The Error World (5 page)

My mum had no interest in stamps whatsoever, but the results of her blood tests had probably been good that day, and she was in an indulgent mood. I hadn't devoted much time to my collection for several years, and I still didn't have much money, but we were celebrating not only clear results but the end of my O levels and a downturn in the heatwave. I felt an expensive present coming on.

Our first call was the post office in Trafalgar Square, the best philatelic counter in London. There were only new stamps on sale here, but the people behind the counter understood the collector's demands. They understood them a lot more than my mother did, and as we queued up I did my best to explain the latest thing in British stamps—gutter pairs.

'Gutter pairs are when two stamps are separated by a strip of white paper. There are ten gutter pairs in every sheet of one hundred stamps, and the gutter, which is also perforated, runs down the middle of a sheet.'

'What's the point of it?' she asked.

She had me there. 'I think it has something to do with the printing process. Or the folding process.'

'But what's the point of collecting them?'

'The point is, they are rare. The early ones are getting very expensive, though I'm not sure why.'

The man behind the counter didn't have much of an idea either, but he knew they were in great demand. The post office in Trafalgar Square was the only place in London I knew where they didn't sigh if you asked for particular strip or block of a stamp sheet. The person in the queue behind the person being served understood too, and never tutted when the wait was long. In fact, the Philatelic Bureau may have been the only queue in Britain where the person behind was genuinely interested in the business being transacted ahead. Ah, you collect cylinder blocks ... and traffic lights ... and blocks of four. An addict loves an addict.

What I didn't say, because I had no knowledge of it at the time, was that gutter pairs were something of a scam. They were a way of creating value out of something which, not long before, had only face value. The reason that the early ones were getting expensive—they began appearing with the Silver Wedding issue of 1972—was because a few dealers had found they had vast amounts of sheets of stamps that no one really wanted, and they conjured a market for them out of thin air. Their adverts in the stamp magazines had a gold rush element to them. 'Special Offer!' one of these ran. 'We strongly and wholeheartedly recommend the complete unmounted mint collection of Great Britain gutter pairs ... a total of 182 stamps ... special offer ... normally over £135 ... price per collection: £95!'

The key to gutter pairs was the traffic light gutter pair—the one pair in any sheet with the central white strip featuring a small check dot of every colour used in its production. You would not get this for £95, and not even for £900. These days, more than thirty years later, you can find all the traffic light gutters for £100, and the regular ones for a few pounds. It didn't take long for people to come to their senses and realise that what they were buying were two stamps when they only needed one. The Post Office did nothing to discourage this.

'I'll have one of everything you've still got on sale please,' I said to the man behind the counter. 'The Telephone set, and the Social Reformers, and the American Bicentennial and the new Roses set. All in gutter pairs.'

'What do you like about stamps?' my mother asked as we walked up the Strand. This was a tough one, too. I liked their colour and design, and the fact that one could collect them, and the fact that they could be worth something. I don't think I articulated the thought at the time, but I now realise that collecting is about family. Collecting stamps is particularly about family. With stamps one follows a tradition handed down, and one makes new additions, and the boundaries and conventions are fairly well established. Deviate from the norm and you're in trouble; people frown; societies will shun; you'll have trouble selling on. Albums are like homes—ordered dwelling places, and when they become too small to contain the collection we buy something else, something bigger. We begin with the grandest ambition but then downsize; we find what makes us happy and pursue that. We hope that a big family and a big collection will see us through old age.

The good news was, the Strand was the one place where stamp collecting needed no theorising. Here, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world; if you weren't collecting, what on earth were you doing in this street? In those days there seemed to be a stamp shop every ten yards. The Stamp Centre was there, incorporating several specialist dealers. Bridger & Kay and Vera Trinder were close by in Bedford Street, W. E. Lea was opposite in John Adam Street. On a Saturday the treats began much earlier, at the market underneath the Arches by Charing Cross. Here I could afford a few spacefillers and commemorative issues that appeared before I started collecting, including the 1957 World Scout Jubilee Jamboree and the 1962 Ninth International Lifeboat Conference. And I still have the secondhand magazines I bought for a few pennies each.
Stamp Magazine
contained articles headlined 'Postmarks, Places and People' and 'International Reply Coupons—New Design!' There were also articles specifically for beginners on the meaning of philatelic terminology, like
tête-bêche
(two or more joined stamps, with one upside down) and advice on how to look for priceless stamps on old documents in grandma's loft. This would have been fine if grandfather hadn't got there first, and sold anything half-decent to dealers or friends. By the time I began collecting in the 1960s, the world had got wise to the value of stamps. Philately was more than 120 years old, and lofts had long given up their treasures.

I think my mother was always in an indulgent mood when we went shopping together. I also thought that I was her favourite, and that we had the most in common. One of the most memorable things she said to me and about me—and she said it a lot—was that I had good taste. Whenever anyone says this it usually means that you have the same taste as them, and in the case of my mother and me this was true. She liked to take me with her when she shopped for a party dress, and I would give her the nod or the shake. It was like something you see in romantic comedy films—two girlfriends having a ball in a store in New York with one of them in love and the soundtrack at full promo as they giggle over something low-cut and exorbitant. That was me, as one of the girlfriends, although my mother couldn't wear low-cut after 1974. She had a heavy foam sponge which she moved from bra to bra; unless you knew, you wouldn't look twice. On one occasion when my dad was still alive, he had given her money to buy herself a new ring for her birthday. I must have been eleven or twelve, and rather than choose something himself, he would send me out with her. I've still got that ring, bought on holiday somewhere, an impressive jagged gold number like an almond nut cluster, and I still like it.

