Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
I will stay fairly close to chronological order. Again thanks to Clive for the AlbumEasy software. I hope you enjoy it.
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The first two pages actually predate Siam issuing its own stamps and both pages are very un(der)populated with stamps. The British consulate in Bangkok was running a post office for foreign mail. Eventually they started stocking Strait Settlements stamps overprinted with a "B" for use on outgoing mail. Maybe one day I will make a big effort to increase the number of Bangkok "B"s I have.
The second page shows a possible essay for Siam's first stamp which wasn't used.
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These are great!! Thanks again for posting them!
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Sometimes it's hard to fit in my hobby between my publishing jobs, but I am slowly moving along. I have two more pages finished showing the earliest Siamese stamps from 1883. At this time the newly organized postal service was just for internal mail and mostly for the city of Bangkok. Siam didn't join the UPU until 2 years after these stamps were issued so they didn't need to follow UPU rules. They were printed by Waterlow and Sons of Great Britain and the best information we have is that half a million of each value were printed. The currency values looks fairly complicated as the first three values all have the Thai character for "1" on them. The real value is in the Thai word on the stamps. Siam had taken its counting system from India and its currency was a tical which was a weight of silver. The tical was divided into 64 atts. Half an att was 1 solot and each time the value doubled it got a new name. We do not see a change to a decimal system on Siamese stamps until 1909 when 100 satangs equals 1 baht. The "fuang" value, 8 atts, was never issued and most of the stock was destroyed. The few that escaped destruction are extremely expensive.
A few notes on the first issue. They do tend oxidize with age but a hydrogen peroxide fueled sweat box can bring the colours back, especially with the 1 att red stamp. The lowest value, 1 solot, never represented a real postal rate and they were sold off to collectors by the Siamese post office after they were demonetized. In fact Siamese stamps have had a lot of collector interest from their earliest days so there are plenty in old collections. To put together a mint set of the first issue isn't very hard. In my album I am putting pictures in places I don't have the stamp as this becomes my "wants list" catalogue. 
If the stamp isn't in a black mount it means it is just a picture to be covered over by a mount when I do find one. With the 1 solot blue stamp it is possible to collect the three plates and also the three shades. Why this value is the only one we know Waterlow used different plates in the print run I don't know.
Here are the three plates of the 1 solot blue stamp.
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Very nice. My only comment is that at first glance the border looks cropped (should be something extending outside of the board) but it seems intentional.
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I think it's just me cropping the scan preview. These pages are made to fit into sleeves so it's two pages back to back in each sleeve. The albums are locally made using a 3-ring binder. The sleeves are actually US letter size and designed for stock sheets, but if I used that size paper I would need to trim the pages. I use A4 size with the bottom 24mm trimmed off. This way it makes the page design easy because I don't have to allow for a gutter margin. The albums come in various colours with slip cases so they are fairly attractive.
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Another page posted below, but I thought I should say a little more about this period in Siam. To start we must mention King Chulalongkorn, the fifth monarch of the Chakri dynasty, so also called Rama V. His father was King Mongkut who was rather inaccurately portrayed by the great Yul Brynner in the stage musical and movie The King and I. This was based on a fictionalized account of Anna Leonowens teaching the children of King Mongkut in the royal court in Bangkok. That makes the young crown prince in the movie the future King Chulalongkorn. Both the kings above were facing problems in a period of peak colonization with the French advancing from the east and the British from the south. Their answer was rapid modernization and this partly explains the origin of the Thai postal system. In the Entente Cordiale signed in 1904 between Britain and France among the many Franco-British agreements accepted Siam as a buffer state separating British and French expansion in SE Asia.
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The highest value stamp of the first issue was the 1 salung which was worth 16 atts, although later devalued to 12 atts to match the international letter postal rate. There was a small need for a higher value stamp so in 1885 some of the mainly unused minimum value stamps, the 1 solots worth a ½ att were surcharged as 1 tical worth 64 atts. This was an increase of 128 times and so was open to forgery of the hand stamped surcharge. Even back then postal use wasn't the biggest temptation as there wasn't that high a demand for high postage. It was the philatelic trade that wanted copies of this new stamp. In fact the sub-types of the last surcharge which were typeset were probably more about the government supplying this trade. You can see I have 4 of the 5 surcharges, but I have to be honest. There could be 4 fakes or 4 genuine copies there, or anything in between. These were all from older collections, but that was when a lot of the fakes were being printed too. When the 1 solot blue stamps were later demonetized they were sold off to collectors giving a lot of stock for forgers to add hand-stamped surcharges to.
