Blue Mauritius E-Book

Helen Morgan

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In September 1847 coloured squares of paper were stuck to envelopes and used to send out admission cards to a fancy-dress ball on the tropical island of Mauritius. No-one at the party would have guessed that the envelopes bearing these stamps would one day be worth more than a million dollars. When a two pence 'Blue Mauritius' surfaced on the fledgling French stamp-collecting market in 1865 it gained instant celebrity. Then in 1903, when a perfect specimen, discovered in a childhood album, was bought at auction by the Prince of Wales, the Blue Mauritius gained super-star status. Even now, the stamps of 'Post Office Mauritius' remain synonymous with fame, wealth and mystery. Helen Morgan tells the fascinating story of the most coveted scraps of paper in existence, from Mauritius' Port Louis to Bordeaux, India and Great Britain, Switzerland and Japan, into the fantasies and imagination of stamp collectors everywhere.

Leseprobe

About the Author

Helen Morgan trained as an art historian and archivist. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. This is her first book.

‘Helen Morgan’s book traces in great detail the stories of the twenty-six known “Post Office” stamps in existence in a scholarly but very readable fashion. She brings to life the collectors who hunt­ed their quarry and the letters which the stamps adorned.’ Peter Lewis, Daily Mail

‘Helen Morgan’s enthusiasm for these stamps is catching.’ Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, Financial Times

‘Fascinating … This is a very well and extensively researched book, not only of the stamps, but also of the various personalities, dealers, collectors and others who have discovered, handled or possessed them… Mauritius in 1847 is brought vividly to life, as is the stamp collecting world of the 1860s to the 1990s, the period of most activity and discovery of the 1d and 2d items.’ Philatelic Explorer

Blue Mauritius

The Hunt for the World’s Most Valuable Stamps

Helen Morgan

ATLANTIC BOOKS

London

Copyright page

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2006 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition published inGreat Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Helen Morgan 2006

The moral right of Helen Morgan to be identified as the author of This work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978184354 436 4

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Epigraphs

Il ne faut jamais désespérer en philatélie.

L’avenir nous réserve peut-être encore

des surprises heureuses.

(One must never despair in philately.

The future reserves for us yet, perhaps,

happy surprises.)

Georges Brunel,

Les Timbres-Poste de l’Île Maurice:

Émissions de 1847 à 1898,

Editions Philatelia, Paris, 1928

Contents

List of illustrations

Author’s Note

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Postscript

Glossary

Biographies of the Stamps

Notes and Sources

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Mauritius Philatelic Society

List of illustrations

Two pence ‘Post Office Mauritius’ stamp. Copyright, Blue Penny Museum, Mauritius.

Ruisseau du Pouce, Port Louis, Mauritius. Postcard, collection of John Shawley.

Mauritian postage stamp commemorating Lady Gomm’s ball and the ‘Post Office’ stamps. Collection of John Shawley.

‘Mrs Lloyd’s postman, Mauritius’ by Owen Stanley, Voyage of the H.M.S. Rattlesnake: Vol. 1. MS, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Australia. (PXC 281 f.24)

View of warehouses and the customhouse, Port Louis. Produced in 1847 as a hand-coloured lithograph by Deroy after an original work by Pierre Amand François Thuillier and printed in Paris by Lemercier. Copyright, Blue Penny Museum, Mauritius.

Mauritius page. Frederick Booty, The Stamp Collectors Guide: Being a List of English and Foreign Postage Stamps with 200 Fac-simile Drawings, 1862.

‘La Petite Bourse des Timbres aux Champs-Élysées’. Arthur de Rothschild, Histoire de la Poste aux Lettres et du Timbre-Poste Depuis Leurs Origines Jusqu’a Nos Jours, Paris, 1880.

Bordeaux, Cours du Pavé-des-Chartrons. Postcard, author’s collection.

Edward B. Evans. Frontispiece, Philatelic Record, Vol. 6, 1885.

One penny ‘Post Office’ on an envelope addressed to Monsieur Alcide Marquay. By permission of the British Library, The Tapling Collection, (6377).

Philipp von Ferrary. Frontispiece, Philatelic Record, Vol. 11, 1889.

Thomas Keay Tapling. Frontispiece, Philatelic Record, Vol. 9, 1887–8.

The Jerrom letter to Bombay, bearing two one penny ‘Post Office’ stamps. Courtesy of Investphila SA, Switzerland.

