Lanarkshire Philatelic Society
"Fiji"
Mr. Andy Napier
It was good to come into the warmth from out of the cold on Friday night at the Lanarkshire Philatelic Society (23rd January) when Andy Napier gave his display about "Fiji".
The display began from the time in 1870 when the Editor of the Fiji Times Express newspaper printed stamps so that mail could be delivered along with the newspaper - these stamps were plain and carried the words "Fiji Times Express" and the postal value. Several interesting examples were shown. These, by order of the British Consul, were stopped in 1872 and were replaced by locally issued mail stamps. These became subject to local reprints, forgeries, overprints, underprints and excellent examples of these were all available to view.
On 10th October, 1874, Fiji became a British Crown Colony and stamps now became overprinted with "V.R."- many of these were displayed followed by other issued stamps of the Victorian period.
Then a very colourful viewing of thematically arranged special issues of stamps depicting: Culture; Royalty; Wildlife; Fruit; Birds; Christmas; Fish; Sport also some miniature sheets and First Day covers issued for these delightfully produced issues.
In the second round, Andy gave a fascinating display of overprinted definitive stamps the basic value of the stamp being overprinted with a new value up or down and with "XX", or "xxx", printed over the old value. This led to many errors happening in the overprinting misplacement; too many XXs; small and large XX mixed; printed upside down; wrong value etc. The overprinting started using stamps of 1c & 6c base value followed by stamps of 13c. When stocks of these were exhausted, stamps with base value of 23c, then 31c & finally 44c were brought into use. In all 9 values have been created by those overprints; 1c, 2c, 3c, 4c, 5c, 18c, 20c, 40c & 50c.
Maureen Mathieson gave thanks for a "terrific" display and remarked on the wonderful research undertaken.
Our next meeting in the Caledonian Bowling Club, Motherwell Road, Hamilton, is on Friday, 6th February, 2015, at 7:30pm when Albert Tong will give his display on China.
Anyone with an interest in stamps, postal history, postcards etc is very welcome to attend.