The Error World (8 page)

I would go for a drink with friends and someone would mention a stamp book they had read as a child. The poet Ruth Padel said I should look up a novel by Robert Graves—
Antigua, Penny, Puce.
I was pretty sure she had made a mistake. I knew some of Graves's work, and this didn't sound like his sort of thing at all. Besides, there was no such stamp. But here it is with me now, a book written in Majorca, the one Graves calls his only 'light' novel, about a brother and sister fighting over the ownership of a unique stamp. It is not vintage Graves. It is not even vintage stamp literature, for it crawls along like a heavy Balearic afternoon, not like Bunter or the Brandon thriller. But it does contain one bullseye passage. 'All British schoolboys of a certain age collect postage stamps,' Graves wrote in 1936,

or at least all schoolboys whose parents have a little money; below a certain social level the collecting instinct must, we suppose, be satisfied largely with cigarette pictures and gift-coupons. Schoolgirls, on the other hand ... schoolgirls do not go in for stamp collecting. In fact, they usually despise the pursuit, which is not direct and personal enough to satisfy them emotionally: if they collect anything it is signed photographs of famous actresses and actors. But they have brothers, and brothers collect stamps. So in the holidays they very often consent to lend a hand in the game. They rummage in bedroom drawers, and in their parents' writing-desks, and in boxes in the attic, and sometimes make quite useful hauls. The brothers are touched and gratified. Schoolgirls are not interested in stamps, agreed, but—this is the important point—they are undeniably interested in their brothers' preoccupation with stamps. What is it all about? What is the sense of it?

These are good questions. But the key thing about this passage is the observation that collecting is an instinct. It is not whether one collects, it is what.

Almost everything from my bedside table has gone. Indeed, apart from my first stamp album, almost everything from my bedroom has gone. But how do we agree to these departures? What confident error of forward thinking allows us or our mothers to dispose of childhood property, or secure it in a loft never to be retrieved? How can we tell, at the age of twelve or thirteen, that we will not one day miss these things?

When I returned to stamps in my early forties I found that the market had changed. The Strand was no longer the Mecca of philately, and was unrecognisable from when I had last examined it with a collector's eye. Gibbons and the Strand Stamp Centre were still there, but the weekly Saturday market had gone, along with many traders. A few had retired and sold up, a few had gone bankrupt, and others had just decided to work from home and send catalogues in the post. Then the Internet came along, and they didn't even have to spend postage any more.

One shop that had disappeared was owned by a man named David Brandon. Brandon had opened for business in 1975, and during my first collecting phase I had marvelled at the treasures on display. Brandon sold almost everything—GB across all reigns, British Commonwealth, most of the world, albums and many accessories such as watermark and phosphor detectors. The shop was there for eleven years, until Brandon realised that he could do without paying the high property rates and would probably sell just as many stamps to his regular clients via mail order.

To attract new clients, and remind people that he still had a knockout selection of stamps, Brandon now placed advertisements in the monthly magazines. Along with his son, he had developed a new speciality. 'Honesty, Integrity and Confidentiality,' proclaimed one advert in
Gibbons Stamp Monthly
not long after I had taken up collecting again. 'We believe that these are the three most important words when choosing a dealer to help you build the Great Britain Collection of your desire. Being the world's leading and most active dealers in Important Investment Quality Errors we would be pleased to hear from you, should you care to obtain major pieces such as the items illustrated.' The items illustrated included the Jaguar with the missing Minis, and the Red Cross stamp without the red cross. Another advert appeared in July 2004 announcing another twenty major pieces, ranging from a George VI
tete-beche
mis-cut booklet pane to the 1967 Wild Flowers with missing agate. Just four sets of this existed, and Brandon had the only complete block of four. According to the advert, the block was last offered for sale by a man called Derek Worboys, and had remained in a private collection ever since. The price was £8,500.

