India #40 - Shame About The Face!

Was scanning some stuff to put on ebay and came across this Queen Victoria from India.
Has a nice 1889 cancel, guess that would be called a circle-square.




Unfortunately her Majesty's visage has been bleached out by something.
Shame. Guess it goes in the junk pile.

is it maybe a quality control issue maybe or perhaps a dry print/under-inking?

I only found ONE town in India starting with BRO(A), and that town is Broach; the town name, however, would seem to need to be 7 or 8 letters to be symmetrical. It is also peculiar how the year and date are mis-aligned in the postmark.

Of course, there are places outside of India that used Indian stamps, such as Aden, Muscat, Oman, etc.

I think you've nailed the cancel Doug.
A crude reconstruction (I'm no CSI!) shows that Broach could easily fit in the space provided.




Still doesn't broach the subject of Her Majesty's face.
sorry, couldn't resist

Her majesty sneezed when they printed that one. It looks like a worn die state.

Hmm. I'd love the thought of this being some sort of EFO, and my heart goes pit-a-pat at the possibilities.
But I took another look at her, and turned her over. This is what I find.



A blob of brown hard stuff (still want to go with the sneeze joke? )
When I hold the stamp up to the light, this blob correlates perfectly with the 'bleach' spot. My guess. Some sort of glue someone many moons ago used to stick this stamp in their album. An ingredient in the glue soaked through and had it's way with the blue ink of the stamp. But NOT the cancel.
Oh well.

I'd say definitely from Broach - a resonably important trading town in Western India.

The misalignment of the date slugs is pretty typical of the era. Here is another example of the same thing I turned up (in a file I was already working on) from Fatehpur:

This Br. India 1883 2A SG 91 was canceled with Danby type B squared circle cancelation (dt. May 7,1889) with 3 corner bars (circle diameter ranging 19–21mm) of Bharuch Head PO, which is recoreded being used from October 1888 to May 1900.

Danby type B cancels in general were allotted to selected Head POs/Sub POs which on average handled 1000 posted articles daily and which were not allotted with squared circle cancels with index letters denoting the specific time of dispatch and all Br. Indian squared circle canceling devices with movable date slugs were manufactured at the Postal Workshop, Aligarh.

The cancel here is an example of the early usage of the format of date preceding the month.

Bharuch PO was originally established in 1826 to handle the business mail of the merchant communities in Bharuch (21.712°N 72.993°E), now in Bharuch district of Gujarat, which was a busy port city as well as a center of peanut trade.

From 1866, Bharuch HPO cum Disbursing Office functioned under Gujarat Division (HQ Surat) of Mumbai Circle.

It may be mentioned that the Paragraph 4 of Post Office Circular No. 66 dt. January 11,1891 records the official date of introduction of squared circle postmarks in India as 1884 but it was found to be used by Experimental POs even earlier in 1883.