During a tour of the Windward and Leeward Islands in January and February of this year I made a few observations, which, although somewhat scrappy, may be of interest to readers of Stamp Collecting who collect this fascinating group of islands.

I arrived in Barbados on January 1st, when the Independence issue was on general sale, and I was surprised to see that the equivalent denominations in the “Fish” set were also available on request. The G.P.O. is situated in the public buildings, which are shown on the 1950 3c. stamp, and is totally inadequate for the needs of the public. I found it necessary to wait in a long queue every time I wished to post a letter, as there were no stamp-vending machines. On January 1st postal rates were increased, the most notable change being an increase from 8c. to l0c. for an airmail letter to the other West Indian islands, causing an urgent demand for a l0c. stamp.

In Grenada, the G.P.O. at St. George’s is a very old brick building, very different from, and even uglier than, the impression given by that hideous Postal Centenary stamp of 1961. The post office has only one stamp counter, and the service is painfully slow. The girl stamp seller was not at all helpful and obviously had little time for stamp collectors, probably due in part to the unwanted publicity afforded to the Grenada post office by the 2c. /$1.50c. surcharge and the 6c. block watermark*. Short sets, already packaged, were available, but the one I purchased contained a 2c. UNESCO stamp instead of the current definitive. All the UNESCO stamps were on sale, but the corresponding definitives were not. I obtained far better service from the Tourist Bureau, which sold all the lower values, both UNESCO and definitive. Also on sale were a few of the obsolete 1953 issue. With studied casualness I asked about the obsolete 6c. denomination, only to be informed that I was one of several recent enquirers for that particular stamp, all of which had been exhausted several months earlier- obviously Grenada has its share of fortune-seeking philatelists! In the second town, Grenville, there were no UNESCO stamps left (early January), and neither were any current 50c. stamps available. The local postmaster’s stock of values over 25c. was very limited, with only two sheets of the 35c. and about half a sheet each of the dollar value.

In the St. Vincent G.P.O. at Kingstown, I received very courteous attention from the two attractive young postal assistants. On separate occasions they each went to great length to en- sure that all my stamps were absolutely perfect; one went so far as to offer me plate numbered copies, even when it meant breaking into a new sheet. The 4c, 8c and 25c. definitives had been temporarily withdrawn during the currency of the UNESCO issue, but it was still possible to buy 25c WHO stamps, though these should have been withdrawn a month previously.

With a spare day in St. Vincent, I hired a car and visited as many of the village post offices as time allowed with the hope of possibly picking up inverted watermark or similar treasures. Each sub-post office is under the control of a postmistress, and without exception each agreed to my request to examine all their stamp stocks, which admittedly usually consisted of only a very few sheets or even just part of a sheet of the lower values to 50c. All these small post offices carried small stock of the UNESCO issue, and several still had the WHO stamps on sale. In the sub-post office at Mesopotamia I was delighted to find several values of the 1955 definitives on sale: amongst these was almost a full sheet of the 15c. Block CA watermark, perf. 12, catalogued at 4s. each by Gibbons. These, of course, I purchased. Also available were a few of the 3c. Script CA watermark and several sheets of the Script CA 4c. When questioned about these stamps, the good lady admitted that they should have been returned to Kingstown in 1965, but he had not yet got round to it.

Luck In St. Lucia

It was in the spacious, modern post office in Castries, St. Lucia, that my luck was really in, however. Here, on January 23rd, I purchased the upper half of a sheet of current 1c. stamps in order to obtain an example of the “spur flaw” (see Gibbons’ Elizabethan). Imagine my surprise at discovering the watermark was inverted. I returned to purchase the rest of the sheet and found that the next few sheets were also with inverted watermark, so naturally I bought those too. Had I arrived in St. Lucia a day or two later all the lc. would have been used up for local postage and this hitherto unrecorded variety might have remained undiscovered for years. Incidentally, I later took the opportunity of examining numerous 1c. stamps used on local mail during the period immediately prior to my arrival in St. Lucia, and found only one invert; this suggest that only very, very few could have been used before my lucky find. A check of several village post offices failed to locate any further sheets and an examination of the entire Castries reserve stock also proved fruitless.