I found the pictures of the stamps irresistible, and so I called up and bought three modest things. I selected the items with great care, and all of them were classic but common stamps I remembered from childhood: 1965 Joseph Lister Discovery Centenary 4d missing brown-red, 1966 British Birds 4d blackbird missing legs, 1966 World Cup is 3d missing blue. This was the beginning: you start small, you like the experience and the product, you get hooked. I had a good conversation with Brandon about prices and great errors, and we hit if off straight away. He knew the area where I lived quite well from his pre-stamp days, and it emerged that we also had a shared interest in the history of the London Underground. Then he did what I considered a remarkable thing: he sent me the stamps I had asked for without first receiving my cheque. It was like getting 'approvals' again, only this time I knew what I was doing, or thought I did. I knew David Brandon was someone I could trust. But he almost certainly knew that by sending me the stamps without prepayment he was establishing an obligation. Three modest errors were never going to be enough. I sent him a cheque for £1,200 immediately, the stamps arrived (in perfect condition, carefully packed between two pieces of stiff corrugated plastic), but I could have received them as a gift, and Brandon still would have profited. You get that at druggy parties—the first hits free and within a week you'd pay anything for more. In that simple three-stamp transaction the error world was pulling me back in.

During one of our conversations, Brandon said I should come down one day if I was ever in the area. I could see no prospect of being in the area at any time, but I really wanted to see more of his stock, and so we fixed a date for lunch. He sent me an email: 'Dress casual, have a relaxing time.'

Before I drove to his place, I bought some more stamps. They were beauties, though not the rarest. I bought a block of four 5d ships from the 1969 issue that sold more than 67 million; mine were missing black, which meant there was no Queen's head, value, hull or inscription, and were four out of seventy-two known. I also got what was technically called a 'wild' perforation on a block of Battle of Britain stamps, which meant that the printed stamps had somehow got caught up in the perforating machine and were cut at unique angles. And then, for £2,000, I bought a horizontal pair of stamps from 1965 that I had been keen on for a while—the ones missing olive-green, the ones without the Post Office Tower.

***

'Value was immaterial to me when I began,' David Brandon told me. 'My plan when I was at school was to have one of every country in the catalogue, but that was when the simplified world catalogue was in one volume not four.' Brandon was sixty-two, small and slender with large glasses, and he was still fond of wearing jeans. He was like no other dealer I had met, in so far as he was someone I wouldn't be nervous about introducing to my friends or my family. He wasn't just into stamps. He also collected London bus and underground maps and tight clothes for his partner Linda on eBay.

He lived and worked on the outskirts of Guildford, Surrey, in a secluded wooded area protected by steel gates and security cameras. His office contained shelves of stamp catalogues and also a large safe with many boxes of breathtaking items. He still deals in stamps from all over the world, but the booming business is in errors.

He explained that when he was growing up in the 1950s every village had a little stamp shop, and everybody collected. '
Everybody
,' he told me again, as he knew it would be impossible to believe. Once a week his mother gave him sixpence to buy stamps from his headmaster's office during break-time, and he also bought from a shop near his home in Barnes (he said he could still smell the smoke from the dealer's cigars). He obtained the last stamp to complete his one-stamp-from-every-country-in-the-world collection in 1960, travelling to Bridger & Kay in the Strand to spend £1 5s on an item from Mafeking. Ever since, he's been collecting Boer War.

His father was an executive at Lyon's Bakery, and when he left school at sixteen he worked for Lyon's Ice Cream. By nineteen he was a sales rep, and his earnings went on stamps. Occasionally he would place adverts in the local newspaper offering items he no longer wanted or owned in duplicate, and he found that the techniques he had honed to sell vanilla blocks could be turned effectively to a new trade. At twenty-one he began dealing in stamps from the back office of a newsagent's his father had bought in Putney. He placed adverts in
Stamp Collecting Weekly,
and soon found that his own collection and dealer's stock became one. 'Occasionally I would advertise something I didn't have,' he told me. 'There was something coming up in auction and I knew that if I could buy it for £20 and sell it for £22 then I couldn't lose. If I couldn't buy it for less than I'd already sold it for I'd just return the money and say, "Sorry, the item's sold." Of course nowadays you're not supposed to do that.'