I can't remember if I bought anything on that stamp trip beyond the new issues. Probably not, as even then I felt that it was something I should do alone. I think I would have been embarrassed to spend even £5 on something she couldn't appreciate. Subsequently I visited the stamp shops with my aunt Ruth, and it was a bit easier with her; she didn't really like stamps either, but she was a bit splashier with her money and was less resistant to impulse. But stamps were private things for me then, and remained so for thirty years. I think I still felt ashamed of the money spent and the pursuit in general, of the lonely hobby with all its misfit connotations.

I was also frightened. I was lost in a world of experts. I didn't believe I would be deliberately cheated, but I feared I would cheat myself. I would be offered a vast choice of Penny Reds from the 1860s, and I'd be bamboozled, and I'd leave the shop in a shaming panic. I had a basic catalogue, but it was far too crude a compass to steer me through so many subtleties of shade and printings and plate numbers and postmark cancellations, all of which affected price. I would have been dissatisfied with any purchase; I could never afford the best, and it pained me that someone somewhere—actually, almost everyone everywhere—owned a better example.

The one place that tried hardest to dispel this feeling of helplessness was Stanley Gibbons, but I found it had the opposite effect. The weight of its history was imposing, and its main showroom, with its ornate ceilings and gilt cornices, far too grand for a shop. The staff tried to entice young collectors with a huge selection of accoutrements; even if you couldn't afford the stamps, surely the pocket money would stretch to a tin of hinges and a set of Showguard mounts. Or perhaps tweezers, or one of the new albums with names from nowhere: The Number i, The Gay Venture, The Improved, The Safari, The Swiftsure, The Worldex, The Devon, The Exeter, The Plymouth, The Abbey Ring, The Philatelic, The Senator Standard, The Utile Standard, The Oriel, The Windsor, The Tower, The New Imperial, The New Pioneer, The New Thames, The Strand, The Nubian. They were all unbelievably similar.

Gibbons occupied several shops towards the Aldwych end of the Strand, and when you walked into any of them—which took some guts for a sixteen year old, it was like entering a shop selling game-shooting guns or cigars—a man would approach with sudden confusion on his brow: part of him wanted to patronise, and part of him wanted to respond to a missive about encouraging the young, they are our future. Patronising got him: 'And what can we do for the young master today?'

'Um...'

'For the young sir, what are your specialities?'

I think I wanted to spill something. It was much easier buying stamps in packs at WHSmith. In Gibbons my stammer worsened. I wanted to look at their stock, but like many stammerers I found that the hardest words to say were those beginning with 'st', such as stock or stamps. 'Just looking,' was all I would usually manage. My mother was no help. 'It's a funny name, Gibbons,' she said. She also wondered whether I would be better off collecting coins; they were older, less likely to get damaged, and in your hand they felt like something.

Gibbons was a funny name, I agreed, but over the years I had got used to it. I told my mum the story of its founder as best I knew it; some of it was quite possibly myth, but certain elements, like the episode with the sailors and the Cape Triang-ulars, had been told so many times that they had become true. His full name was Edward Stanley Gibbons, and the first photograph of him, possibly from his late teens, shows a bulbous nose, receding hairline and a set of wild side-whiskers. He was born in 1840, the year of the Penny Black. He began collecting in the mid-1850s, encouraged by his father, a chemist. Yes, encouraged: at a time when most people threw every stamp away, and when almost every professional man would regard collecting stamps as a habit of the deranged, William Gibbons allowed his son to section off a part of his chemist's shop and start swapping with like-minded friends. This was in Plymouth; there weren't many.

But the idea of stamps was growing. By 1856 more than twenty countries were issuing stamps, and among the most attractive were those from the Cape of Good Hope. These were triangular, and at their centre a woman reclined on an anchor. They were printed initially in London by Perkins Bacon, the same company that produced the Penny Black, and they became desirable not only because of their shape, but also because of the many variations in shades and impressions from subsequent woodblock printings. In 1863, two sailors approached Gibbons in his shop with a sack containing many thousands of these stamps they said they had won in a raffle. Gibbons bought them for £5, and by the time his first price list appeared two years later he was charging up to four shillings each. In this way he began as he wished to go on: rare stamps, rare prices. He sold his business for £25,000 in 1890, by which time its catalogues had established themselves as authoritative checklists for the world. The buyer was Charles J. Phillips, key supplier to the collector Count Philipp la Rénotière von Ferrary.

My mother showed a vague interest in all of this, but she had other things on her mind, and I don't think we went shopping for stamps again. Occasionally at home she would show me a stamp on an old document from my father's study. Most legal papers were paid for or sealed with stamps, the simplest form of taxation. 'Is this a rare one?' my mother would ask. But it never was.

When I look at my modest collection of GB errors I feel comforted. Whenever I open the album I am delighted with the beauty of the tiny objects, and wonder about their journeys from the printing press to my albums. Because I only collect pre-decimal, the stamps transport me to a time when my father was still alive, and when my life seemed secure. The value of the stamps is an entertaining side issue, and collectors are not being honest if they claim that the cost or worth of their hobby never crosses their mind. But it is the quest for the stamps that keeps us going, not their investment potential. The rising value of rare stamps ultimately becomes a hindrance to the collector rather than a benefit. But still I think: if only my father had helped me invest £1,200 in errors in 1973. How wealthy would I be now? And how happy?

As I think about my father dying, and my mother struggling with cancer, I find a new reason for my interest in collecting. Postage stamps offer one way in which we may order a world of chaos, and they have the power to bring a dependable meaning to a life. Owning a piece of history—however common, however rare—may even create a fleeting purpose in this world. I don't like it when people just call them pieces of paper.