On March 1st Banbury Stamp Society held the Robson Cup competition where member’s displays were scored by the membership. We started with an envelope produced to imitate the 1890 Uniform Penny Postage Jubilee envelope. The Post Office took exception to this and managed to get most of the print run scrapped. At the beginning of the Great War, too many men joined the Navy and so the Royal Naval Brigade (infantry) was formed. One deployment was to defend Antwerp from the Germans. This did not go well, and many soldiers became German POWs, or were interned in the Netherlands. We saw letters and postcards from both camps. Letter cards first came out in Victorian times, and we were shown a range of early pre-stamped postal stationery. In order to prevent fraud, many companies perforated their stamps with the company initials. We saw example of these from Newfoundland. When Germany started to fly the Zeppelins around the world in the 1930’s, they carried a lot of mail and we saw letters from Malta which went via Italy to Friederichshafen in Germany where they joined the Zeppelin to South America. The winning entry (Jonathan Durley) was on vending machines. The first British vending machine came out in 1891 and we saw a range of material including ‘training’ stamps used to test the machines as well as an actual vending machine. We finished with maritime mail related to the Bahamas. Most was posted from liners and had Bahamas stamps on, but one had US stamps on and had been posted from the submarine USS Pollack on a ‘shakedown’ cruise around the Caribbean. The next event will be a display by 3 Members held on Tuesday 29th March 2022 at 7:30pm at the Hanwell Fields Com munity Centre. The Banbury Stamp Society is on-line at ‘www.banburystampsociety.co.uk’ or contact John Davies on 01295 255831.
