Yesterday I bought a delightful book in what the English call a “charity shop”. I was going to sell it but I have decided to keep it.

It is “Handbook of British Colonial Stamps in Current Use” by R. Courtney Cade MBE (Colonial Office), published by The Crown Agents for Overseas Governments and Administrations, 1955 .

There are good black and white pictures of all the stamps in use in 1955, arranged in sets, and a lot of text about each colony and its stamps (for example, more than two pages each on Fiji, Gambia, and Tonga, indeed that much on most colonies.

1955 was a most interesting date for this, because the first colony (proprement dit) to gain its independence was Gold Coast in 1957 (as Ghana). This means that we get a complete picture of a world now almost disappeared and with a nice pull-out map of the world too. As well as territory coloured red (why was it always red ?) there are all those island names underlined in red, which I haven’t seen for some time. Although the dominions, for the purpose of this Crown Agents book, are not coloured red, a generous segment of Antarctica is !

1955, however, was not so long after 1952, and some of the colonies (such as the Virgin Islands, Sierra Leone and Swaziland) were still using George VI stamps, the book providing notes that they would be replaced . A few places, notably Fiji and Barbados, are caught frozen in time with a strange mixture of the two monarchs.

While conceding that most of the constituent parts of the Union were not colonies, the book includes all of Malaya “at the request of the Postal Union of Malaya as well as many readers” (this being the second edition).

You may like to know that Lake Bosumtwi (on the Gold Coast 4d) is the sacred Fetish lake of the Ashanti. Boats are not allowed on it, but fishermen can use “unworked logs” instead. As the lake is 5miles in diameter and 233 feet (71 m ) deep, this sounds quite dangerous !

Grüße,
Rheinmädchen