The 1889 1 att overprints on the 2 atts (1 sio) stamps were needed because in the next 1887 De la Rue stamp issue no 1 att stamps were ordered. They didn't appear until 3 years later. This was the first answer for the lack of 1 att stamps, but it was going to cause a lot problems in the second series of stamps, as we shall see later in this thread.
Again a shout out to Clive and the fabulous Album Easy software.
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The final part of the Waterlow contract for the first issue was a postal card with a printed 1 att stamp which was the inland postcard rate. The card was sold for 1½ atts at the post offices and became a popular means of communication. You often see them sent by shipping agents to tell customers their cargo has arrived by sea. Local clubs also used them to confirm meeting dates and such like. I have a nicer used one but I'm holding it back because it has some interesting postmarks and may fit better into a postmark page later in the album. This one looks like it has been cancelled to order for the philatelic market. (Yes, collectors preferred used back in those early days.)
The first issue postal card was overprinted twice. (There is another overprint but it is rather dubious as it didn't show up until rather late in the day.) The first overprint was after Siam joined the UPU and the card was needed for overseas mail. The international postal rate for cards was 4 atts so the card was surcharged for this amount. A later surcharge of 1½ atts in Thai script showed the cost of the card rather than the 1 att card postal rate. I like to imagine this was done as postmasters were tired of customers complaining that they were paying 1½ atts although the stamp said it should be 1 att. Hopefully I will find a good looking 4 att card soon.
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I hope some members are still enjoying this odyssey through the stamps of Siam. The page below with the mint and used stamps of the second stamp issue was one of the easiest to design so far. What it doesn't foretell is the can of worms I'm opening by introducing this stamp issue. There are weeks of work ahead with many pages to design. This is because of the many surcharge overprints on these stamps between 1889 and 1909. Each of these surcharges has its own varieties and errors. There are a couple of minor repeatable key plate faults and wealth of interesting postmarks to be added in also.
In 1887 Siam issued its new set of stamps. By this time they had joined the UPU. De La Rue printed this second issue mostly in 2 colours using a new typography process they were introducing. They were also using inks that would wash out if there were attempts to clean off postal cancels. The reuse of stamps seemed to be the main worry of postal authorities at the time. In this issue the green and purple inks are a worry for collectors trying to clean stamps of old backing paper or hinges. The single colour green 1 att stamp was issued almost 4 years after the bi-coloured stamps and was much missed in those years as we shall see in the overprints. I'm not sure why they were not ordered at the same time as the others.
The key stamp in this set for collectors is the 64 att high value in mint condition. (You can see it is missing on my page.) It is priced at almost $60 on the Stampworld online catalogue.
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As I warned in the previous comment I am opening a can worms in putting the many surcharges of the Siam's second issue in an album. The att (Siamese currency of the period) surcharges of 1889-1908 can become addictive. I will try to keep it simple, but even so the next two album pages I had hoped to be able to put on a single page. These two pages of the 1 att overprinted on the 2 atts stamps is one of the simpler surcharges, but as you will see it's far from being simple.
Some things to keep in mind. Up until 1932 Siam (Thailand) was an absolute monarchy which could affect government decision making. Siam did need foreign experts to help in its modernization drive, but both British and French experts could be seen as too close to their colonial governments. Siam looked to Germany for help with postal and railway services.
The cause of so many surcharges was a lack of stamps of the correct values. In the beginning this was the failure to ask for 1 att stamps with the original second stamp issue order. It was almost 4 years before a 1 att stamp joined the other values.
A repeated warning, De La Rue used water soluble green and purple inks for the second Siamese stamp issue so try and keep these away from water.
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In 1889 because Siam hadn't ordered a 1 att stamp along with the other seven values of the second stamp issue from De La Rue in 1887 there was a shortage of this value which was needed for the inland printed paper postal rate. The 1 att stamp stock of the first issue was exhausted and the remaining 1 sio (2 atts) stamps of the first Waterlow issue had been overprinted as 1 att. It was decided to start overprinting the new second issue 2 atts with 1 att to fill the need. In hindsight this wasn't such a great idea as 2 atts was the inland letter postal rate and eventually there would be a shortage of these also.
