It’s we ‘dry and dusty’ collectors who preserve the national heritage

Growing up in the rural Midlands, I visited London once in a blue moon. But one experience was much more memorable than seeing Big Ben or Covent Garden, and that was walking inside the hallowed doors of Stanley Gibbons on the Strand.

As a child I was a madkeen stamp collector and so Stanley Gibbons was a dream world. I have to admit that my collection was a little paltry – a set of first and second-class stamps from the UK, with a few Swiss ones from family friends and three from America when my grandmother had been on holiday to New York. But Gibbons had everything – even Penny Blacks.

Ever since Stanley Gibbons himself, as a young man in 1863, assisting in his father’s pharmacy, bought from two sailors a sack of rare Cape of Good Hope stamps, and began his successful business, the company has been one of the greatest philatelic dealers in the world. The news that it may be sold is sad for collectors and stamp lovers alike.

I collected stamps and PHQ cards (stamps in postcard form), as well as shells and more than 60 wooden spoons. But my interest fell away with the onset of teenagerhood, and had disintegrated by the time I went to university.

The impetus to collect is strong in childhood. Even now, when children have ipads and computers, I still see them enthusiastically swapping football or movie-themed stickers as they wander home from school. I think it’s a way of interpreting the giant, incomprehensible world around them, making it smaller and something they can control. But we often mock those who continue the practice into adulthood – stamp collectors, like trainspotters, are seen as weird. They shouldn’t be.

Sir William Hamilton (husband of the more famous Emma) created a superb 18th-century collection of antiquities and vases but he was ridiculed for his obsession during his lifetime, and his family were impatient with his spending. When Emma fell in love with Nelson, the satirical cartoons by James Gillray and others depicted Hamilton gazing at his collection while his wife and the naval hero carried on behind his back.

A collector, so it went, was dry and dusty, stuck in the past and thus deserving of being cuckolded. Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady is the worst type of collector – cold, caring only for surfaces and money.

The Victorians were the greatest collectors – hoarding everything from folk tales to butterflies. Take Charlotte Schreiber, a wealthy widow and businesswoman who married her son’s tutor and then went with him across Europe to buy ceramics, and who became possessed, as she put it, by “china mania”. Mr Schreiber didn’t mind, but many families of collectors have hated it. In 2009, postman Alan Roy’s two-million strong stamp collection was sold after his death, and his daughter said she wished never to see another stamp again.

Hamilton gained his great accolade after death, for his life’s work forms the basis of the British Museum’s Enlightenment Galleries. But many of the great collectors have been forgotten and their collections subsumed into museums and libraries. We shouldn’t forget them – for it is thanks to their passion, their drive to “buy just one more”, that we have safeguarded our historical memory. Maybe the British Museum will one day want my wooden spoons.