Page 17 - Delcampe Collections classiques EN-008

Stamps

pendent and part of the Commonwealth “Timbres de guerre” catalogue published
on 7 February 1974. The first prime minis- by Zumstein in 1918 lists only two stamps:
ter was Eric Gairy. However, his govern- “One Farthing 1914-1915-1916” and “One
ment became gradually more authoritarian Farthing 1914-1915-1916-1917”. Hummel
and linked up with the Chilean and South ignored the first issue.
Korean military dictatorships. It relied on After research, we were confused by the
the Mongoose Gang, a militia similar to information gathered from the various Red
the Tontons Macoutes in Haiti, to assas- Cross specialists with respect to the exis-
sinate political adversaries. Gairy built up tence of the stamp with the three dates
a significant fortune, accumulating hotels “1914-1915-1916”. Apparently, no one had
and restaurants. Granada was ruled by ever seen it. Yet, Zumstein was offering it
the People’s Revolutionary Government to customers in 1918!
as a communist state from 1979 until the We were given the key to the mystery when
American invasion of 1983. In 1997, the we discovered a vertical pair of the Grenada
opposition parties joined forces to counter vignette presented by Mr Buhr, a collector
the “dictatorial” tendencies of the regime. from the Federal Republic of Germany, at
the Philatelic exhibition for the centenary
The Granada vignette of the Red Cross in Geneva.
The first issue was printed on sheets of The top stamp had the four years, from
2X5 horizontal stamps. The top, bottom 1914 to 1917. The latter was missing from
and right borders of the sheet are not perfo- the bottom stamp. This means that there
rated. We don’t know if the same held true was an error or a composition accident in
for subsequent issues. According to the this variant: the year “2017” was missing
Mosbaugh catalogue, the 1917 vignette on one of more stamps on each sheet. We
also exists without perforations. While the saw this for ourselves when we examined
vignettes were never official, they were of- the stamps shown by collectors at the
ten cancelled. They were printed in red on Geneva exhibition.
white, yellowish or chamois paper with per- Some of them were printed on white, yel-
forations on two or three sites. lowish or chamois paper. There weren’t
Yvert & Tellier list one of the stamps. It is any subsequent print runs and the original
valued in farthings and printed in 1914- stamps were modified with surcharges for
1915. They believe that it is a compulsory the subsequent issues. They are separate
surcharge stamp for the benefit of the Red issues and the design and composition
Cross. All similar stamps must be cata- vary significantly from one to the next.
logued also, and in the same way.

How many different stamps did the Gre-
nada post office issue?
While Yvert & Tellier only list one, the “One
Farthing 1914-1915”, Louis Hummel, in
his “Catalogue des vignettes de la Croix-
Rouge” published in Innsbruck in 1937,
lists three: “One Fraction”, “One Farthing
1914-1915” and “One Farthing 1914-1915-
1916-1917”. On the other hand, the small

Delcampe Magazine 17