These surcharges were made using hand-stamps in the Thai language as they were for inland use rather than international use.
A quick note to explain the scans. This time I wanted to show how the pages are displayed in my albums. We have locally made albums using 3-ring binders. The albums fit US letter size pages and there are stock pages of various strip heights that fit in the sleeves. Because the sleeves themselves are US letter size you cannot fit a US letter paper page inside the sleeve without some slight trimming. Now US letter size paper isn't that easy to obtain in Thailand where the standard paper is the European A4 size. So, if I have to trim the paper anyway I may as well trim an easy to obtain A4 page. I can put two pages back-to-back in each sleeve. Again I'm using Clive's great software to design the pages. The scanner cannot show the entire width of the sleeve but I think you can see the basic idea.
I will talk more about the rarer stamps which you can see are missing on the first of my above pages later.
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I said I would talk some more about the rarer overprints on Siamese stamps from the late 19th Century. What surprised me was how important the philatelic market had already become. Stamp dealers in Europe and their agents in Bangkok were looking for fresh material and they found some of it in Siam. Bonnie Davis in her wonderful book, Royal Siamese Postal Service (The Early Years), combed through the archives of that period and found plenty of comments relating to just this. Here she is writing about the content of the Bangkok Times, January 21, 1896.
There seemed to be a general opinion in Bangkok that the Siamese Postal Authorities were working with the interest of philatelists in mind, by continuing their policy of issuing surcharged stamps. However, if the surcharging must continue, it was wondered why it could not be done by competent printers "who would not connive in the printing of philatelic monstrosities." The annoyance was even greater because of the widespread belief that plates for the printing of the required denominations were waiting for use and "lying idle in Europe."
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I have to admit that the last page posted on the 8 hand-stamps has some misidentification. I have checked with some image measuring software and I think I have a few in the wrong position. Working in tenths of millimeters isn't so easy. An over-inked hand-stamp can add half a millimeter. I will rework that page.
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I've reworked the page on the 8 hand-stamps used to overprint the 2 atts stamps to 1 att. I wanted to keep the two blocks of 4 at the top of the page and these are now labelled hand-stamps 2 & 3 with places for the singles of hand-stamp 1 and 4-8 below. There are now two empty places rather than the one I had before using my more accurate measuring to correct the original page. (I probably wouldn't have gone this deep into this particular issue except for having quite a bit of stock.)
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I had some time to continue. Before anything else I am feeling guilty about not giving due credit so I will start a list below.
Our fellow SoR member Clive and his great Album Easy software.
My fellow Thai Philatelic Society (TPS) member, Derek Bingham for his TPS publication Thailand: The Att(s) Surcharges of Rama V 1889-1908.
Also fellow members of the TPS, Prakob Chirakiti (President of FIP - the Fédération Internationale de Philatélie) and Rory Morrisey (Editor of The Thai Times, the TPS magazine) for their joint articles about the 1st and 2nd Siamese issues in The Thai Times.
Correction: The first stamp on the fifth page of this collection, the first 1 TICAL overprint on the blue 1 solot stamp is most likely a fake. A very old and fairly good fake, but still a fake. Someone who knows pointed out after looking a high resolution scan that the "1" wasn't quite correct, the length of the surcharge was slightly off and the postmark was unlikely to have been used on this stamp. It's quite possible that all four of my overprints are fakes. All of them came from old collections but there was a thriving philatelic market in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries for Siamese stamps causing many fakes to be produced. You shouldn't spend big money on these overprints unless they have a certificate.
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We are still just at the beginning of the late Nineteenth Century 'att' surcharges. Sourcing from De La Rue in Britain hadn't gone well. I think De La Rue had a reputation of being rather arrogant and Siam was running out of low value stamps and not enjoying doing business with the printer.
Because a 1 att stamp wasn't in the original order of the 2nd series stamps, 2 atts stamps were surcharged to 1 att to fill the need. Unfortunately 2 atts was the local letter postal rate and stock was running short. The 1 att surcharging was switched to the 3 atts stamp. This came a little late as the 2 atts stamps were now running out. The next surcharge was to overprint 3 atts stamps as 2 atts. In all this overprinting wood and metal hand-stamps were used followed by letterpress surcharges. It is possible to identify the various hand-stamps being used as you can see below.