The Bordeaux letter, bearing both one penny and two pence ‘Post Office’ stamps. Private Collection. Courtesy of Richard Borek, Braunschweig, Germany.

Monsieur Théophile Lemaire. Philatelic Record, Vol. 21, No. 6, June 1899.

The original copper plate (perhaps) used to print the ‘Post Office’ stamps. Whereabouts unknown. Reproduced from The West-End Philatelist, 1912.

Fred Melville’s Rare Stamps: How to Recognise Them, London, 1922. Held in the Royal Philatelic Society of Victoria Library, Australia.

Alfred Lichtenstein and Théodore Champion. Reproduced from Balasse Magazine, Brussels, No. 104, February 1956.

The one rupee Mauritius stamp issued to celebrate the centenary of the island’s first British colonial postage stamps. Author’s collection.

The original case containing two ‘Post Office Mauritius’ and other rare stamps. Courtesy of Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation, Bonn, Germany.

Vernon Warren, The Blue Mauritius, Thriller Book Club, London, undated, first published 1954. Author’s collection.

Jean-Baptiste Moens. Frontispiece, Philatelic Record, Vol. 15, 1893.

Bois Cheri, Blue Mauritius vanilla tea. Author’s collection and the author’s favourite tea!

Author’s Note

In terms of prices paid for the ‘Post Office’ stamps I have cited currencies and amounts given in contemporary sources, such as philatelic journals, and, if available, followed conversions given therein. I did not attempt the onerous task of standardizing prices paid into one currency for comparative purposes. Historical conversions can be difficult to calculate, depending on what criteria are used as a basis (such as monthly salaries and cost of living). What did paying £1,450 for a stamp mean to George V?

The important thing to remember in this story is that while anybody could conceivably discover a ‘Post Office’ stamp, only the wealthy could afford to buy one. Their financial value remains a wonderment.

Introduction

Probably the hostess would not have been flattered if a guest had intimated that the entire interest and enjoyment of the gathering would afterwards be summed up in a square inch, unless she had reflected that ’tis on little things great adventures hang.

Rev. C. S. Morton, ‘A Study of the Early Postal Issues of Mauritius’, London Philatelist, 1924

Winter in colonial Mauritius, from July to October, was a time of balls and dinner parties. The ‘gay season’ usually began with the return of the Governor and his family to the capital, Port Louis, from their country residence in Moka. Then Mauritian society stirred itself, eagerly anticipating the invitations to musical soirées, picnics, race day at the Champs de Mars, and particularly to the balls. Rejoicing in the cooler weather, the ladies readied their wardrobes, shaking out their best dresses and venturing into the well-supplied merchants’ shops in town.

Lady Gomm was the Governor’s wife and, while her ball was neither the first nor the last of the season, it would be the grandest. Elizabeth Gomm was well liked in the island and a great asset to the Governor. She was charming and knew how to entertain to advantage. She was also, it seems, happy to promote Port Louis’s newly organized town mail delivery on this occasion, using it to send out the invitations (it is thought) to her ball. What better way to introduce the local community to the concept of the penny postal system and the first postage stamps the island had ever seen?

The brilliant orange-red stamps were a great novelty and the profile of Queen Victoria printed upon them would immediately have caught the eye against the delicate buff colour of the env­elopes. A few of the older French recipients might have raised an eyebrow resignedly for a moment at the sight of the head of the British monarch, as they prised open the envelopes to discover that a grand fancy-dress affair was to be held at Government House on the evening of 30 September 1847.

It was common practice to invite a slightly greater number of guests than were expected, for it was rare that everybody accepted. Yet on that mild Thursday evening, as a steady stream of soldiers in their military best strolled up the rue de la Chaussée from the nearby barracks, guests in their carriages continued to rattle in from all directions – along the rue Moka, up the broad tree-lined sweep of the Place d’Armes, the rue du Gouvernement and rue Royale. The carriages stopped briefly to set their occupants down, a bright splash of colour against the dark stone of Government House. It had been built by the French in another era, during their time as rulers of the island, and was periodically denounced by the British with a sniff as ‘one of the most unsightly, inelegant structures in the place’.

It must have been a remarkable evening, but Lady Gomm’s ball is remembered chiefly for one curious reason. Of the hundreds of invitations or admission cards sent out, three of the envelopes which carried them survived. These were the earliest items bearing postage stamps to pass through the Mauritian postal system. Not one of Lady Gomm’s guests could have imagined that people the world over would soon be collecting these little scraps of paper, these postage stamps, and would even pay great sums for them – that 150 years later the stamp-bearing envelopes they had chanced to keep would be worth more than a million dollars.

