Postage stamps were introduced as a receipt to show the sender had paid the postage for letters and parcels. Before that, the person receiving the letter paid the postage. The first adhesive postage stamp was the British “Penny Black”, introduced in 1840. The main philatelic societies for collectors of Caribbean stamps are the British West Indies Study Circle and the British Caribbean Philatelic Study Group.
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BWIA (British West Indies Airways, the predecessor of Caribbean Airlines) also made its postal contribution, by transporting mail on its first commercial flight to Tobago in 1940. Barbados and Jamaica housed the earliest post offices in the British West Indies in 1663 and 1671, respectively — long before the formal invention of the postage stamp. Many West Indian post offices used British stamps at first, with local stamps bearing the colony’s name eventually introduced. one-cent stamps for newspapers and four-cent stamps for letters. Stamps with different values but of the same design were usually printed in different colours. Not for this emergency issue, though. The printing firm did both values in black ink on magenta paper. The rushed job was of poor quality, so as a security measure to prevent forgery, Dalton asked post office employees to initial each stamp before selling them. Prior to making scarce appearances outside of bank vaults, this particular one-cent “Black on Magenta” was owned by a twelve-year-old Scottish boy named Vernon Vaughan. In 1873, while living in Demerara, he discovered the stamp postmarked 4 April, 1856. It was ink-smudged, had been clipped into an octagonal shape, and bore the handwritten initials “EDW”. Vaughan cleaned it up and added it to his stamp collection, then later sold it to a local collector for six shillings, which at that time was worth less than US$1. Several sales later, London stamp dealer Edward Pemberton identified the one-cent “Black on Magenta” as a rare issue. It was eventually bought by Philipp Von Ferrary, the most famous stamp collector of the early 1900s, for £150. In 1922 it was bought at auction by New York millionaire Arthur Hind for £7,343. It’s rumoured that Hinds was so fascinated with the stamp that he bought a second one-cent “Black on Magenta” and destroyed it so his would be the only one in the world.
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Shelly-Ann Inniss
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
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