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Very nice! Well done!
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Thank you Sean.
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What phenomenal work you've done! It's truly a model for how to present a complicated series of issues.
I especially like the way you've laid out the pages to highlight plate and overprint differences, and very much appreciate the supplemental explanations you're providing in the posts.
If I wore a hat, it'd be off to you!
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Well, thank you very much Dave. I have to say though that the hard work was done by other collectors over the years including those I have posted credit to. In the early years of the Twentieth Century there was already a Siamese Philatelic club collecting information as well as stamps. It is through them translating Siamese post office notices that we know things like how many stamps were printed in the first 1883 issue. (500,000 of each value.)
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A shortage of 4 atts stamps created the need for a surcharge on the 24 atts stamps of the second issue. 80,400 stamps (670 sheets of 120 stamps) were surcharged using 4 wood hand-stamps at a local print shop and 120,000 stamps (1,000 sheets) using 4 metal hand-stamps by the Post and Telegraph Department in Bangkok. Initially the surcharge was in Thai only, but because of the UPU rules an English overprint was added shortly afterwards. Only 8,040 of the Thai only wood hand-stamp and 4,000 of the Thai only metal hand-stamp stamps were issued. The remainder were issued with both Thai and English surcharges. (The fourth of the metal hand-stamps is not seen on Thai only surcharged stamps.)
The individual hand-stamps, both wood and metal, can be identified. This time I'm not leaving spaces for those I do not have as I am not planning on looking for them. If some new ones come into my possession I will redesign the page.
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While taking a break from pulling my hair out writing about what was to later happen to the 4 atts stamps shown above I thought I would add a bit of local colour, both at the time the stamps were issued and much more recently. American Bonnie Davis wrote a number of history books about Thailand while living here. Below is a small piece from her wonderful 1983 book, Royal Siamese Postal Service - The Early Years. In it she researched the archives of the post office and the Bangkok English language newspapers of the period.
First a bit about the author. I never met her but I must have already been in Bangkok when the book was published by the Siam Stamp Trading Trading company as I must have got my copy at the time. She wrote many interesting books and history pieces in the local press and was a fine writer. Now the next bit is from my poor memory of hearing talk and gossip about her so if I am wrong please don't sue me. She came out to Thailand as the wife of a US diplomat of whom it was said he was the long term Bangkok CIA resident.
Anyway a quote from her book taken from a report in the Bangkok Times of Saturday the 20th February 1892 which indirectly relates to the 4 atts inland letter postal rate.
"While we all know that Siam in 1892, was a large part unexplored jungle, few of us have any idea just what it is like to leave the city of Bangkok and head out to the provinces, whether for adventure, or duty. In March of that year a Post Office survey party, working to open up mail routes between Korat and Ubon, had their night camp attacked by tigers. One came in close enough to stampede their animals, but no one was injured."
Now it doesn't say what animals they were using, but it is quite possible that elephants were in use along with cattle and horses. Just over 60 years later the Americans were building Thailand's first international standard highways in the Cold War to link Bangkok with two of its air bases, Udon to the north and Ubon to the east where US aircraft would eventually take off on missions over Vietnam. Wild tigers still roam the Kao Yai national park just south of Korat.
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Just over 200,000 stamps were surcharged with the wood and metal Thai hand-stamps, but very few were issued as Thai language only surcharges. It was realized that they couldn't be used to make up values on international mail according to UPU rules. The following month a first batch were also surcharged in English using typeset printing and two sizes of Roman fonts. A few months later the rest were also given the English overprint using the same two fonts, but this time a stop was added after the word "atts". With four English surcharge styles and eight Thai styles there are fourteen known possible combinations. It is possible there are more.
I have a fair selection below and I am not leaving spaces for those I don't have as I am not actively looking for the others. If it wasn't that I had put some old collections away many years ago I would have reduced the following four pages and the previous Thai only page to a single page with just six stamps showing basic set.
The Stamp World online catalogue shows the Thai only overprints at $30-$40 while those with both Thai and English are $8-$12.
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I will show the building of my new album for stamps issued under the name of Siam as I do it. In 1939 the country's name was changed to Thailand although the people had long called themselves Thais, which translates as "free men". They are part of the Tai ethnic group which stretches from China through Laos and the Shan States of Burma into Thailand. Stamps were first issued under King Chulalongkorn, the fifth monarch of the present Chakri dynasty. At that time Siam had become a buffer state between the expanding colonial empires of France and Britain. To south and west were the British colonies of Strait Settlements (Malaya) and Burma. To the east was French Indochina (Laos and Cambodia).