There were two versions, or values, of the stamps: the one penny used by Lady Gomm, printed in orange-red, and a two pence printed in deep blue. In addition to the value and the profile of the Queen, both designs carried the inscription post office – mauritius – postage. Up to 500, perhaps, of each denomination were issued in September 1847, engraved locally by Joseph Osmond Barnard. While some have found the stamps plain, they look as if care was taken over their creation, and the few surviving specimens are jewel-like. They seem almost to glow.

Mauritius was only the fifth country in the world – and the first British colony – to produce postage stamps. This fact would be enough to ensure interest in the island’s first postal issue, but the stamps’ fame and fortune flowed from more than this.

For a time, like Lady Gomm’s ball, the first stamps of Mauritius retreated into obscurity, unknown and undocumented, until a two pence finally surfaced on the fledgling French stamp-collecting market in 1865. From the moment of the first announcement of this discovery in the philatelic press, mystery surrounded the little blue stamp. This specimen was ever so slightly different. In most respects it was similar to known examples of what was then thought to be the first stamp of Mauritius, except that it bore the words post office instead of the expected post paid. Perhaps this particular specimen was an error, that quirk of manufacture beloved of the omnivorous collector? When had it been issued and how many more might there be? (These were already important questions for those who had taken up the world’s strangest new hobby.) The stamp was evidently rare, and the lucky dealer who had acquired it priced it accordingly.

A handful of the so-called ‘Post Office’ stamps (also known as the ‘Post Office Mauritius’, and popularly as ‘the Blue Mauritius’) came to light in the following years. By the 1890s, surrounded by an aura of mystery and rarity, with the added spice of apparent error, they had taken hold in the public imagination as the most famous and expensive of their kind. Twenty-six (or perhaps twenty-seven) specimens survived the ravages of the waste-paper basket to become, along with the dodo and its tropical beaches, one of Mauritius’s main claims to fame.

There was something intriguing in the idea of these plain little labels, intrinsically valueless, passing from hand to increasingly wealthy hand. Millionaire collectors were driven to bag the stamps as if they were big game. The discovery of a ‘Post Office’ was long the ultimate goal of collectors at both ends of the philatelic spectrum. Soldiers, schoolboys and stamp collectors everywhere (the entire German nation even) became obsessed with uncovering the mysteries of the stamps or, better still, finding another one. There was always the chance that an overlooked specimen might turn up in any place in the world that had communicated with Mauritius in the late 1840s.

Towards the end of 1903 this happened when a civil servant in London, sorting through his papers, came across a two pence ‘Post Office’ in perfect condition. It had lain forgotten in his childhood collection for some forty years. The find attracted international interest and philatelists came from around the world, crowding into the auction rooms of Messrs Puttick and Simpson.

More than an hour into the auction, the restlessness which had pervaded the room stilled. A hush descended as the auctioneer took a deep breath: ‘Mauritius, lot 301, 1847 two pence Post Office, unused with large margins, a fine example’. The stamp was less than an inch in height and width, and was indeed a fine example. Despite its age, the rich blue ink was still brilliant. No marks defaced the profile of the young Queen and the whole was intact, with large margins clear of the design.

The bidding started at £500 and rose rapidly, by hundreds, to twelve, thirteen, fourteen hundred. Charles J. Phillips, representing the Reichspostmuseum in Berlin, declared himself out. The penultimate bidder threw up his hands in frustration at the record bid of £1,450, and lot 301 was knocked down to an agent, Mr J. Crawford.

Shortly afterwards, in conversation with the Prince of Wales, one of the royal courtiers remarked, ‘Did your Royal Highness hear that some damned fool has just paid £1,450 for a single stamp?’

‘Yes,’ the future George V is reputed to have replied. ‘I was the damned fool.’

Long before this, a London newspaper had described the auction prices of stamps as ‘a contribution to the history of human folly’. Stamp collectors were thought a little strange. Yet the hobby soon eclipsed all others as the most popularly practised global pastime.

