Solomons Seal (43 page)

At his office in the Strand, Josh Keegan greeted Perenna as though she were some sort of princess. ‘I have to tell you, dear lady, you've made my first big auction. I've had acceptances from just about every dealer of importance. I don't know what it's going to fetch, that little collection – your great-uncle's, isn't it? – but there's no doubt about the interest it has aroused. I'm serving champagne. There! I'm a businessman, Miss Holland, and I don't do a silly, show-off thing like that unless I'm on to a winner. And we will have a bottle right now. It's the best thing after a long flight.' And as one of the girls came in with a bottle and four glasses on a plastic tray decorated with Penny Blacks under Perspex, he turned to me and in quite a different voice said, ‘Now, where is the sheet? I want to see it.'

While I was getting it out of my briefcase, he picked
up a copy of the catalogue, which was lying on his desk, and held it up for us to see. ‘There you are. I've taken a chance on what you told me on the phone from Sydney.' And there it was, on the cover – a reproduction of the two Solomons Seal proofs under the heading:
The Incredible Has Finally Happened
, and then, below the facsimile of the proofs:
The only remaining sheet (60) of the blue Solomons Seal Ship Label is being delivered to the J. S. H. Keegan offices from Sydney in time for this unique auction offering – design collection, proofs, and resulting sheet of the most startling transplant ever perpetrated.
‘There!' he exclaimed again. ‘You can't say I haven't done you proud, eh?'

It was Perenna who asked him what it was all about, but he laughed and shook his head, looking like a learned professor in a relaxed moment as he toasted her, raising his glass and smiling. ‘Commander Sawyer – Tubby – he's driving you down to Essex, I gather. He'll explain it.' And he added hastily, ‘But I think I must say this: The fact that it has aroused a great deal of interest doesn't mean they'll bid the price up to a ridiculous figure. They're businessmen, all of them, and a glass of champagne or two won't stop them keeping their feet firmly on the ground. We've got them to the auction. What happens then … ' He shrugged. ‘Now, that sheet please.'

By then I had got it out of my briefcase, and he stood looking at it in silence for a long time, the magnifying glass screwed in his eye. Then he shook his head. ‘Pity! All those blotches, and only part original
gum. Pity it isn't mint. If it were in mint condition … ' He hesitated. ‘But then, I don't know. Maybe it's better like this. It's so obviously been in the heat and humidity of the Solomons. Yes, better perhaps, more real-looking, more genuine. And a nice shade of blue, a genuine Perkins Bacon blue.' And he winked at Tubby, laughing quietly to himself. ‘It really is quite humorous. He'll tell you. Very funny indeed. Perkins Bacon, of all people. Such a stuffy, banknote sort of outfit. Theft, forgery … you tell ‘em, Tubby. That's what I said to Mr Slingsby here when he came to see me months ago, I said I wouldn't spoil it for you, so you tell ‘em – later.' He re-filled Perenna's glass and said, ‘You'll be attending the auction, I hope, Miss Holland? It could make quite a bit, that sheet.'

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 & 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 & 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 & 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.'

‘But it would surely have been easier to steal printed stamps.'

‘I don't think so. Perkins Bacon's security wouldn't have been that bad. Any stamps the thief could have got his hands on would have been from cancelled sheets. They would have been overprinted with the word SPECIMEN. But it's very doubtful whether they would have regarded Colonial stamp dies as objects liable to be stolen. Josh says security at Perkins Bacon was very strict for GB dies, but probably quite negligible as regards the dies for foreign and colonial issues, and a print shop like theirs would have been full of stored plates and dies.'

But by then I had remembered something he had said to me here in this room, so long ago it seemed now. ‘Hold on,' I said. ‘The seal – that's from an early Newfoundland stamp. Didn't you say those stamps were printed in America?'

He nodded. ‘That's quite correct. The 1865–70 set was a completely new issue printed by the American Bank Note Company of New York. The Seal-on-Icefloe die was used for the five-cent brown, also for the two later issues, first in black, then in blue. After that the seal was re-designed, and the printing switched to Montreal.'

‘You're surely not suggesting there was a thief at the American printing house, too?'

‘No, of course not.' He sounded quite shocked. ‘The seal was designed by Jeens on the instructions of Perkins Bacon, and the die was made by them here in London and sent across to New York. In addition to the seal, Perkins Bacon engraved and cast a die of the Jeens Codfish design. But that design was used for banknotes only. The Jeens Codfish has a straight tail; the codfish on the two-cent stamp a curled-up tail. The seal, on the other hand, was used for both banknotes and stamps.' He picked up the
Records
book, turned back the pages and, having found what he wanted, pushed it across to me again. ‘There's de Worms's account of what happened.'

It was a long note headed
Seal and Codfish
at the end of the chapter on Newfoundland, and a few pages back there were illustrations of both the seal and the codfish designs. It confirmed that the die for the Jeens seal had been engraved in London by Perkins Bacon, probably for the banknotes first, and this die was presumably stored there in 1862, when the thief was discovered.

I was still reading when Tubby went on, ‘Well, there you are, Roy. That's the mystery that has puzzled all the experts ever since the results of Percy de Worms's painstaking research into the Perkins Bacon files and letter books was published. On the face of it these two volumes appear quite straightforward, a fascinating, but very mundane day-to-day record of correspondence, meticulously copied and filed away by the Perkins Bacon clerks. We know how many stamps they printed of every colonial issue, how
many they dispatched, every detail of the advice they gave on design, paper, ink, gum, perforation, how the sheets were to be preserved in transit, all their costings. And then, in the midst of a protracted battle with the Crown Agents, that laconic statement that there was a thief in the print shop. No details, nothing – just the bald declaration to excuse a delay. As de Worms says, a strange admission for a firm of security printers to make.' And he added, raising his glass to us with a slightly wry smile, ‘Here's to you and the Solomons Seal collection. We'll have some idea of what other experts think when the bidding starts on Thursday for Lots Ninety-six and Ninety-seven.'