I will stay fairly close to chronological order. Again thanks to Clive for the AlbumEasy software. I hope you enjoy it.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
The first two pages actually predate Siam issuing its own stamps and both pages are very un(der)populated with stamps. The British consulate in Bangkok was running a post office for foreign mail. Eventually they started stocking Strait Settlements stamps overprinted with a "B" for use on outgoing mail. Maybe one day I will make a big effort to increase the number of Bangkok "B"s I have.
The second page shows a possible essay for Siam's first stamp which wasn't used.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
These are great!! Thanks again for posting them!
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
Sometimes it's hard to fit in my hobby between my publishing jobs, but I am slowly moving along. I have two more pages finished showing the earliest Siamese stamps from 1883. At this time the newly organized postal service was just for internal mail and mostly for the city of Bangkok. Siam didn't join the UPU until 2 years after these stamps were issued so they didn't need to follow UPU rules. They were printed by Waterlow and Sons of Great Britain and the best information we have is that half a million of each value were printed. The currency values looks fairly complicated as the first three values all have the Thai character for "1" on them. The real value is in the Thai word on the stamps. Siam had taken its counting system from India and its currency was a tical which was a weight of silver. The tical was divided into 64 atts. Half an att was 1 solot and each time the value doubled it got a new name. We do not see a change to a decimal system on Siamese stamps until 1909 when 100 satangs equals 1 baht. The "fuang" value, 8 atts, was never issued and most of the stock was destroyed. The few that escaped destruction are extremely expensive.
A few notes on the first issue. They do tend oxidize with age but a hydrogen peroxide fueled sweat box can bring the colours back, especially with the 1 att red stamp. The lowest value, 1 solot, never represented a real postal rate and they were sold off to collectors by the Siamese post office after they were demonetized. In fact Siamese stamps have had a lot of collector interest from their earliest days so there are plenty in old collections. To put together a mint set of the first issue isn't very hard. In my album I am putting pictures in places I don't have the stamp as this becomes my "wants list" catalogue. If the stamp isn't in a black mount it means it is just a picture to be covered over by a mount when I do find one. With the 1 solot blue stamp it is possible to collect the three plates and also the three shades. Why this value is the only one we know Waterlow used different plates in the print run I don't know.
Here are the three plates of the 1 solot blue stamp.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
Very nice. My only comment is that at first glance the border looks cropped (should be something extending outside of the board) but it seems intentional.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
I think it's just me cropping the scan preview. These pages are made to fit into sleeves so it's two pages back to back in each sleeve. The albums are locally made using a 3-ring binder. The sleeves are actually US letter size and designed for stock sheets, but if I used that size paper I would need to trim the pages. I use A4 size with the bottom 24mm trimmed off. This way it makes the page design easy because I don't have to allow for a gutter margin. The albums come in various colours with slip cases so they are fairly attractive.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
Another page posted below, but I thought I should say a little more about this period in Siam. To start we must mention King Chulalongkorn, the fifth monarch of the Chakri dynasty, so also called Rama V. His father was King Mongkut who was rather inaccurately portrayed by the great Yul Brynner in the stage musical and movie The King and I. This was based on a fictionalized account of Anna Leonowens teaching the children of King Mongkut in the royal court in Bangkok. That makes the young crown prince in the movie the future King Chulalongkorn. Both the kings above were facing problems in a period of peak colonization with the French advancing from the east and the British from the south. Their answer was rapid modernization and this partly explains the origin of the Thai postal system. In the Entente Cordiale signed in 1904 between Britain and France among the many Franco-British agreements accepted Siam as a buffer state separating British and French expansion in SE Asia.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
The highest value stamp of the first issue was the 1 salung which was worth 16 atts, although later devalued to 12 atts to match the international letter postal rate. There was a small need for a higher value stamp so in 1885 some of the mainly unused minimum value stamps, the 1 solots worth a ½ att were surcharged as 1 tical worth 64 atts. This was an increase of 128 times and so was open to forgery of the hand stamped surcharge. Even back then postal use wasn't the biggest temptation as there wasn't that high a demand for high postage. It was the philatelic trade that wanted copies of this new stamp. In fact the sub-types of the last surcharge which were typeset were probably more about the government supplying this trade. You can see I have 4 of the 5 surcharges, but I have to be honest. There could be 4 fakes or 4 genuine copies there, or anything in between. These were all from older collections, but that was when a lot of the fakes were being printed too. When the 1 solot blue stamps were later demonetized they were sold off to collectors giving a lot of stock for forgers to add hand-stamped surcharges to.