Its charms and benefits are indeed many. Stamp collecting can be instructive – encouraging a knowledge of zoology, history, geography, art, botany, languages and politics – as well as enjoyable. Part of the appeal is visual and part historical, both in the interest in the changing design aesthetic and stamp production, and in the reflections, in these miniature portraits, of people, places and events. Through the collecting of letters and envelopes bearing stamps and other postal markings, serious hobbyists (philatelists) research the development of postal systems and practices. There are many ways the hobby can be pursued. One collector dispenses with the terms ‘stamp collecting’ and ‘philately’ when he lectures on his favourite pastime, entitling his talks simply ‘curiosity’.

Then there is the thrill of the hunt – the sense of achievement when gaps are filled. The pursuit and the find drive much collecting. For philatelists particularly, a desire for complexity linked to the challenge is also important. And ever present, underlying the pursuit, is the hope of discovering buried paper treasure – the rare stamp.

Ninety years after the Prince of Wales paid a record price for a schoolboy’s ‘Blue Mauritius’, a consortium of Mauritian companies paid $2.3 million for two specimens of the rare ‘Post Office’ stamps. They have become one of the most documented of all postal issues, a byword for rarity, fame, wealth and mystery. Each new discovery inspired potted biographies, attended always by rumour and speculation. The most coveted scraps of paper in existence, this is their story, an adventure that began at a fancy-dress ball during turbulent times on a tropical island, taking them from Port Louis to Bordeaux, India and Great Britain, into the hearts and imagination of collectors everywhere.

Chapter 1

Port Louis, Mauritius, September 1847

Notice to persons attending Balls: – Monsieur F. has the honour to inform the public and his clients, that he will keep his hair-dressing room open on all such occasions in the evening.

Nineteenth-century newspaper advertisement, Port Louis

Late in November 1842, Sir William Gomm was en route to take up the position of sixth British Governor of Mauritius. His party caught their first sight of the magnificent volcanic mountains of Port Louis – a riveting spectacle from any angle and particularly so from the harbour. The town spread from the seaboard to the green foothills of the mountains, Pieter Both and Le Pouce (the thumb), which stood out in bold relief against the jumbled rooflines of churches, forts and other buildings.

The news of the Gomms’ arrival spread quickly, as the signal passed from their ship, the Cleopatra, to the signal station on Long Mountain and across the valley to Port Louis. Everybody knew the significance of the Union flag hoisted on Signal Mountain, clearly visible from the streets in the town: a frigate was approaching the harbour. At three o’clock in the afternoon, according to the pages of the local bilingual newspaper, Le Cernéen, the guns on the frigate sounded and Sir William ‘crossed the Place d’Armes between a double file of soldiers extending from the Port to Government House, and accompanied by all the authorities of the place, amidst the discharges of Artillery from the Citadel’. It was a grand arrival. High hopes were held for Sir William’s governorship, based on the reputation that preceded him from his time in colonial administra­tion in Jamaica (1839–42), and his military service during the Peninsular Wars and at Waterloo. The colony was certainly in need of a head, since the previous Governor, Sir Lionel Smith, had died of pneumonia ten months earlier.

High hopes were also held for Lady Elizabeth Gomm – ‘la moitié gracieuse’ (the charming half), as Sir William liked to call his wife. The editors of Le Cernéen anticipated that she would ‘assemble around her the distinguished persons of our society and will thus be instrumental in establishing, between all parties, those bonds of sympathy and friendship, the formation of which the apathy of our former rulers has alone delayed’. Sir William, in a diplomatic gesture towards facilitating those bonds, gave his first address to the colony’s legislative assembly in French.

Ruisseau du Pouce (Pouce stream), Port Louis, Mauritius. Le Pouce, the thumb-shaped mountain, can be seen in the background.

Colonial Mauritius was still at this time, after more than thirty years of British rule, the ‘Île de France’ to many of its inhabitants. A small Indian Ocean island east of Madagascar, Mauritius was uninhabited before the arrival in 1598 of the Dutch, who named their new possession after their Prince, Maurits van Nassau. In little over 100 years, they had decimated the dodo, exploited the thousand-year-old ebony forests and founded the sugar industry on the back of black slavery. The island was abandoned by them in 1710, and annexed by the French East India Company a few years later, when it was renamed Île de France. Control eventually passed to the French Crown in 1764. Little more than an outpost settlement of several hundred inhabitants during the Dutch period, the island prospered under the French. However, despite defeating the British in 1810 in a famous naval battle at Grand Port in the island’s south, the French shortly after ceded Île de France to the British. They were militarily outnumbered, the island was suffering from the British naval blockades and the population was largely indifferent to who ruled them, as long as normal trade was able to flourish again. The victorious British renamed the island Mauritius, and agreed to respect the culture, language, legal system and religion of the incumbent French.

