Sixty Years of Philately in Sale

Sixty+ Years of Philately in Sale
by Clive Griffiths
It was with some relief that the officers of the Society learnt recently that our archives had at last turned up. Along with minute books of meetings (from 1949) and committee meetings (from 1944) was an almost complete collection of the yearly syllabus. Some of you will have had sight of the photocopy of the first syllabus that our secretary brought to a recent meeting, and will no doubt have noted that the subscription in 1944 was five shillings, the equivalent I would guess of about £25 in today’s money.

What that early syllabus confirmed was that the first public meeting of the Society was held on Tuesday, 31 October 1944. It is perhaps interesting to remind ourselves of the wartime situation of that period. D Day had taken place almost six months earlier, but hopes of a breakthrough into Germany and a rapid end to the war had been frustrated by the set-back of Arnhem in September, and a new threat had emerged in the early days of October, at least for the South East of England, with the beginning of the V2 campaign. Nonetheless, with the campaign in Italy making steady, if unspectacular progress, advances in Burma and the American fightback against Japan in the Pacific gathering pace, it must have seemed that the tide of war was now definitely running in favour of the Allies, underlined perhaps by the visit of King George VI to the Western European battlefields 11-16 October.

No doubt buoyed up by a degree of optimism and determined to begin a process of getting back to something approaching normality after five years of war, a few dedicated philatelists gathered in Sale for the first meeting of the newly formed Sale and District Philatelic Society.
The Treasurer, Norman Wardleworth, gave a talk and display entitled ‘Russian Commemoratives’. Regrettably, just what the display comprised is not known (no minute book for these early meetings appears to have survived), but it is interesting to speculate for a moment on what Norman might have shown. Would he have started his display with the War Orphans Fund issue of 1905, or the 1913 celebration of the Tercentenary of the Romanov Dynasty (those familiar portraits of Czar Nicholas II, Catherine the Great and other monarchs found in most childhood collections), or the anniversary issues of the October Revolution (1922)? And where would he have finished? Had he been able, I wonder, to get his hands on any of the latest issues of 1944, commemorating amongst other things the liberation of Stalingrad and Leningrad, ‘Twenty Years without Lenin’, the birth centenary of Rimsky-Korsakov and recalling the achievements of various other scientists, writers and artists? And what sort of account would he have given of that seemingly endless succession of Soviet issues celebrating anniversaries of previous revolutions and of Lenin’s death, and the propagandistic triumphs of the new communist regime?

Certainly from the early ‘20s onwards there is a proliferation of very colourful sets with something like 800 individual stamps appearing in the years before 1945. It’s perhaps curious that we have no Russian collector amongst our membership at present (at least as far as I know). I suppose the Soviet and other Eastern European postal administrations developed such a bad reputation in the decades after WWII that the number of serious collectors interested in their stamps went into a decline, and who knows if there has been a recovery yet?