| Report of Regional Meeting, July 18, 2009 At York |
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PRESENT: Nine members and a guest were present; apologies for absence were received from ten members.
In the absence of the Chairman, the Secretary, Mike Murphy, welcomed those in attendance, and regretted that despite every effort and the planned conjunction with the York Racecourse Stamp Fair, the attendance was so low. He paid full tribute to Keith Pogson (ESC 130) and his wife Kay, who had worked so hard to bring the meeting about, from providing a suitable hall within easy walking distance of the Fair, to lightweight display frames borrowed from York Philatelic Society (to whom grateful thanks are also due) – and even to providing tea/coffee and biscuits before and during the afternoon (thank you, Kay!). All this against Keith’s background of two heart attacks in recent weeks – the Circle is enormously grateful. The Secretary mentioned with sadness the recent illness of Mohamed Adel Farid (ESC 435), former President of the Egyptian Society, who suffered a brain haemorrhage while acting as Egyptian Commissioner at the recent international exhibition in Essen, Germany. The meeting wished him well. PRESENT: Nine members and a guest were present; apologies for absence were received from ten members. In the absence of the Chairman, the Secretary, Mike Murphy, welcomed those in attendance, and regretted that despite every effort and the planned conjunction with the York Racecourse Stamp Fair, the attendance was so low. He paid full tribute to Keith Pogson (ESC 130) and his wife Kay, who had worked so hard to bring the meeting about, from providing a suitable hall within easy walking distance of the Fair, to lightweight display frames borrowed from York Philatelic Society (to whom grateful thanks are also due) – and even to providing tea/coffee and biscuits before and during the afternoon (thank you, Kay!). All this against Keith’s background of two heart attacks in recent weeks – the Circle is enormously grateful. The Secretary mentioned with sadness the recent illness of Mohamed Adel Farid (ESC 435), former President of the Egyptian Society, who suffered a brain haemorrhage while acting as Egyptian Commissioner at the recent international exhibition in Essen, Germany. The meeting wished him well. Two new members were elected – welcome, Mike Hert of Australia and Nasr Abou Taleb of Egypt – and there was brief discussion of arrangements for the London 2010 celebrations. The organisers have sent us publicity material which we shall consider inserting in the next QC; and the Secretary appealed for some thought as to who would display what at our meeting on May 7. He also sought one-page colour-illustrated articles for the special QC marking London 2010 and our own 75th Anniversary. He hoped that the Rural Post book he was writing in conjunction with Dr Ibrahim Shoukry would be available at that time. He also announced that Stanley Gibbons was willing to give members a 10 per cent discount on the £42.50 purchase price of the new Part 19 Middle East catalogue published in August, together with free postage within the British Isles. To gain the discount, members must quote a particular phrase (contact the Secretary for this phrase) when using the freephone number 0800 611 622 or emailing orders@stanleygibbons.co.uk.
The displays were opened by John Davis (ESC 213), who gently amended the advertised title of his talk, The Consular Posts, to “Early Egypt, 1420 to 1866”, in other words, ending with the Consular Post Offices rather than concentrating on them. Starting with a merchant venturer’s letter dated March 6, 1420 from Venice to Alexandria, he unleashed a veritable torrent of fascinating and unusual early material, accompanied by a potted history of the Mediterranean in general and Egypt in particular, ranging through the Mamelukes to Napoleon (showing a printed invitation to dine with him dated December 28 1799 as well as postal markings of Alexandrie, Le Caire and Siouth) ... and then a mystery: an 1803 letter addressed to Rosetta. But with Napoleon defeated, and the Mohammed Ali post not yet inaugurated, how did it travel? John showed mail disinfected against cholera and several lazaretto markings, and moved on to the forwarding agents, including of course Thomas Waghorn (on display were three different cachets and, astonishingly, a letter signed by Waghorn himself!) and Briggs and Co, and also showed two wonderful Samuel Shepheard letters, one bearing the distinctive oval cachet on December 8 1854, the other written to his wife and also bearing his signature. 
A series of Posta Europea folded letters and covers followed, with mixed frankings with French posts, and then a beautiful Khedivial Post cover bearing the Mansura handstamp of 4 LUGL 1865 (though most covers known are Cairo or Alexandria), and a striking 1872 cover bearing the Khedivial CDS and the otherwise unrecorded intaglio seal of Roda (left) and addressed to Emil Brugsch of the Egyptian Antiquities service (John might have mentioned once or twice his love of Egyptology!).