Also in the G.P.O., Castries, I found amongst a very small stock of postage due stamps one sheet of the 8c. with the scarce St. Edward’s Crown watermark error, catalogued by Gibbon at £35. This sheet had, according to an official, been in the post office since 1952.

In Dominica, the G.P.O. in Roseau is an old building on the waterfront. Th postal counters are upstairs in a very small and quite inadequate room, resulting in considerable congestion most of the time. All the UNESCO values were on sale (early February) and the equivalent values were not available on the counter.

I was very surprised indeed to find that the 14c. definitive in use was the old Die I, which was replaced by Die II in 1965. This intrigued me, and I approached the postmaster on the subject. His explanation was that when the second die was issued he ordered a mere 1,000 sheets, mainly to satisfy the philatelic demand for used and mint. When all these orders had been honoured the remainder were used up for ordinary postage alongside the Die I, at the Roseau and Portsmouth post office only – none of the other villages received any copies at all. Eventually, after a little persuasion, the postmaster dug up half a sheet of the Die II from the archives and after a little more persuasion reluctantly allowed me to purchase six copies. In his opinion there are sufficient sheets of Die I left to last for a long, long time, so it looks as though Die II will never again go on sale in Dominica. This, of course, means that the catalogue quotations for used copies of both stamps are quite wrong, the Die II being a relatively scarce stamp. It also means that the Crown Agents are selling to dealers an entirely different stamp from that being used in the territory.

Next stop was St. Kitts, where there is a modern, roomy post office in Basseterre, replacing the old one in the Treasury Building shown on the 60c. stamps of 1952 and 1954. My only requirements from St. Kitts were a few examples of the very fine “N” flaw on the current 6c. (see Gibbons’ Elizabethan). Unfortunately, these stamps were off sale because of that ubiquitous UNESCO issue, and the girl behind the counter thought I would have to go without. Undaunted, I sought audience with the postmaster personally. He is very strict over his stamp sales, always ensuring that all commemoratives are withdrawn on the specified date, and refusing to permit his staff to allow philatelists to pick out certain stamps from any particular part of a sheet. However, after a friendly discussion, he eventually agreed to draw four sheets of the 6c. from stock on condition that I took all four sheets. Finally, however, I managed to get away with taking only the two lower rows from each sheet.

Charlestown post office in Nevis is designated as a sub-post office, and here I again tried to obtain some of the current 6c. This time it was a little easier, and the sub-postmistress took two sheets from stock, allowing me to take the two lower row of each, giving me in all six examples of a very nice flaw. While in Nevis I saw several copies of the St. Kitts newspaper, The Daily Bulletin, delivered by post, each bearing a 1/2c. stamp, thereby proving that there is still a postal rate for 1/2c. Incidentally, it is not possible to buy a single 1/2c. stamp, as there is no coin of that denomination. Two copies must be purchased.

The G.P.O. in Plymouth, Montserrat, is again situated in an old building and is very small, but as the population of the entire island number only 14,000, the limited facilities are probably adequate. Only the definitive issue was on sale, but 1 tackled the Colonial Postmaster about the high value of the UNESCO set, which many collectors thought unnecessarily costly. He admitted that it did not actually cover a particular postal rate, and that sales had been very poor, but denied having had anything to do with selecting the denomination. This was decided for Montserrat by some other, unspecified, authority. On questioning him about omnibus issues in general, I was told that the Crown Agents had recently sent him a letter asking for a guarantee that Montserrat would participate in all future issues, irrespective of what was being commemorated. This he had agreed to do, which, I think is a great pity, and told him so. Collectors are becoming tired of these quite unnecessary reams of identical stamps and it is to the credit of such colonies as the Falklands Islands and British Honduras that they have refused to issue Football, WHO and UNESCO stamps.

My final call was to Antigua, here St. John’s was gay with flags and bunting in preparation for Statehood celebrations on February 27th. Here I had the pleasant task of fixing my own Independence stamps to self-addressed first day covers, several days before the stamps were officially issued. Unfortunately, I had to leave Antigua for Britain at 4 a.m. on the morning of Statehood Day, so I never actually saw the stamps at the post office.

*This is written before Grenada became an “agency” country whose philatelic sales are handled by a private American business!