The 1889 1 att overprints on the 2 atts (1 sio) stamps were needed because in the next 1887 De la Rue stamp issue no 1 att stamps were ordered. They didn't appear until 3 years later. This was the first answer for the lack of 1 att stamps, but it was going to cause a lot problems in the second series of stamps, as we shall see later in this thread.
Again a shout out to Clive and the fabulous Album Easy software.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
The final part of the Waterlow contract for the first issue was a postal card with a printed 1 att stamp which was the inland postcard rate. The card was sold for 1½ atts at the post offices and became a popular means of communication. You often see them sent by shipping agents to tell customers their cargo has arrived by sea. Local clubs also used them to confirm meeting dates and such like. I have a nicer used one but I'm holding it back because it has some interesting postmarks and may fit better into a postmark page later in the album. This one looks like it has been cancelled to order for the philatelic market. (Yes, collectors preferred used back in those early days.)
The first issue postal card was overprinted twice. (There is another overprint but it is rather dubious as it didn't show up until rather late in the day.) The first overprint was after Siam joined the UPU and the card was needed for overseas mail. The international postal rate for cards was 4 atts so the card was surcharged for this amount. A later surcharge of 1½ atts in Thai script showed the cost of the card rather than the 1 att card postal rate. I like to imagine this was done as postmasters were tired of customers complaining that they were paying 1½ atts although the stamp said it should be 1 att. Hopefully I will find a good looking 4 att card soon.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
I hope some members are still enjoying this odyssey through the stamps of Siam. The page below with the mint and used stamps of the second stamp issue was one of the easiest to design so far. What it doesn't foretell is the can of worms I'm opening by introducing this stamp issue. There are weeks of work ahead with many pages to design. This is because of the many surcharge overprints on these stamps between 1889 and 1909. Each of these surcharges has its own varieties and errors. There are a couple of minor repeatable key plate faults and wealth of interesting postmarks to be added in also.
In 1887 Siam issued its new set of stamps. By this time they had joined the UPU. De La Rue printed this second issue mostly in 2 colours using a new typography process they were introducing. They were also using inks that would wash out if there were attempts to clean off postal cancels. The reuse of stamps seemed to be the main worry of postal authorities at the time. In this issue the green and purple inks are a worry for collectors trying to clean stamps of old backing paper or hinges. The single colour green 1 att stamp was issued almost 4 years after the bi-coloured stamps and was much missed in those years as we shall see in the overprints. I'm not sure why they were not ordered at the same time as the others.
The key stamp in this set for collectors is the 64 att high value in mint condition. (You can see it is missing on my page.) It is priced at almost $60 on the Stampworld online catalogue.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
As I warned in the previous comment I am opening a can worms in putting the many surcharges of the Siam's second issue in an album. The att (Siamese currency of the period) surcharges of 1889-1908 can become addictive. I will try to keep it simple, but even so the next two album pages I had hoped to be able to put on a single page. These two pages of the 1 att overprinted on the 2 atts stamps is one of the simpler surcharges, but as you will see it's far from being simple.
Some things to keep in mind. Up until 1932 Siam (Thailand) was an absolute monarchy which could affect government decision making. Siam did need foreign experts to help in its modernization drive, but both British and French experts could be seen as too close to their colonial governments. Siam looked to Germany for help with postal and railway services.
The cause of so many surcharges was a lack of stamps of the correct values. In the beginning this was the failure to ask for 1 att stamps with the original second stamp issue order. It was almost 4 years before a 1 att stamp joined the other values.
A repeated warning, De La Rue used water soluble green and purple inks for the second Siamese stamp issue so try and keep these away from water.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
In 1889 because Siam hadn't ordered a 1 att stamp along with the other seven values of the second stamp issue from De La Rue in 1887 there was a shortage of this value which was needed for the inland printed paper postal rate. The 1 att stamp stock of the first issue was exhausted and the remaining 1 sio (2 atts) stamps of the first Waterlow issue had been overprinted as 1 att. It was decided to start overprinting the new second issue 2 atts with 1 att to fill the need. In hindsight this wasn't such a great idea as 2 atts was the inland letter postal rate and eventually there would be a shortage of these also.
