Travancore

A producer of ‘ugly’ stamps if ever there was one. Badly printed on dodgy paper, rough perforations abound, unimaginative designs that look very similar and common as muck. But I have a soft spot for them. As a child I had one of these strange purple and old looking beasts. I always thought it would be worth a few quid. A few pence maybe, but it’s memory has hung around my psyche. Leaving aside the commemoratives, lets have a look at these bread and butter definitives.

So faced with a pile of 40 or so definitives bought for peanuts and the SG catalogue in hand, the task was started with a hey-nonny-no and a happy whistled tune. Two hours later, the whole lot went into the same stamp packet. The next week, armed with an old Lighthouse perf gauge, a working roll-a-tector (don’t tell anyone) and a daylight LED bulb in my desk light, I had another go. A bit better, but the same story. All back in the same packet. These are hard!

The problem is the bewildering array of possibilities. There are 14 different values (some in different colours which actually helps to narrow them down), four basic watermarks, though one one might not produce a watermark at all, and another that often appears on it’s side and so looks a bit like the first one, one basic perf gauge to start with, but this descends into a cacophony of three different gauges that can be found together in what’s called compound perforations. Oh, and there are three different types of paper. And according to SG, different issues can be found in slightly different colours. But I tend to take that with a pinch of salt and in any case I lack a colour key.

Back at the drawing board I decided to fall back on a tool that is useful when dealing with later GB penny stars. I built a spreadsheet with all the issues listed along with their salient features. I had gone through all the standard variations and naively thought that the official stamps would be the standard issue with an extra overprint. But nothing so simple! The catalogue notes that some officials were special printing in their own right. So another hour or so and the size of the spreadsheet was doubled. You can download the spreadsheet by clicking here. 

The great thing about spreadsheets are that you can filter the information contained in them and quickly produce a shortlist of possibles. Here follows the order of examination that seemed to develop as the stamps were processed. As with most of these types of operation, you go for the quick and easy wins first and proceed to the trickier challenges later. 

Step 1 - Denomination. 

This is the lowest hanging fruit as the denomination is written on the stamp. You can’t ask for a bigger clue! Using the purple beastie at the top of this page as an example, we need to look all stamps of the ½ Ch denomination. We can exclude all other denominations using the auto feature found in the spreadsheet. This immediately brings up 13 possible issues as shown.

Step 2 - Surcharge. 

Again, easy to see, filtering any surcharge amount immediately narrows down the search. There are different official overprints, and even some mixed types withing the same setting. This is turning out to be a deceptively complex group. With our example stamp not having any kind of overprint, we can reduce the possibles to nine.

Step 3 – Paper. 

There are three main types of paper used for these stamps. Laid paper, wove and machine made paper. Laid paper is actually easy to pick out of a crowd, so filtering the spreadsheet for laid paper takes you straight to the answer. Unfortunately, wove paper, whether made by hand or machine can look remarkably similar. It’s true that the machine made stuff should be of a more even texture than hand made, but the better quality hand made paper is comparable to machine made. This is according to my untrained eyes. If we are not sure, it is better to filter out laid paper and revisit this step if necessary towards the end of the process.

Step 4 - Watermark. 

If the watermark is reasonably clear and upright, it will be either Wmk B or C. C is a large expansive watermark and usually easy to pick out. In this case, a C watermark would give us an answer of SG36. Watermark C is only found on machine made paper (see comments above).  A smaller perhaps slightly shallower watermark, though still upright would be Wmk B. I have noticed that inverted watermarks are common, which is probably why they are not listed.

If you are having problems discerning or even finding the watermark, it is probably from either Wmk A or the earlier (un-named and unillustrated?) “Government of Travancore” watermark. There are also a very few sideways examples from Wmk C when they changed the sheet size. Things were clearly getting too simple for us. In this instance, the ½ Ch was not part of the early release, so any off set watermark is probably Wmk A.

Our example above has a nice upright, though inverted watermark B. Filtering the spreadsheet with this information give us a choice of three SG numbers.

Step 5 - Perforations. 

We had no need to go this far with our example as variations only occur on later issues. However, if you have some options still open, it is worth getting out the perf gauge as some of these varieties are worth a few pounds. It may also help nail your stamp to a specific SG number. Judging by the perforation intersections at the corner of these issues, they look to be made by a line perforator. The catalogue mentions that a perf 12.5 gauge was introduced in 1937 and a gauge 11 introduced in 1939. The existence of compound perforation gauges would indicate that there was some degree of division of labour with more than one perforating machine. After 1904 all sheets were a standard size of 84 stamps arranged 14x6. Assuming a rough size per stamp of 23mm x 28mm, this gives us a sheet size of 322mm x 168 mm. This is important as the amount of force required to perforate a sheet of paper is surprisingly large, and perforating more than one sheet at a time increases that force exponentially.  Although I do not know the actual arrangements within the Stamp Manufactory, Trivandrum, it is a fair bet that one machine was much sturdier than the other.

Step 6 - Colour. 

To an extent, here I am groping in the dark. I have an SG 36 which (according to the catalogue) is only found in reddish violet. So in theory, I know what that colour looks like. And in this case, it is a reasonable match for our example stamp. Which would make it SG11a.

Colour is one of those bugbears that plagues penny reds, and I suspect virtually any area of stamp collection you care to mention. Much of the time there is no philatelic importance to slightly different shades and so should be cataloged as “Red-Brown (shades)” for example. Sometimes the colour used at press changes over time and so acquires some philatelic significance. Occasionally SG decide to add a premium to these shades, though whether the price hike is justified is open to question, but in general a very high price indicates a very specific shade at a very specific date. I do not yet know enough about the timeline of these stamps and their colour variations to say whether they are significant. To be fair to SG, they do say that the shades found on these stamps vary for various reasons, even within the same sheet. And there does not appear to be any stamps in this range that have a hefty premium just because of the colour apart from 19a - which is due to an error.

Just to re-iterate, I am completely new to this area. So if you see a mistake, please let me know.

AP

May 2020 - 23