On Tuesday January 7th Banbury Stamp Society met for our New Year Social and members displayed their recent acquisitions. As always this gave an interesting and varied range of material. We started with one of our members who normally collects central Europe, and he had been tempted to buy a collection of Sweden. We saw material bought at the recent Banbury Festival of Stamps: Windmills and a collection of European issues from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, so we had Hitler’s head stamps with defacing overprints as well as Free Czech stamps printed in England. Some members showed where they had filled gaps in their collections so from the Bahamas in 1860 we had proofs of the Queen Victoria ‘Chalon Head’ followed by some 1917 Bahamas ‘Queen’s Staircase’ issue and first flight covers between the Bahamas and the USA. We finished the first half with some material from Malta, including complete sheets of stamps and a cover sent from a Turkish POW during the Great War. After a break for some refreshment we saw some new material for the 1890 Penny Post Jubilee, postcards from around the world – including some fascinating pictures of the Panama Canal in its early days – and finished with a 1930 Italian stamp picturing Mussolini and issued for use in one town only, on the occasion of a state visit by the man himself.
Our next meeting will be Tuesday 21st January at 7:30pm at Hanwell Fields Community Centre when David Hutchins will give ‘A Philatelic History of China’. The Banbury Stamp Society is on-line at ‘www.banburystampsociety.co.uk’, or contact John Davies on 01295 255831.