These surcharges were made using hand-stamps in the Thai language as they were for inland use rather than international use.
A quick note to explain the scans. This time I wanted to show how the pages are displayed in my albums. We have locally made albums using 3-ring binders. The albums fit US letter size pages and there are stock pages of various strip heights that fit in the sleeves. Because the sleeves themselves are US letter size you cannot fit a US letter paper page inside the sleeve without some slight trimming. Now US letter size paper isn't that easy to obtain in Thailand where the standard paper is the European A4 size. So, if I have to trim the paper anyway I may as well trim an easy to obtain A4 page. I can put two pages back-to-back in each sleeve. Again I'm using Clive's great software to design the pages. The scanner cannot show the entire width of the sleeve but I think you can see the basic idea.
I will talk more about the rarer stamps which you can see are missing on the first of my above pages later.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
I said I would talk some more about the rarer overprints on Siamese stamps from the late 19th Century. What surprised me was how important the philatelic market had already become. Stamp dealers in Europe and their agents in Bangkok were looking for fresh material and they found some of it in Siam. Bonnie Davis in her wonderful book, Royal Siamese Postal Service (The Early Years), combed through the archives of that period and found plenty of comments relating to just this. Here she is writing about the content of the Bangkok Times, January 21, 1896.
There seemed to be a general opinion in Bangkok that the Siamese Postal Authorities were working with the interest of philatelists in mind, by continuing their policy of issuing surcharged stamps. However, if the surcharging must continue, it was wondered why it could not be done by competent printers "who would not connive in the printing of philatelic monstrosities." The annoyance was even greater because of the widespread belief that plates for the printing of the required denominations were waiting for use and "lying idle in Europe."
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
I have to admit that the last page posted on the 8 hand-stamps has some misidentification. I have checked with some image measuring software and I think I have a few in the wrong position. Working in tenths of millimeters isn't so easy. An over-inked hand-stamp can add half a millimeter. I will rework that page.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
I've reworked the page on the 8 hand-stamps used to overprint the 2 atts stamps to 1 att. I wanted to keep the two blocks of 4 at the top of the page and these are now labelled hand-stamps 2 & 3 with places for the singles of hand-stamp 1 and 4-8 below. There are now two empty places rather than the one I had before using my more accurate measuring to correct the original page. (I probably wouldn't have gone this deep into this particular issue except for having quite a bit of stock.)
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
I had some time to continue. Before anything else I am feeling guilty about not giving due credit so I will start a list below.
Our fellow SoR member Clive and his great Album Easy software.
My fellow Thai Philatelic Society (TPS) member, Derek Bingham for his TPS publication Thailand: The Att(s) Surcharges of Rama V 1889-1908.
Also fellow members of the TPS, Prakob Chirakiti (President of FIP - the Fédération Internationale de Philatélie) and Rory Morrisey (Editor of The Thai Times, the TPS magazine) for their joint articles about the 1st and 2nd Siamese issues in The Thai Times.
Correction: The first stamp on the fifth page of this collection, the first 1 TICAL overprint on the blue 1 solot stamp is most likely a fake. A very old and fairly good fake, but still a fake. Someone who knows pointed out after looking a high resolution scan that the "1" wasn't quite correct, the length of the surcharge was slightly off and the postmark was unlikely to have been used on this stamp. It's quite possible that all four of my overprints are fakes. All of them came from old collections but there was a thriving philatelic market in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries for Siamese stamps causing many fakes to be produced. You shouldn't spend big money on these overprints unless they have a certificate.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
We are still just at the beginning of the late Nineteenth Century 'att' surcharges. Sourcing from De La Rue in Britain hadn't gone well. I think De La Rue had a reputation of being rather arrogant and Siam was running out of low value stamps and not enjoying doing business with the printer.
