Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

She glanced at me, and I nodded. Nothing would stop me being there after what he had said. Five thousand pounds … if that sheet made £5,000, I thought we could manage. That would about double the total capital we could raise. It should just be enough. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Mr Keegan — I’ll be there, listening with bated breath.’

Tubby, with a proper sense of the dramatic, held off from telling us until we had reached his house. He needed his books, he said, to explain it all properly, but that was just an excuse to get the story of the Solomons sheet out of me first. Once we were in his comfortable black-beamed living room with drinks in our hands, and Perenna had phoned the nursing home again to arrange a time to visit her brother next day, he took down from his bookshelves the larger of the two blue-covered volumes of the Perkins Bacon Records. As he stood there, holding it out to me and saying, ‘Ever browsed through these books?’ I knew we were in for one of his lectures. But this time, with so much at stake, he had my full attention.

‘You should,’ he said. ‘To anybody interested in printing, any British collector, they’re fascinating. They don’t cover the GB printings — that was dealt with by Sir Edward Bacon himself in his Line-Engraved Postage Stamps of Great Britain. I’ve got a copy of the 1920 first edition here somewhere. But all the other printings … This first volume deals with British Colonial issues; the other one deals mainly with printings for foreign countries.’ He opened the larger of the two, turning to the end where he had marked it with a slip of paper. ‘Here it is, five-o-nine — the last chapter. That’ll give you the background.’ And he turned it round so that we could read it. It was headed The Beginning of the End.

The Home Government exercised the strictest supervision over the production of the postage stamps of Great Britain, but the Agents General of the Colonial Office, first George Baillie and then Edward Barnard, as also the Agents for the various Colonial Governments, in no way controlled the production of the stamps ordered. The quantity was merely checked on arrival in the Colony. Perkins Bacon classed postage stamps in the same category as needle, soap and tobacco labels, and although the firm usually produced only the supply of stamps ordered, in some cases the quantity printed was greatly in excess of the number immediately required.

This method continued until Penrose G. Julyan was appointed Agent General for Crown Colonies towards the end of 1858. The following documents make it clear that he considered that the dies, plates, paper and other material for the production of stamps ordered and paid for by his department should be under his control.

‘It was back in 1851,’ Tubby went on as we both looked up to indicate we had finished reading, ‘that Perkins Bacon were invited to tender for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia labels. Up to then the only stamps they had printed were the GB Penny Blacks and Red and the Twopenny Blues. During the next seven years they printed stamps for some twenty-five or thirty of our colonies, including Western Australia, and since they were really banknote printers, regarding stamps as much the same as tobacco labels, they probably were a little slack. On Julyan’s appointment as Agent General a running battle began, de Worms recording pages of correspondence interspersed with his comments. What the Agent General was complaining about initially was late delivery, colour discrepancies and other technicalities. Then, in April 1861, he discovered the printers had been approached by Ormond Hill on behalf of two or three stamp collecting friends of his and had released specimens of everything they had printed, six of each stamp. Julyan blew his top over that, switching his attack to security.’

He began refilling our glasses. ‘Well, there you are, Roy. That’s the background. But you’ll never guess what it led to.’ He was smiling, enjoying himself. ‘Ormond Hill, you see, was Superintendent of Stamping at the Inland Revenue. He was also Rowland Hill’s brother. In the circumstances Perkins Bacon’s protest that they’d seen nothing wrong in sending him cancelled specimens seems reasonable enough. But Julyan took a different view. In the end, he demanded that all dies, plates, stocks of watermarked paper and stamps printed in excess of orders, everything in fact relating to each colony should be delivered to the Agent General’s offices.’ He put down the decanter and came back to the desk. ‘Now turn to the end of the book, the last page but one. Perkins Bacon had argued that, if not stored by experts, the plates would rust or otherwise deteriorate. And they’d been fairly dilatory in meeting Julyan’s demands.’ He leaned forward, pointing halfway down page 525. ‘Now read those two letters. Then you’ll begin to understand why I wanted that collection, why the auctioning of the Solomons Seal die proofs is attracting so much attention.’

The letters read:

Office of The Agents-General

for Crown Colonies,

6,Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.

2nd June, 1862.

Gentn.

I beg to draw your attention to my letter of 12th ultimo requesting you to forward to this Office the Postage Stamps, Paper Moulds, and facsimiles in your possession, and shall be obliged by receiving a reply to that communication.

I am, Gentn,

Your obedient Servant.

P. G. Julyan

Messrs Perkins, Bacon amp; Co.

This was the end of the struggle, but up to the last Perkins Bacon were able to produce an excuse, a strange admission for a firm of Security Printers.

69 Fleet Street, E.C.

June 3, 1862.

Dear Sir

We beg to apologize for the delay which has arisen in sending you the P Stamps, Envelopes amp; Moulds in our possession, but the loss of time on other matters forced upon us by the discovery of a thief in our employ, has occasioned the apparent neglect. We hope to be able to send all by the beginning of next week.

We are Dear Sir

yr obdt serts

Per Proc. Perkins Bacon amp; Co.

J. P. Bacon

P. G. Julyan Esq.

Agent General.

I looked up at him, not entirely sure what it meant.

‘That’s all we know about it,’ he said. ‘We don’t know who this thief was or what he stole. Maybe it was banknotes. Perkins Bacon were banknote and bond printers long before they started printing the Penny Blacks in 1840. If you look at the top of that page, you’ll see a letter from the Agent General referring to delivery of fifty facsimiles for preparing Natal Bonds. It could have been notes the thief stole, or bonds or some of the excess sheets or printed stamps. As you will have gathered, Perkins Bacon were in the habit of running off extra sheets. At their best they were very meticulous printers, always concerned about colour, which was sometimes liable to fading, and they found it difficult to get paper with the right depth of watermarking.’ He glanced at Perenna. ‘The watermark is achieved simply by a slight thinning of the paper. And gum — gum was a problem, too, particularly when the order was for the tropics.’

He hesitated, a significant pause as he turned back to me. ‘On the other hand, it could be that the thief had been borrowing material for a friend of his, a would-be forger, say. He could have borrowed dies, plates even. Copies could have been made of them, and then the borrowed dies or plates returned. It might have been going on for some time.’

I realised what he was suggesting then, that the use of Perkins Bacon dies and plates need not have been confined to just this one label.

‘A nasty thought,’ he murmured. ‘It would raise doubts about the authenticity of some of the rarer mint-condition stamps. After all, the mania for stamp collecting goes back even further than the Ormond Hill controversy.’