He began refilling our glasses. ‘Well, there you are, Roy. That’s the background. But you’ll never guess what it led to.’ He was smiling, enjoying himself. ‘Ormond Hill, you see, was Superintendent of Stamping at the Inland Revenue. He was also Rowland Hill’s brother. In the circumstances Perkins Bacon’s protest that they’d seen nothing wrong in sending him cancelled specimens seems reasonable enough. But Julyan took a different view. In the end, he demanded that all dies, plates, stocks of watermarked paper and stamps printed in excess of orders, everything in fact relating to each colony should be delivered to the Agent General’s offices.’ He put down the decanter and came back to the desk. ‘Now turn to the end of the book, the last page but one. Perkins Bacon had argued that, if not stored by experts, the plates would rust or otherwise deteriorate. And they’d been fairly dilatory in meeting Julyan’s demands.’ He leaned forward, pointing halfway down page 525. ‘Now read those two letters. Then you’ll begin to understand why I wanted that collection, why the auctioning of the Solomons Seal die proofs is attracting so much attention.’
The letters read:
Office of The Agents-General
for Crown Colonies,
6,Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.
2nd June, 1862.
Gentn.
I beg to draw your attention to my letter of 12th ultimo requesting you to forward to this Office the Postage Stamps, Paper Moulds, and facsimiles in your possession, and shall be obliged by receiving a reply to that communication.
I am, Gentn,
Your obedient Servant.
P. G. Julyan
Messrs Perkins, Bacon amp; Co.
This was the end of the struggle, but up to the last Perkins Bacon were able to produce an excuse, a strange admission for a firm of Security Printers.
69 Fleet Street, E.C.
June 3, 1862.
Dear Sir
We beg to apologize for the delay which has arisen in sending you the P Stamps, Envelopes amp; Moulds in our possession, but the loss of time on other matters forced upon us by the discovery of a thief in our employ, has occasioned the apparent neglect. We hope to be able to send all by the beginning of next week.
We are Dear Sir
yr obdt serts
Per Proc. Perkins Bacon amp; Co.
J. P. Bacon
P. G. Julyan Esq.
Agent General.
I looked up at him, not entirely sure what it meant.
‘That’s all we know about it,’ he said. ‘We don’t know who this thief was or what he stole. Maybe it was banknotes. Perkins Bacon were banknote and bond printers long before they started printing the Penny Blacks in 1840. If you look at the top of that page, you’ll see a letter from the Agent General referring to delivery of fifty facsimiles for preparing Natal Bonds. It could have been notes the thief stole, or bonds or some of the excess sheets or printed stamps. As you will have gathered, Perkins Bacon were in the habit of running off extra sheets. At their best they were very meticulous printers, always concerned about colour, which was sometimes liable to fading, and they found it difficult to get paper with the right depth of watermarking.’ He glanced at Perenna. ‘The watermark is achieved simply by a slight thinning of the paper. And gum — gum was a problem, too, particularly when the order was for the tropics.’
He hesitated, a significant pause as he turned back to me. ‘On the other hand, it could be that the thief had been borrowing material for a friend of his, a would-be forger, say. He could have borrowed dies, plates even. Copies could have been made of them, and then the borrowed dies or plates returned. It might have been going on for some time.’
I realised what he was suggesting then, that the use of Perkins Bacon dies and plates need not have been confined to just this one label.
‘A nasty thought,’ he murmured. ‘It would raise doubts about the authenticity of some of the rarer mint-condition stamps. After all, the mania for stamp collecting goes back even further than the Ormond Hill controversy.’
‘But it would surely have been easier to steal printed stamps.’
‘I don’t think so. Perkins Bacon’s security wouldn’t have been that bad. Any stamps the thief could have got his hands on would have been from cancelled sheets. They would have been overprinted with the word SPECIMEN. But it’s very doubtful whether they would have regarded Colonial stamp dies as objects liable to be stolen. Josh says security at Perkins Bacon was very strict for GB dies, but probably quite negligible as regards the dies for foreign and colonial issues, and a print shop like theirs would have been full of stored plates and dies.’
But by then I had remembered something he had said to me here in this room, so long ago it seemed now. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘The seal — that’s from an early Newfoundland stamp. Didn’t you say those stamps were printed in America?’
He nodded. ‘That’s quite correct. The 1865-70 set was a completely new issue printed by the American Bank Note Company of New York. The Seal-on-Icefloe die was used for the five-cent brown, also for the two later issues, first in black, then in blue. After that the seal was re-designed, and the printing switched to Montreal.’
‘You’re surely not suggesting there was a thief at the American printing house, too?’
‘No, of course not.’ He sounded quite shocked. ‘The seal was designed by Jeens on the instructions of Perkins Bacon, and the die was made by them here in London and sent across to New York. In addition to the seal, Perkins Bacon engraved and cast a die of the Jeens Codfish design. But that design was used for banknotes only. The Jeens Codfish has a straight tail; the codfish on the two-cent stamp a curled-up tail. The seal, on the other hand, was used for both banknotes and stamps.’ He picked up the Records book, turned back the pages and, having found what he wanted, pushed it across to me again. ‘There’s de Worms’s account of what happened.’
It was a long note headed Seal and Codfish at the end of the chapter on Newfoundland, and a few pages back there were illustrations of both the seal and the codfish designs. It confirmed that the die for the Jeens seal had been engraved in London by Perkins Bacon, probably for the banknotes first, and this die was presumably stored there in 1862, when the thief was discovered.
I was still reading when Tubby went on, ‘Well, there you are, Roy. That’s the mystery that has puzzled all the experts ever since the results of Percy de Worms’s painstaking research into the Perkins Bacon files and letter books was published. On the face of it these two volumes appear quite straightforward, a fascinating, but very mundane day-to-day record of correspondence, meticulously copied and filed away by the Perkins Bacon clerks. We know how many stamps they printed of every colonial issue, how many they dispatched, every detail of the advice they gave on design, paper, ink, gum, perforation, how the sheets were to be preserved in transit, all their costings. And then, in the midst of a protracted battle with the Crown Agents, that laconic statement that there was a thief in the print shop. No details, nothing — just the bald declaration to excuse a delay. As de Worms says, a strange admission for a firm of security printers to make.’ And he added, raising his glass to us with a slightly wry smile, ‘Here’s to you and the Solomons Seal collection. We’ll have some idea of what other experts think when the bidding starts on Thursday for Lots Ninety-six and Ninety-seven.’