Because a 1 att stamp wasn't in the original order of the 2nd series stamps, 2 atts stamps were surcharged to 1 att to fill the need. Unfortunately 2 atts was the local letter postal rate and stock was running short. The 1 att surcharging was switched to the 3 atts stamp. This came a little late as the 2 atts stamps were now running out. The next surcharge was to overprint 3 atts stamps as 2 atts. In all this overprinting wood and metal hand-stamps were used followed by letterpress surcharges. It is possible to identify the various hand-stamps being used as you can see below.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
Very nice! Well done!
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
Thank you Sean.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
What phenomenal work you've done! It's truly a model for how to present a complicated series of issues.
I especially like the way you've laid out the pages to highlight plate and overprint differences, and very much appreciate the supplemental explanations you're providing in the posts.
If I wore a hat, it'd be off to you!
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
Well, thank you very much Dave. I have to say though that the hard work was done by other collectors over the years including those I have posted credit to. In the early years of the Twentieth Century there was already a Siamese Philatelic club collecting information as well as stamps. It is through them translating Siamese post office notices that we know things like how many stamps were printed in the first 1883 issue. (500,000 of each value.)
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
A shortage of 4 atts stamps created the need for a surcharge on the 24 atts stamps of the second issue. 80,400 stamps (670 sheets of 120 stamps) were surcharged using 4 wood hand-stamps at a local print shop and 120,000 stamps (1,000 sheets) using 4 metal hand-stamps by the Post and Telegraph Department in Bangkok. Initially the surcharge was in Thai only, but because of the UPU rules an English overprint was added shortly afterwards. Only 8,040 of the Thai only wood hand-stamp and 4,000 of the Thai only metal hand-stamp stamps were issued. The remainder were issued with both Thai and English surcharges. (The fourth of the metal hand-stamps is not seen on Thai only surcharged stamps.)
The individual hand-stamps, both wood and metal, can be identified. This time I'm not leaving spaces for those I do not have as I am not planning on looking for them. If some new ones come into my possession I will redesign the page.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
While taking a break from pulling my hair out writing about what was to later happen to the 4 atts stamps shown above I thought I would add a bit of local colour, both at the time the stamps were issued and much more recently. American Bonnie Davis wrote a number of history books about Thailand while living here. Below is a small piece from her wonderful 1983 book, Royal Siamese Postal Service - The Early Years. In it she researched the archives of the post office and the Bangkok English language newspapers of the period.
First a bit about the author. I never met her but I must have already been in Bangkok when the book was published by the Siam Stamp Trading Trading company as I must have got my copy at the time. She wrote many interesting books and history pieces in the local press and was a fine writer. Now the next bit is from my poor memory of hearing talk and gossip about her so if I am wrong please don't sue me. She came out to Thailand as the wife of a US diplomat of whom it was said he was the long term Bangkok CIA resident.
Anyway a quote from her book taken from a report in the Bangkok Times of Saturday the 20th February 1892 which indirectly relates to the 4 atts inland letter postal rate.
"While we all know that Siam in 1892, was a large part unexplored jungle, few of us have any idea just what it is like to leave the city of Bangkok and head out to the provinces, whether for adventure, or duty. In March of that year a Post Office survey party, working to open up mail routes between Korat and Ubon, had their night camp attacked by tigers. One came in close enough to stampede their animals, but no one was injured."
Now it doesn't say what animals they were using, but it is quite possible that elephants were in use along with cattle and horses. Just over 60 years later the Americans were building Thailand's first international standard highways in the Cold War to link Bangkok with two of its air bases, Udon to the north and Ubon to the east where US aircraft would eventually take off on missions over Vietnam. Wild tigers still roam the Kao Yai national park just south of Korat.
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re: The stamps of Siam from 1883 to 1939
Just over 200,000 stamps were surcharged with the wood and metal Thai hand-stamps, but very few were issued as Thai language only surcharges. It was realized that they couldn't be used to make up values on international mail according to UPU rules. The following month a first batch were also surcharged in English using typeset printing and two sizes of Roman fonts. A few months later the rest were also given the English overprint using the same two fonts, but this time a stop was added after the word "atts". With four English surcharge styles and eight Thai styles there are fourteen known possible combinations. It is possible there are more.
I have a fair selection below and I am not leaving spaces for those I don't have as I am not actively looking for the others. If it wasn't that I had put some old collections away many years ago I would have reduced the following four pages and the previous Thai only page to a single page with just six stamps showing basic set.
The Stamp World online catalogue shows the Thai only overprints at $30-$40 while those with both Thai and English are $8-$12.
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