Postmark Theme, New, Old, How Or Why.

so....a hotbet of croquet and bridge!

And other vices too terrible to name in a nice place like SCF ...

And I completely forgot to mention: Middle Camberwell was where Barry Humphries grew up. 'Nuff said - but I'll add one more detail off list.

Cancels can tell you so much if you just ask the right people.

Barry Humphries our Queen of Australia.
A complex character,...but aren't we all?

As Kipling wrote
'And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Kathmandu
And the crimes of Clapham chaste is Martaban'

And as it happens, Kew in Melbourne is just next door to Camberwell ...

Bhopal State had some fairly uninspired CDSs, but it also produced some rather fancy cancellations: in the earlier era





and later

A couple more for Rod222:

Some hooded CDSs from J(h)ind:



and a small curiosity, 'Pachbadra Salt Lines':



I've seen plenty of the plain Pachbadra and Pachbadra City CDS - it was an important salt trading centre - but this is the only one from the Salt Lines I've found. Sounds inviting, doesn't it?

And I almost forgot: in the hooded CDS division, this one from Lashkar, the main post office in Gwalior State, must surely take the cake:



Two cobras forming the 'hood'!

I had missed the last few additions to this thread.

Here is a Rose Hill, Mauritius, postmark, which sounds like a nice little place...



turns out it the third largest city, so this strike is probably very common.

One for the slogan lovers:



and also a nice example of the large and rather florid Bhopal Sehore CDS ... and finally, nice for having the complete set of animals, SG 344 and 345 together on cover, and paying the correct rate of 1¼ Annas, on a strictly commercial cover.

Dar es Salaam Parcels cancel...anyone have an opinion on whether this is still considered a postal usage?

Surely perfectly postal, Cjd. You'd think a parcel would be the only legitimate postal use for a 2/- value. I must say I was astonished to see that Gibbons price the used at such a steep discount to mint. There must have been an awful lot of parcels going out of Dar Es Salaam.

Yes, by the time you get to the next stamp, the 3/-, it is back to a significant premium for used (and probably many fewer opportunities for use).

And Gibbons warn of forged postmarks on the 3/- and higher values, but yours looks strictly legit.

For lack of a better place to put this, I'll put it here...



Not much to say about it...I just like it. Hankau/Hankow is located at the confluence of the Han and Yangtze Rivers, in present-day Wuhan. Russia, Japan, France and Britain also maintained colonial presences there well into the 20th century.