Childhood Stamp Collection Opened a Reporter's Eyes to the World

0:00Today on State of the World, how a childhood stamp collection opened a reporter's eyes to the world. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. Childhood mementos can be hard to part with, but they also take up space, valuable space, space that parents or a spouse might want to reclaim. That's the situation reporter Willem Marks finds himself in with his childhood stamp collection in London. It gives him the opportunity to think about what the stamps collected from around the world years ago had meant to him.

0:42But also important, are they worth anything? Willem takes us along as he finds out. The attic in my London home is pretty tiny and it's tight, just enough space for a few boxes and some tins of paint. My parents demanded recently that my three adult siblings and I all collect our childhood possessions from their larger home outside London that they're hoping to sell. But scrambling around back in my small attic, I realised there was definitely not enough space to add more crates of, well, stuff. While my wife was adamant that my thousands of old postage stamps should be among the first things to go.

1:18I rang my mum to see if she could remember what these stamps collected from around the world had meant to me as a kid. I think it helped you continue a path of curiosity because you would think, ah, this comes from France or this comes from Germany. And so you would then go and find out exactly where that place was, and you would connect them up. Funnily enough, I've ended up in a career making those international connections and satisfying that curiosity as a foreign correspondent. But I wondered, were some of my many stamps worth any real money? Could they tell me anything about my family's history, or indeed the history of the countries my family comes from, especially Britain?

1:58I also figured it would be kind of fun to find out. I'm walking down a narrow 18th century alleyway in the heart of London to an address on the Strand, one of London's most famous streets, where Stanley Gibbons, a business that sells stamps, has very kindly offered to look at my collection. A couple of older enthusiasts seem to be getting their own collections appraised already.

2:31My host, Oscar Young, an expert in stamps of the British Empire, soon arrived. Hi, yeah, Oscar. How are you doing? Nice to see you. And you? The inner sanctum? The inner sanctum. You get to go where we're at, the clients don't. We then squeezed into a small room. We are currently in the process of moving things. Oh, wow. Completely crammed with stamp auction catalogs dating back decades. How long do your catalogs go back to, I see? 1870s I think something goes back to. Wow. And as I start to unpack my collection, I have a box here. Young starts to whisk through it at speed. It's part of my job every single day to have a look through these collections.

3:11And of course, any dealer, any collector that has real experience in collections like this can flick through them at quite a rate of knots really, just scanning the entire page and know exactly what they're looking at, I know exactly what the value is for a lot of these stamps. The stamps are arranged in album books, often in neat rows, by their era, face value or country. And Young quickly starts to critique or comment on mine. A lot of these are just very colourful current commemoratives. We've got quite a few Dutch ones. My father's Dutch. Of course, yes. We've got a few of the old Dutch colonies.

3:45We've got from New Guinea. I've seen some from the Netherlands, East Indies, which is of course now Indonesia. easier. Stamps played a practical but also a political role in the very concept of colonialism, Young says, particularly for the UK with its monarch's face appearing at one point on a quarter of the world's stamps. The popularity of collecting stamps peaked in Britain around the 1950s when one of my British uncles began his collection and also at a time when Britain's role in the world began to change. The empire was crumbly, the map of the world was no longer pink and I think you've got older generations that were seeing that as a very bad thing but also in 1950s you had swathes of new ideas and modern thinking there is still some light from the sun that never set on the british empire that still beams around the place whether it be through people's nostalgic memories or whether it be through the pages of a stamp album but after going through my albums young hadn't seen much that caught his eye so this sort of collection in you know money terms is in the under£50 bracket.

4:48You're not going to be able to retire on this sort of thing, unfortunately. It's lots of little interesting things that are really quite common and that we see every single day. Journalists try not to rely on just one source, though, so I figured I'd ask for a second assessment at another business not far away on the edge of London's Chinatown. It's an amazingly incongruous building here, surrounded by the crowds and neon signs. Small door with a small sign saying Argyle Ekin, an old collection company here in the heart of London. Hopefully they'll give me some idea about what my collection means.

5:22Hi there. Yeah, OK. Thank you. That's how it is. That's very kind of you. Thanks. I'm Jeremy. We spoke on the phone. Yes. Hi, Jeremy. Hi. Jeremy Baher told me Britain first developed stamps to avoid the problem of postmen going unpaid by the people they deliver to. And ever since then, he explained, scarcity or rarity has driven up the value of the postage stamps produced, including those printed, for instance, in a small region of Iran the British had occupied for just several months during the First World War, called Bushir. We had a collection of Bushire from that very small period when the British occupied it.

5:57I think it was maybe a couple of hundred stamps, but it was about£40 ,000, because they're so sought after and they're such a small, short period. Such stamps for Britain's colonies were typically printed in London, then shipped overseas. Some were so rare, they're today among the most valuable in the world, worth millions of dollars. Speaking of value, we moved on to my stamps. I was probably 10 years old the last time I looked at any of this stuff. Oh, gosh. I'm not expecting too much. No, I wouldn't. Sort of childhood collection. Many of which are countries that no longer exist. They still exist.

6:30Well, they still exist in stamps terms, but not in reality. I'm not seeing anything at the moment. Salon and Sri Lanka now, it's all... No, I'm not seeing anything of any consequence. I didn't come here thinking any of this would be worth anything. No. But with a collection like this, I'm under pressure for my wife to clear up our house. Does this just go in the bin? Oh, well, you can give it to a school club where we send it to, or you give it to a charity shop, that's about it. So the next day, on his advice, I mailed almost my entire collection to a school stamp club several hours north of London.

7:07I held on to just a few, printed to celebrate England's World Cup win in 1966 for my own soccer-mad son. Perhaps another ten-year-old will take as much pleasure from those stamps as I once did, learning about long-forgotten countries that no letter could reach today. And, you know, finding them may not be so much about making money, but opening a new window onto the world for the next generation. For NPR News, I'm Willem Marks in London.

7:36That's State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.