After displaying all of the First Issue stamps in essay, proof and distributed form, together with a number of outstanding covers, he moved on to the Consular Posts, and was able to show a number of covers from each of the various consular offices, highlighted initially by pre-stamp covers of the Austrian office (1837-1889) to Livorno and Trieste. From the British offices he showed a wide range of prepaid (ie, struck in red) handstamps of the Crown Paid at Alexandria and at Cairo, and though it is generally assumed that mails travelling east carried Suez markings and those going west were handstamped at Alexandria, he showed a cover for Bombay with Alexandria markings. He showed several B01 (Alexandria) and B02 (Suez) markings (Cairo had only the thimble), and a remarkable cover from Alexandria of DE 30 1864 with both More to Pay and Insufficiently Paid markings, both of them rare – on the same cover quite astonishing. For France he showed a cover cancelled with 3704 in the lozenge of dots of 1862, and for the Greek office a similar cover with the rare 97 in the lozenge (March 1867). He explained that the Italian consular office was opened before Italy was unified, and so first used the stamps of Sardinia (1851) before Italy produced national adhesives (1863), and that the office was not at the consulate but at the shipping office running services between Ancona and Alexandria. Among the highlights was a mixed franking with a 1pi Second Issue and two Italian stamps cancelled Cairo 19 GIUL 68 and with the 234 lozenge respectively. The display closed with material from the Russian office, for which special stamps were issued for use in the Levant in 1863 with the ROPIT (Russian Company for Navigation and Trade) inscription. He showed two covers, one of them from Trieste to Beirut via Alexandria and franked with a pair of 3-kopek stamps; and finished with a cover bearing ROPIT stamps but dated 1892, almost 20 years after the office closed. The alert Egyptian officials gave the stamps a neat boxed-O marking as invalid! It was difficult to follow that display, but Ted Fraser-Smith (ESC 238) managed it with aplomb, panache and immense and characteristic enthusiasm. He likes the unusual, does Ted, and he has long been fascinated by the civil censorship of mail passing through Egypt during the Second World War. It had recently come to his attention via Graham Mark, Editor/Librarian of the Civil Censorship Society, that the labels printed in blue on white or blue on brown with two lines each of English and Arabic and used to reseal an envelope after the censor had sifted the contents were worth rather more consideration than had previously been given them. 
As a keen user of Arabic, he first noticed that al-maraaqabah al-masriyah, the Arabic equivalent of “Egyptian Censorship”, was written – totally unexpectedly and inexplicably – in two different forms of Arabic calligraphy, one in which the letters lam and mim are quite clearly separately formed (see solid rectangle in the illustration), making a “long” (L) form; and the other where the “l” and “m” are combined, with the mim appearing only as a short stroke to the right (see chequered rectangle), against the flow of the right-to-left sentence and making a “short” (S) form..
Intrigued, he decided painstakingly to examine all examples he had on cover – and carefully traced and copied all 100 examples, happily eventually with the aid of a photocopier for ease of use. When he then compared the multiplicity of labels, he found to his very great surprise that the two types of script appear to have been placed in order quite deliberately, in the ratio of 3:1 S:L. Why on earth? Looking even more closely, he realised that he had selvage at the right end of some labels, and the left end of others; and also occasionally at top and bottom too. So he was able to “plate” the labels, discovering that each one had a distinctive place in the printed sheet; and was then able to reproduce the sheet from the examples to hand. But then it became even more intriguing ... a sizeable proportion of the labels did not fit the pattern he had discovered, but were typeset with a 2:1 S:L proportion. Clearly different. And there were differences also in the sizes of the gaps between the English phrases “Opened by Censor” and “Egyptian Censorship” and between the Arabic al-raqib ( ﻟﺮﻘﻴﺐ ) and fath ﻓﺘﺢ) ). So he set out again; and was able to plate a larger sheet with the new proportions. Close attention to the covers on which the two types were used allowed him to ascertain that the 3:1 sheet, the First Printing, was in use from 1939 to 1940/41, and the Second Printing (2:1) from 1940/41 to the end of censorship in 1945. Not only that, but that the sheets were of different sizes, the first a strip two labels deep and one metre long, the second around 540mm wide and with the depth yet to be ascertained. Just to confuse matters further, from about 1941/42, when paper was in short supply, the Censor Department began to use scrap paper for printing the labels, which are often found with text on the other side – and now the text just appears to run off the edge of the printing sheet. Ted’s discoveries led to a wide-ranging discussion of printing methods, Arabic usage and tools to be used in such research – an immensely stimulating and fascinating exposition. He hopes to be able to clarify his findings in an article for the QC, and would be grateful if all members would be kind enough to send him photocopies (with dates of use) of resealing labels (both halves, please!) from their collections. On behalf of the Circle, Sami Sadek (ESC 559) thanked both speakers for their afternoon’s entertainment – John Davis for the way in which he had “married Egyptian history and Egyptian philately so very effectively”; and Ted Fraser-Smith for “showing us all the meaning of persistence in a great cause”. Members were suitably generous in their applause. |
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