Stamp Collector

68 MAY 2020 www.allaboutstamps.co.uk Junior stamp albums from the 1930s to 1960s give us a welcome glimpse back to the heyday of collecting and a dose of nostalgia And according to Ed Fletcher, they also hold interesting social postal history Classic albums STAMP ALBUMS T he Latin word album translates loosely into English as blank parchment; and that fairly accurately described my first home-made album created when I launched an early foray into stamp collecting as a seven-year-old, not long after the end of the Second World War. Paper; in such short supply we ate takeaway cod- and-chips laid out on sheets of Daily Mirror ; could not be spared for stamp collectors, so I had to fall back to the borderline of criminality to create my album. An uncle, lodging with us because his own home had lost an argument with a German bomb, worked as a lowly grade civil servant somewhere around Whitehall. He regularly brought us off-cuts of Colonial drafting paper; a lovely ivory shade with a grid of fine lines that helped me to lay out my collection in regimented rows across each page. I block-lettered the country headings in blue ink without adult aid, proud of my calligraphy until the uncle pointed out the correct spelling of AFGHANISTAN. Fortunately, by the time I reached LIECHTENSTEIN I had managed to acquire a 6d copy of the XLCR Stamp Finder and greatly reduced spelling mistakes when it came to country names. With affluence slowly returning in the late 1940s, shop-bought stamp albums became the great status symbols among ragamuffin stamp hinge lickers. We could never have afforded the plush pre-war albums published for the well-heeled philatelists who could still purchase them in austerity Britain. We did nevertheless embed our collections in printed albums. Some came from older brothers who handed down giveaway poster stamp albums they had acquired in the 1930s from firms including chocolate makers Nestle who, in those affluent times, had dispensed free albums to chocolate addicts. Conventional postage stamp collectors simply hinged extra stamps over parts of pages carrying the company’s name. Kids lacking a generous older brother looked out for small-ads in Rover, Wizard and Adventure comics to track down affordable soft-backed albums, often boasting space for thousands of stamps. Enough of them still linger today, often on the stalls of ephemera dealers. If you stumble upon an example it will almost certainly have had its stamp contents 1 2 3 3