A part-used stamp booklet from 1935

• Front Cover
• Mint Stamps
• Postal Rates – Then & Now
• The World Then
• Finest Quality Fruit

Front Cover

Amongst a treasure-trove of mint stamps from the 1940s, unearthed by my mother-in-law from a metal box that had lain under a bed for decades, was this little gem, a King George V May 1935 Silver Jubilee stamp book (Stanley Gibbons ref. BB16). A remnant of her father’s stamp collection, this stamp book would have a “catalogue value” of up to £90, according to SG Great Britain Concise stamp catalogue of 2015, had it been complete with all 2/- worth of postage stamps.

Mint stamps

But most of the contents had been used, except for this part-pane of three 1-1/2d brown Silver Jubilee issue stamps. And yet the real enjoyment of this little booklet is not any extrinsic value, but the little window it affords into the times. From the perspective of nearly 90 years on, the 1930s was “ominous” with the growing shadow of fascism looming over Europe, read to explode into the violence and chaos of World War just 4 years after.

And yet here were people, presumably taking up the offer of credit to buy fine furniture from “DRAGES”, which promised not only payment over 50 months, but a free book: Jane and John’s “You and Your Home“. The authors were, presumably the Joneses with whom one would be aspiring to keep up. But anyone sending in the coupon and updating their modern lifestyle with a purchase after June 1935, would have found the country at war before the credit was paid off.

Postal Rates – Then & Now

The booklet included handy tables of the inland and foreign postal rates. The average British wage at this time was about £150 per annum. Scaling that against a 2020s average of around £38,000, would mean the equivalent to the three halfpence letter rate in 1935 would be about £1.86 now, compared to the actual First Class (£1.25) or Second Class “(75p) rate in 2024. So sending a letter then cost a larger fraction of one’s earnings than it does now!

The World Then

Of course the “Imperial and Foreign” rates table tells a different story, not just in terms of money paid at the Post Office counter, but in terms of what the world looked like from the heart of the British Empire. Letters to (almost) anywhere in the Empire were to be franked at the same rate as inland post. So that would be the equivalent of £1.86 versus the current £2.00 for surface mail or £2.20 for Air Mail. So that is still comparable.

However, the division of the world into Empire etc. versus the rather dismissive “all other places abroad” is telling. So it cost 40% more to send a letter to France than it did to Australia, for example. I am intrigued that there might be special rates or conditions for “Magazine Post to Canada and Newfoundland”. And I have also only just learned that Newfoundland was not confederated with Canada until after a referendum of 1948!

Another glaring oddity resonates with tragic consequences, playing out until the present day. Letters to Trans-Jordan were to be charged the foreign rate instead of the lower Empire rate. The “Mandated Territories” were areas of the world high-handedly shared out between the “great” powers in the aftermath of World War I. This included Palestine, whose governance was handed to Great Britain. Transjordan was the eastern part of the Palestine territory, separated off in August 1922, later to become the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in May 1946. Between the world wars, the Levant was re-shaped and governments set up according to the interests of western powers, rather than the consent of those living there. The seeds of interminable resentment and war in the “middle East” were sown a long time ago.

Finest Quality Fruit

And finally, I am struck by the simplicity of advertisements included in the stamp booklet. Plain messages assuring quality were enough. Brand recognition did not yet require the subtle manipulations of the advertising industry – the insights of psychology and the lures of lifestyle aspirations that we see in today’s ads for cars or washing-up liquid, were a thing of the future.