Geoffrey Osborn has been collecting Postal History of various countries for several decades. Of all his collections, it is perhaps his Worldwide Naval Mails collection – the subject of this Cavendish catalogue – that confirms him as one of the most advanced Postal Historians of our generation. Having studied Postage Stamps, Postal Markings and unusual covers of all periods (with an emphasis on Gibraltar, Great Britain and Bermuda), he came across a kind of cover that seemed impossible to classify, this challenge appealed to him! Many of us had come across QV covers with British stamps cancelled at British ports with unusually high postal rates, but with the word 'England' in the address and with 'Via Brindisi/Marseilles' endorsements or the like, and wondered where they had been sent from... All the rest of us merely continued to wonder... but Geoff decided to try harder. He realised that many of these envelopes came from British Naval personnel all around the world. The problem was that they seemed impossible to analyse without their contents. That was the challenge.
Geoff began to look carefully at the addressees of some of these letters, their postal rates, and the dates of their (usually English) arrival datestamps; he realised that many were written to seamen's wives, mothers, sisters, and other relations. These sometimes gave a clue as to the identity of the senders. Then the arrival dates suggested a finite number of possible mail-carrying vessels, and slowly a tricky jigsaw puzzle presented itself - totally different for almost every cover. In the end, he found that it took an analysis of Lloyds Lists of incoming vessels, Postal History records of mail-carrying ships, a thorough understanding of the postal rates of the period, and (very often) a determined genealogical effort to trace a naval relative of the addressee. The latter could very often (from the identity of the writer and analysis of the Navy Lists) lead to the ship from which a letter was sent, and so the port from which the relevant mail connection was made to carry the letter to Britain on the date indicated by the arrival datestamp.
This mammoth task would readily have put most of us off, but it spurred Geoff on, and soon he was accumulating as many of these 'Mystery' letters as possible. After many years he had solved enough of these covers – and come to understand the special P.O. rules for 'Naval Officers' and 'Ships' Bag' letters that often determined the postal rates of his covers – to publish (in 1995) a 133-page A4 book (profusely illustrated with his distinctive and detailed album pages) on the subject. His 'Naval Officers' Letters' (published by the Stuart Rossiter Trust Fund) was a revelation to the rest of us. [This book is referred to as NOL in the descriptions that follow; many of these lots are offered on the original album pages that are depicted in full in the book.] He had solved almost all the problems associated with this kind of mail, although he even illustrated a couple that had defeated him. He had discovered covers (often with Campaign connections) from Abyssinia, Fiji, Mexico, Hong Kong, Panama, and Zanzibar, to name just a few – in fact he had found covers from almost every corner of the world to which Queen Victoria's British Navy found its way!
Geoff has continued to acquire these covers ever since 1995, and around half these lots are new ones that were not illustrated in his book. It is important to remember that the Naval Officers' 6d Concession rate was only in force from 1 July 1857 until 31 Dec. 1869, and that some routes cost 6d anyway and so did not offer the Officers any concession as such. But all these letters (including those sent before and after the Concession rate period) were sent by the 'Ship's Bag' system; so collectors of almost any maritime country in the world can now endeavour to acquire examples of both these kinds of mail from their areas, as well as ingoing covers sent under this scheme and addressed to serving Navy personnel. Likewise, collectors of British 'Used Abroad', Maritime and 'Overseas Destination' mail will now find a whole new chapter to add to their collections.
James Grimwood-Taylor, 7th May 2007.
