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Much has been written on the two voyages of that pioneering steamship Forbes from Calcutta (see references). The first failed to go beyond Madras while by reaching Suez, the second trip proved to be a success. In this article, I will focus on letters from central and south India which were dispatched to Madras with…
Sometime back, I was browsing an old 1988 Stanley Gibbons auction catalogue featuring the ‘Springer’ Collections (Figure 1). A claim is made inside: The lots of the Indian Army P.O. included in this catalogue form probably the most comprehensive study of this service ever formed. Indeed, it contains many Indian Army postal history items –…
The title of this article is inspired from the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by the Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez. The year 1817 saw the beginning of the end of independent Indian rule in the country as the British and Marathas engaged themselves in one last war. It was also…
The straight-line ‘PACKET LETTER / SOUTHAMPTON’ or the circular ‘SOUTHAMPTON PACKET LETTER’ (both ‘SPL’) handstamps (Figure 1), were applied at that southern English port on mails arriving on packet boats. I have not been able to find much documentation or literature as to the raison d’être of this stamp. In Willcocks (1975, p. 146), Alan…
Postal history covers and entire letters saved from the wreck of the Peninsular & Oriental Steamship Company’s (P&O) steamer Ava1 are well-known to Indian postal historians, especially those specializing in 19th century mails. These are also sought after by collectors of worldwide maritime disaster postal history. As Hoggarth and Gwynn (2004) make it clear in…
The title of this post has been inspired from that 2017 movie’ quirky title: Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. For centuries, countries in Europe were at loggerheads resulting in innumerable wars. While history remembers the generals and admirals who won laurels, wars couldn’t have been fought without the poorly paid and much neglected soldiers and…
Figure 1 shows both sides of a entire letter written in mid-1842 on board the ship ‘Rustomjee Cowasjee’, at anchor off “Rugged Islands” (Chusan, today’s Zhoushan Island) during the first Opium War. Briefly, the East India Company was growing opium in India and dumping it in China. Opium was playing havoc with the Chinese –…
