South Africa 1942-44 War Effort Bantams

I'm wondering if anyone knows much about the South African war effort bantams of 1942-44. These stamps were in the usual South African bilingual pairs, except that the pairs were divided by rouletting rather than perforations.

Here are two mint examples (both items currently being auctioned on ebay) in which you can clearly see what I'm talking about:





The Gibbons Commonwealth catalogue gives surprisingly high CV to pairs without the roulette.

I find myself in a bit of a dilemma, because I have one pair that is semi-rouletted, so to speak (just three indentations), and two pairs that have no identations at all, but in which there are some small spots which suggest that something happened in that area of the stamp without leaving the indentations. Technically, I would say that these pairs are not rouletted, although they also do not have the completely clean appearance of, say, imperforate stamps.

Would these stamps fall into the category 'Roulette omitted'? If anyone knows anything about this issue I'd like to hear from you.

Nothing sways an argument better than an image.

In this case, only two cuts can be seen from the front:



And from the back:



But I guess this makes this pair defectively rouletted rather than 'roulette omitted.'

By the way, with these stamps, the rouletting can normally be seen very clearly on the reverse. Example:

I am not aware of just how they rouletted these,
I presume it would have been blade punched,
given the condition at the end of the war,
should a couple of rouletting blades have been damaged
it may be an occurrence to disregard a few missed punctures
until a later time. "defectively rouletted" would be
an ideal description I should think.

Hi Jimjam,

here is an example of the roulette omitted :





For them to be the high cat stamps the roulette needs to be completely omitted. An interesting pair though, I will see if I can find more info on partial roulettes.

Drew

There is a footnote in my SACC saying that misperforations exist on all values.

StampStudy, I suspected that would be the case.

Really, I just wanted an ecuse to talk about these very interesting stampsand show off my 'nearly' unrouletted examples!

Does anyone know of other cases of perforated AND rouletted stamps?

They are a wonderful set. South West Africa has an identical set with the SWA overprint. I have seen whole collections of just this set - Colour Variations, Constant Errors, Slogan blocks, Arrow Blocks.

I know of only one other case of perforated and rouletted stamps - also South Africa, 1943 Postage dues. Set of 4. All these are triplets similar to the 1d value of the war effort bantams.

Drew

Bantams.
A very busy cover.

South Africa
Cover Dated 17th November 1943
Posted from North End, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. to Denver Colorado. USA

Registered with Blue Crayon Cross Hatch
Registration Label Port Elizabeth 2, 5934
Opened by Censor, Violet Arms sealing cachet.

Unknown CDS Code 63 (Hidden by sensor label)
North End Elizabeth CDS 17-Xl -43 (3 times)

New York USA Oval "Foreign" 25th January 1944 (twice)
New York NY Oval "Reg'y Div" 25th January 1944 (twice)
Violet Denver Colorado CDS Registered 29th January 1944
Violet Denver Colo. (South ????? Stn ??) Registered 31st January 1944 CDS

Violet 9417 C auxilliary marking ??

From this site go to link 'Page 5 to 14 in a PDF' (over halfway down the page) for information regarding the printing format and rouletting:

http://www.southafricacollector.com...tam_Wars.htm