforation: The Somerset House Years, 1848 to 1880, which was published by the Royal Philatelic Society in 2006. A free PDF extract of 109 pages can be found online. Another of Simpson’s interests is stamp usage; a sub-topic under this would be mixed frankings.
Louis is well-known as the prior Managing Director of Corinphila Auctions AG. He is also the compiler of the world-famous ‘card index’ of Great Britain. As of 2023, the index consisted of more than 130,000 cards and 150,000 individual items!
What constitutes Mixed Franking?
In its broadest sense, mixed franking means a postal history item bearing a mix of two or more stamps which are different from each other - either in their value or colour or perforation or printing method etc.
The authors attest that such items, from the Queen Victoria period, would number in the tens of thousands. Any attempt at listing these would test the sanity of the authors and readers! Further, not enough data exists to compile such a ‘telephone directory’ (remember those) type book.
Hence, the authors restrict their ambition to mixed franking items which “exemplify change”. In other words, they list only such covers that contain elements of philatelic transience (the dictionary meaning is ‘short in duration’) and transition (‘moving from one state or form to another’).
The first page of contents is shown as Figure 2. There are 17 chapters in the book of which chapters 3 to 16 cover the transitions that led to different kinds of mixed frankings coming into use.
Within each chapter, a lot of information is presented in multiple tables showing the different mixed use of stamps. Figure 3 reproduces an extract of a table from chapter 3 which deals with the first stamps and postal stationery (Mulready) of GB (Figure 3).
A perusal of the tables shows that in the initial few years, when only low denomination stamps were available, most mixed franking covers known are inland ones (see Figure 3 to get a sense). When higher value stamps became available, almost all mixed franking covers seen are those sent to foreign destinations.
Within foreign destinations, most covers that survive are to Europe followed by the Americas. Items to Asia, Australia, and Africa are much scarcer.
GB to India Mixed Franking Covers
I collect postal history of India from the time when no formal postal system existed to the pre-stamp period to the stamped era until about 1900 (end of Queen Victoria’s reign).
Within that wide spectrum, I am interested in a diverse range of subjects. One such which piques me is incoming mails and within that, incoming mails bearing Great Britain mixed franking stamps.
The Census
A compilation made from the tables in the book reveal the existence of 43 mixed franking items to India over a 60-year period.2
Since 1,285 entries find place in the book, those going to India comprises just 3.3% of the total.3 Remember, India was Britain’s biggest and most important colony with a substantial British population and two-way trade between the countries. What accounts for this low number then? Preservation habits, or rather the lack of it,4 and the tropical climate are the two main contributors.
A ‘Gold Standard’ Cover
Simpson and Louis define a ‘Gold Standard’ cover as one which has on it a particular stamp of a particular value and its immediately predecessor. Such covers demonstrate transition in the ultimate way possible.
Figure 4 illustrates one Gold Standard mixed franking cover from December 1869. This cover demonstrates the transition from Small White Letters to Large White Letters, an area covered by Chapter 10.
The three British stamps affixed on the cover are:
Surface printed 1862-64 4d Red (Plate 4) with Small White Letters P-C
Surface printed 1865-67 4d Vermillion (Plate 11) with Large White Letters D-L
Line engraved 1864-79 1d Rose-red (Plate 124) with coloured letters A-C
A close-up of the two 4d stamps is shown in Figure 5.
Now, there are many covers (38 recorded in the book) which bear a mixed franking of the old 4d Small Letters stamp with the new 3d, 6d, and 1s Large Letters stamps. This is because the latter were contemporaneous with the old 4d for a period of four to six months.
However, instances of usage of the 4d Small White Letters with the 4d Large White Letters are very rare. The former was first issued on 15 January 1862 (Plate 3) / 16 October 1863 (Plate 4) while the latter (Plate 7) did not come out until 4 July 1865. The substantial time gap between the two makes any simultaneous use miraculous.
No wonder, Simpson and Louis record only one “pièce de résistance” - a Gold Standard cover from October 1865 to France bearing the two 4d stamps (Figure 6).
The Gold Standard cover from December 1869 shown in Figure 4 is a new discovery. It is mind boggling that the 4d Small White Letter stamp (Plate 4) was used seven years after its issue.5 And the 4d Large White Corner stamp was pretty new with Plate 11 having been issued just a few months earlier in that year.
Acknowledgment: Karl Louis for reading the first draft and for confirming the veracity of the 1869 cover.
Those interested to know more about the book can watch the authors’ instructive and entertaining presentation made at Virtual Stampex 2020. The book is still available for sale from its publisher - Mike Jackson Publications.
‘India’ includes the Indian Post Offices in places like Burma, Straits Settlements, and the Middle East. Further note that a few covers appear in two different tables in the same chapter or the succeeding one. So, the number of unique covers is a few less.
Of course, new discoveries will have surely taken place in the six years since the book was published. I do hope the authors will bring out a supplement soon and I am so very looking forward to it.
Consider family correspondence. Letters sent by British military officers and civil servants and their family members in India to family and friends back home are quite likely to have been preserved in family archives. Conversely, if letters to India are to have any chance of being saved, recipients would need to carry them back home when leaving the country; not all may do so.
In the case of commercial letters, merchant houses in GB (as well as Europe and North America) had a well-defined process of archiving their incoming letters. On the other hand, recipients in India, especially native merchants, were less prone to hold on to old correspondence. Further, even if they did have a system of archiving, the hot and humid climate prevailing in the major trading cities of that time, viz. Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, would tend to destroy paper quickly.
The only logical explanation for the old 4d stamp being on the cover is that the sender found it somewhere in his effects and thought of making use of it. In late-1869, stamp collecting was still in its infancy and it is almost certain that the use is not philatelic.