Cover I Found Interesting

This is just a basic cover but shows a lot about postal services at the time.

The entire is from Liebovitz & Sons inc, a shirt manufacturer with head offices in New York to T. Geddes Grant an importer in Barbados.

It was prepared as an Airmail letter with a nice AirMail sticker and posted on Feb 23rd 1933. Cancelled with a wavy line at 1.30 am.

It then arrived in Castries, Saint Lucia on 1st March, where it received a backstamp.

Then arrived in Barbados at 8 [unreadable] on 2 March 1933, where it again received a backstamp and a nice slogan postmark.

So all in all took about a week to airmail US to West Indies.

Hope you find this interesting too.

Gordon

For speed reply by AIRMAIL. Airmail has no speed these days how times have changed

The subtle thing is the receiver has opened the cover, using a letter knife,
how cultured.
The CDS "G.I" ? would that be a part "G.P.O" do you think.

Rod222

Probably G.P.O. was a regular part of Barbados postmarks in that period.

Seabathing? A term I had never heard before. Is that because it is "English" and I'm "American?"

blcjr The phrase is old fashioned and was used in Britain, can't speak for what words were used in the USA at that time. Seabathing can include allsorts of playing around in the sea. Possibly less people could swim at that time.

Very possible.
Whence a nipper, I can recall going to the "Baths" in blighty, (Not swimming Pool)
Lots of steam, soggy duckboards, and the overpowering Chlorine.

Baths, Seabathing ...there's a link.

There were no flights from New York City to Castries, St. Lucia so it would have gone on a patchwork of flights and surface mail starting in New York City and then going to Miami via domestic Contract Air Mail Routes. I an not sure which CAM flights it would have been on other than I expect that the last leg would have been on a CAM 10 slight from Atlanta to Miami with stops along the way at Macon, Jacksonville, Tampa, and Fort Myers. When it eventually reached Miami it would have waited at the post office there for the next Pan American Airlines flying boat flight going south on Foreign Air Mail Route (FAM) 6. Barbados was never served on this route for some reason (I would imagine Pan Am could not get an agreement with the British for some reason) and so it was dropped off at Castries, St. Lucia as the nearest stop on FAM 6. From there it would have been carried over the short distance to Bridgetown, Barbados. My guess is that it may have gone by a small mail boat as I am unaware of any regular British mail carrying flights hopping between these two relatively close islands, but I am not sure.

One of the fun and challenging aspects to collecting postal history covers of most any kind is to research and determine just how a letter traveled from the sender to the recipient. Airmail covers are especially interesting in this regard since routes and rates were in steady flux as new aircraft were invented and put into service, new deals with other governments were constantly being made for carrying mail to and from the US, etc. etc. Some of the most challenging examples are airmail covers that were carried internationally during World War 2 when the flow of the war was constantly changing and mail carrying flights were being re-routed all the time because of it. Air mail rates are also a part of this area of collecting and study, especially rates for overweight letters.

Kimo,

Thanks for the routing information. Certainly adds to the info I have for this cover

Gordon

For the love of philately I can't fathom how it can take 4 to 6 weeks to get a letter from Belgium, or even France sometimes, to Australia but less than 2 weeks (as a rule) from Great Britain.

I do find this stuff interesting.

I just posted about a US 5 cent Columbian that I have. It went from Philadelphia to San Francisco in about a week. Then it went to Shanghai China in just over a month.

Robert