The one that you posted with the comment "How bout this cancellation" is, as rogdcam pointed out, an overprint, but I'd like to give you a little more information about it and what it represents. The stamp started life as Great Britain number 160 in the Scott catalogue, described there as 1 penny scarlet, and first issued around 1912, early in the reign of King George V, whose side view portrait is pictured. This type of stamp is called a definitive, which is the workhorse of the stamp world, the ordinary postage stamps which people use to mail their every day letters, as opposed to special issues or commemoratives. The one penny probably had the greatest number printed, because that was the standard postage rate at that time. In 1922, after years of brutal fighting, most of Ireland, except for six counties in the north, became independent of British rule, and became the Irish Free State, or Eire. During the early days of independence, there were no distinctly Irish stamps, so the government at the time did the next best thing, which was to use the regular British stamps that they had been using ever since the inception of postage stamps in 1840, but to overprint them with something which showed that they were now an independent nation. The earliest overprints were issued on February 17th, 1922 and said something like Realtat Sealadac na Heireann, which is Gaelic for Provisional Government of Ireland, and the year 1922. Yours has the earliest overprint and is Scott #2. Later, the same overprint using different type faces and printed by different printers were issued, and were used for several years. By the end of 1922, the first true Irish stamps came out and were used side by side with the overprinted British ones. |
Posted 01/03/2020 09:51 am