He stopped doing this not long after meeting a man who advised a merchant bank on alternative investments. From then on he would get telephone calls asking him to buy stamps with other people's money, and he would put a £1,000 portfolio together of classic Canada or Mauritius, making a little profit on the side. 'I was still in my mid-twenties, and nobody knew how I was buying and selling so many stamps,' he said.

His investment friend died in the mid-1970s and his bank was bought, but by then he was already well established at the major London stamp fairs and, with his brother, had converted a dry-cleaner's shop on the Strand. He remembers about forty competing dealers within a few hundred yards, but he had a prime position directly opposite Gibbons. He is still fond of saying, 'No—actually they were opposite me.' He would work hard to get some of Gibbons's trade. 'I don't understand why people bought from them,' he told me, 'unless it was a cheap-ish stamp you just needed to complete a set. But why someone would spend £5,000 on a stamp when they could buy the same stamp from me for £3,500 or £4,000 I don't know—the same quality. There are lots of collectors who believe that because they are buying it from Gibbons it has to be better quality, and of course that's not the case.'

Brandon would spend a portion of every day in his shop disappointing people. Men and women would come in with their stamp albums, or their dead brother's albums, and they thought they might be worth a fortune. Brandon could usually tell what the stamps were worth by the sort of albums they came in. If they were tatty, he would sometimes pretend to weigh them in his left hand and, without even opening the cover, would say, '£20!' Some customers thought he was being serious, and considered the offer with a sigh. Their eyes would lighten a little when Brandon then spent a minute flicking through the pages. Better than he originally thought, he said: £25! The problem was, the inexperienced believed that their stamps were worth what it said in the Stanley Gibbons catalogues, whereas that was merely a top-end selling price, often including a handling charge. The cheap stamps listed in the catalogue at 20p each were actually worth about a penny when you came to sell them. It is only the truly rare stamps that achieve the catalogue price. Every collector learns this lesson early on, and then they have to make a decision. Do they throw it all in as a waste of time and money, or do they persevere? The true collectors persevere, because they are in love. I gave up my hobby for about twenty-five years, but when it came looking for me again I was helpless.

Towards the end of the 1970s, Brandon and his competitors all benefited from a brief philatelic boom. Newspapers began extolling the virtues of stamps not just as a quiet hobby for those who don't get out much, but also as a fertile opportunity for profit, and there was always a story of great finds in an attic and a flabbergasted owner. In addition, many countries operated strict exchange-control regulations, but you could put stamps in your wallet and customs officials rarely bothered you. Several stamps had been singled out for investment potential, including the 1929 George V GB Postal Union Congress £1 and the 1939 George VI high values, and their price rose astonishingly within two years. In 1976, David Brandon was selling a well-centred, excellently perforated mint copy of the PUC £1 for about £700; three years later it was £2,500. This elaborately engraved stamp, which featured St George and the Dragon, is consistently voted the most beautiful British stamp of all time. The problem was, it was a common stamp. The crash came in 1980, when the market was flooded and the auction prices slumped dramatically. The price of a PUC £1 went back to about £500, and those who had bought at the top end just a few months before suffered badly. Brandon was left with fifty-one copies, and took a big loss, but he did manage to carry on trading. 'I've always loved stamps, so pulling out wasn't an option,' he told me. 'But a lot of dealers were buying stamps with an overdraft, and they couldn't sell their stock at a sufficient price to pay off what they owed. So they went down.' In those days it was said that you had to have a particular talent not to be able to make money out of stamps. 'It was thought that so long as you kept buying PUC £is you couldn't go wrong,' Brandon said. 'These days people realise that you need knowledge.'