Page 12 - LP1478

The London Philatelist

for decades after the stamps ceased to be issued. Some of these reprints were embossed on the same
paper as the originals. Natal embossed stamps have therefore only been listed by Stanley Gibbons
with contemporary cancellations, and are best collected, if possible, on a contemporary cover –
hence the importance of this first attempt to document all the recorded postal uses of this issue.

3d local use on cover.
The most commonly recorded use of an embossed Natal 1857 stamp on cover is, not surprisingly,
a single stamp paying the prevailing 3d rate of postage between July 1857 and July 1859. There are
91 such recorded examples and rather than providing an itemised list of all the recorded covers,
their use is summarised in Table 1.
The key message from this table is that the existing record, which is, as always, biased by the
presence of a number of items from large correspondences, nonetheless provides postal historians
with a clear picture of the more common covers, and those that are significant rarities. Correspondence
between the two future major cities of Durban, the commercial centre and port, and Pietermaritzburg,
the capital, dominate the existing record. The vast majority (69%) of single rate local uses originated
in Durban or Pietermaritzburg (63/91), or, if they originated in smaller towns, they are addressed
to one of these two cities (a further 23 covers (25%)). Indeed, only five covers are recorded between
small towns; four from Umhlali and one addressed there. Umhlali at this early time had no postal
cancellation device and therefore the characteristic manuscript cancellation used by the postmaster
is well known to collectors of early Natal (Figure 1). There are in total 12 single rate postmaster
provisional Umhlali manuscript-cancelled covers in this record. Manuscript cancels consisting of
just a cross or concentric circle occur in other small towns, but the most sought-after single rate
local covers bearing the Natal 3d have the manuscript cancel applied by small town postmasters
other than Umhlali. Here the pickings are much slimmer. Census number 76 has the only recorded
postmaster manuscript cancel of Pine Town (Figure 2), today spelled as a single word, Pinetown,
but consistently spelled as Pine Town in those days. The second postmaster manuscript town name
cancelled example (Census number 77), also known on just a single cover, is part of the well-known
Wathen correspondence from Richmond to Pietermaritzburg (Figure 3). The cover illustrated in
Figure 4 (Census number 78) has it all, a town manuscript cancel of ‘RR’, attributed to Richmond
Road, transit through Durban and is addressed to Umhlali!
Among the covers originating in Durban or Pietermartzburg, some single rate rarities also exist.
The earliest covers from 1857, mailed from Pietermaritzburg, have a mute cancel, and the earliest
recorded entire bearing a Natal 3d embossed stamp, written on 1 June 1857 (Census number 20)
has the 3d similarly cancelled (Figure 5). From Durban, the blue Natal cds is the standard, but after
the blue 3d Chalon stamps were introduced, black cancellations were used and the black Natal cds
is found on just one single rate 3d cover (Census number 16, Figure 6).
During the shortage of 3d Chalon stamps, mentioned in the introduction, the numeral cancel
‘2’ is recorded on a single cover franked at the single rate (Census number 17, Figure 7). Finally,
with regard to local uses, it has been a mystery to date why the pre-stamp oval of Ladysmith, which
is recorded on used embossed stamps, has not been found on cover. The quality of the handstamp
apparently became degraded and it is mostly illegible by this period, but its smaller dimensions
than the Pietermaritzburg oval have allowed its detection on a single cover (Figure 8).
The most sought-after Natal 3d embossed stamps on cover, are not, however, the single rate frankings,
but the multiple frankings, their use with other embossed stamps, and their use in pairs (the largest
multiples recorded on cover) including the remarkable tête-bêche pair (See Table 2).
To understand the rarity of these multiple frankings, just three local covers are recorded at a double
rate franked with two 3d stamps (one of which is in the Royal collection); three others (one each in the
Royal Collection, the Mann collection at the RPSL and in private hands) have three stamps paying the
triple rate of 9d; a further two double rate local covers are franked with a pair of 3d (one of which is the
unique tête-bêche on cover) and finally, two covers have a 3d plus 6d franking to pay the 9d triple rate.

129 – 324 September 2020