BRITISH GUIANA
As the world’s most expensive stamp comes back onto the market, we take a look at the stamps of British Guiana, some of which are more affordable
The sole British colony on the South American mainland, British Guiana gave philatelists several exceedingly high value stamps, including the world’s most expensive example, which is set to be auctioned in June. Only the super-rich can afford to buy the few that come to market but, as Ed Fletcher discovers, British Guiana issued many other stamps worth collecting… and many are affordable
The first named European to visit the shores of Guiana on the northern coast of South America was Sir Walter Raleigh, who may have landed in 1617 during his second expedition in search of the legendary City of Gold (El Dorado). Dutch explorers followed a few years later, intent not on treasure hunting, but on establishing trading posts. Using black slave labour transported from Africa, they developed plantations that evolved to become the settled Dutch colonies of Essequibo, Berbice, and Demerara from which they exported vast quantities of sugar during much of the 18th century. In the early 19th century all three colonies fell to Britain as a consequence of the Dutch backing the losing side in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1831 Britain consolidated the former Dutch possessions to form the colony of British Guiana, with its capital at Georgetown, and its borders abutting Venezuela, Brazil and Surinam. In total land area the new colony matched that of the British
Isles, though much of Guiana had a covering of dense forests at that time.
A flood of colonists and speculators from London, Liverpool and Bristol soon afterwards arrived and began developing and extending sugar plantations along the banks of Guiana’s numerous rivers (Guiana in the Amerindian language means land of many waters.) They hoped the London government would turn a blind eye on Guiana, given high British demand for sugar; but the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 severely affected the plantations until owners came up with a scheme which brought large numbers of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar fields for pittances. Further boosts to British numbers in the colony came when tribes living alongside inland rivers offered to exchange tropical fruits and vegetables for metal tools and bladed weapons manufactured in Birmingham. Families newly arrived from Britain cleared land for smallholdings and quickly learned how to grow tobacco, flax and cotton. Over time output and the size of holdings increased, with excess produce contributing to cargoes shipped homeward.
In the pre-stamp era British colonists relied on sea captains who carried private ship letters to and from various ports of call. Rising commercial activity, as well as enthusiasm for private correspondence between neighbours, led to the introduction of postage stamps. To meet the needs of an internal postal system a newspaper office in Georgetown (The Royal Gazette) type-set and printed sheets of small stamps carrying a black circular design. They looked so much like the labels stuck to the ends of wooden reels on which sewing cotton was sold that stamp users called them cottonreels. They were issued in 2-cents, 4-cents, 8-cents, and 12-cents values, with the printing in black, and the paper dyed in various shades. Local postmasters had serious concerns about the security of the stamps, which appeared very susceptible to forgery. As a precaution they insisted that every stamp sold must carry an ink signature of the local postmaster as a means of authentication.
The story of the later rise in collector value of those cotton-reels was captured in The Globe (December 1901) newspaper report dated 1901:
Last year an old lady residing in Demerara, British Guiana came across a couple of circular rose-red 2-cents stamps on an envelope she has pasted into her schoolgirl’s scrapbook fifty years earlier. Sight of the stamps reminded her that she had recently seen an advert in the local Demerara press offering to buy examples. She also recalled that in his sermon on the previous Sunday the vicar of her local parish church had mentioned a pressing need for urgent roof repairs. So she took her envelope to the clergyman and said: ‘I think these stamps are worth a great deal of money. Try to sell them at the town’s auction next month, and please add whatever you get for them to the church’s repairs fund.’
A rich collector in the USA received news of the stamps as a lot in the forthcoming auction and at once sent his office assistant by fast ship to British Guiana. Sadly the assistant contracted Yellow Jack [a fever] while waiting to disembark at Demerara and could not attend the auction. The winning bidder, a local man, picked them up for £210. The clergyman received the £210 (less commission) and the winning bidder later sold the stamps to Stanley Gibbons in London for £550. In turn Stanley Gibbons fulfilled a standing order from a Russian aristocrat who was happy to pay a £1,000 selling price.
£1,000 in 1901 would equal £124,000 in 2001; but the cottonreels had not yet exhausted their ability to surprise us. At a David Feldman Geneva auction in April 2008 an 1850 letter-sheet with a single cotton-reel stamp on pale blue
paper showing the value as 2-cents instead of 12-cents, as a result of a printing error, sold for the euro equivalent of £514,000.
By 1852 British Guiana had received from London its first supplies of stamps for use on both inland and overseas mail. Printed by Waterlow & Co on imperforate sheets, the design displayed the Seal of the Colony – a ship under full sail within a frame that carried the motto: ‘DAMUS PETIMUS QUE VICISSIM’ (we give and take in return). Their 1-cent and 2-cents values, in shades of red and blue, met British Guiana’s postal needs until 1856 when an overdue consignment of fresh stamp supplies was reported lost in a disaster at sea. Responding to the emergency, the Georgetown postmaster instructed a local engraving firm to produce a simple type-printed stamp of 4-cents in black on magenta paper. As a result of an engraving error the value of one stamp was cut as 1-cent instead of 4-cents. Only a single example of a stamp printed with that error has ever come to light; and it has so far passed through the ownership of several of the world’s wealthiest collectors. The last time it changed hands, in a 2014 New York auction, the hammer price reached a staggering £5,600,000.
For the next forty years of Victoria’s reign the colony settled down to a long run of issues dominated by the sailing ship on the Seal of the Colony design, with the motto and other lettering almost identical to that seen on the world’s most valuable stamp printed around the ship. You can probably buy a fine used example for a couple of tens of pounds; or a mint stamp for a couple of hundreds. That is about as close as collectors who are not millionaires can come to the world’s most valuable stamp… but we can all dream.
Important economic and social changes occurred during the reigns of Edward VII, George V and George VI, with some of the changes reflected in stamp designs. Sir Walter Raleigh featured on one stamp. Some of the gold he came in search of eventually came to light as alluvial deposits in forest streams. A stamp showing miners at work on a stream bank records that period, but there was never enough of the precious metal to justify the name El Dorado. Bauxite deposits brought more profitable mining to British Guiana in later years. Logging, as well as mining, encouraged the growth of rail transport and larger ports, which also encouraged growth in the fishing industry.
In the 1920s and 1930s several stamps depicting the colony’s forests, waterfalls and other scenery helped to attract increasing numbers of visitors. A fledgling air transport service brought visitors from North America. Tourists who were also stamp collectors no doubt spent time combing antique shops, bookshops and other spots where a remote chance of finding a second 1856 black and magenta 1-cent remained. Their interest in stamps certainly rubbed off on the local population when the colony became independent in 1966 and changed its name to Guyana. Today stamp collecting has become a major hobby in Guyana. Another stamp worth millions could surface one of these days.