On Tuesday January 9th, Banbury Stamp Society met for a New Year social and displayed their recent acquisitions.
We were treated to the wide range of our members collecting interests, starting with some modern: a Christmas Card envelope from this year using a stamp that was withdrawn last year, and a selection of the 2023 Irish Post Office Christmas stamps.
Wartime mail is always popular and we saw covers posted in 1918 to an RAF Balloon Base in Malta, a cover posted from the British army of occupation in Germany in 1928 and WWII censored mail from Argentina to Newfoundland. Collectors are always susceptible to picking up assorted bargain collections and we saw an example one of these which included a set of Polish WWII issues.
We saw two extremes of air mail: a cover flown on the first trans-Atlantic flight (Alcock and Brown) in 1919 and Rocket Mail trials from 1934 – a delivery method that was, fortunately, never adopted.
Great Britain is not as central to collectors’ interests as it used to be, but we still had some: material from the 1890 Penny Postage Jubilee at the Guildhall, a nice selection of the early imperforate penny reds and twopenny blues, including an example of an early automated canceller, and stamps and covers from the 1961 Post Office Savings Bank centenary issue.
Next meetings will be ‘Members Bring and Buy’ on January 23rd and ‘Members Display on the Letter L’ on February 6th, both at 7:30pm at Hanwell Fields Community Centre. The Banbury Stamp Society is on-line at ‘www.banburystampsociety.co.uk’, or contact John Davies on 01295 255831