Mrs Fenton, an Englishwoman who spent five months in Mauritius in 1829, noted that ‘here the time of French ascendancy is still too recent to be forgotten’. She observed the French influence in the local inhabitants’ general courtesy, ‘which French politeness has dispersed wherever they govern’. Charles Darwin, who stop­ped at Mauritius during the voyage of the Beagle in 1836, remarked on the French character of Port Louis as particularly noticeable, he commented, in the shops. By that he may have meant the European origin of the goods, and their expense, or perhaps it was the persuasive charm of the shopkeepers, who were often French or Creole – the latter an appellation for those of French origin born in the island.

By the 1840s the racial and cultural mix of Mauritius – a blend of French, African, Indian and Chinese, with a hint of British – was firmly established. Mauritius was a veritable Babel, whose different races were evident to the visitor disembarking at the Port Louis docks. Alongside a young man of French origin in the latest Parisian fashion walked a shopkeeper wearing the loose cotton frock and trousers of China. Beside him, hailing from Madagascar, was a man ‘bare-headed, the hair twisted and worked into snake-looking points, which stick out and leave a very Medusa-like appearance’. And over there from Bengal, one of the recent immigrants wearing a cast-off soldier’s coat and a cloth tied around his middle.

When the British took possession of Mauritius in 1810 the island’s population consisted of approximately 7,000 people of European origin, 8,000 ‘free coloureds’ and 63,000 slaves. Slavery was abolished in 1835 and replaced by an apprenticeship system. This reluctant workforce was supplemented by indentured labourers from India. But amid concerns that this was just another form of slavery, Indian immigration was suspended in 1839. The issue was one of the most pressing Gomm had to contend with on his arrival in the colony, for the labour market was critical to the island’s export economy, and the established plantocracy – the Franco-Mauritian owners of the sugar plantations – were power­ful. Indian immigration resumed under Gomm, and there was a mass influx of labourers – more than 33,000 men in 1843 alone. By 1847 the number of indentured labourers had outstripped the number of ex-slaves working as apprentices, but the Mauritian planters continued to press for increases in immigration. Gomm, however, correctly interpreted these urgings as evidence of the planters’ desire to keep the upper hand in wage-bargaining, and found himself in great conflict with them.

These proved to be difficult years for Gomm and Mauritius, marked by financial crises caused by the labour problem, over-trading and an excess of imports – the ultimate (and perhaps most useless) being, in 1847, the importation of a rhinoceros. The Governor was unpopular in certain quarters. It was felt that a military governor would never be able to understand the best interests of a colony made up of merchants and planters. When the Gomms gave a levee to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday in May of that year it was, noted local newspaper Le Mauricien, as in other years of late, badly attended.

The promulgation of an Order in Council to replace French with English as the official language of the courts in July 1847 was far removed from the conciliatory gesture of Gomm’s maiden address. Due to come into effect on the 15th, it was noted in Le Cernéen of 8 July that of the 150,000 souls in Mauritius (not including those of English origin) only around 500 people knew the English language. It so happened that a young French lawyer, Célicourt Antelme, was presenting a case in Port Louis on the 14th and he prolonged the hearing until midnight, when he dramatically paused – it is said – and switched from French to English. But perhaps it is wise to remember of this anecdote that in Mauritian history (in the words of local historians) it is ‘common knowledge’, one of those good stories where fact and mythology are equally at home. There is a small paragraph in Le Cernéen of 17 July noting that Monsieur Antelme, in the Court of Assizes on the evening of the 15th (not the 14th), ‘finished an eloquent plea with a touching goodbye to the French language, which was greeted by such loud and prolonged applause that the Chief Judge and the Substitute Procureur-General had much trouble in re-establishing silence.

Never, in the memory of the oldest members of the staff, had the crowd displayed such enthusiasm.’ Each version of Antelme’s story, whichever day the incident took place, has something to recom­mend it in the way of drama.

While the lawyer was inspiring the assembled crowd with his touching adieu to the French language, the second of the season’s winter assemblies was getting under way. These were a series of seven subscription balls, held on the second Thursday of every month of the Mauritian winter, beginning in July. Similarly styled to the Almack’s balls in London, they were managed by ‘patron­esses’ (the Mesdames Stavely, Dick, D’Epinay, de Robillard and Lloyd) and ‘commissaires’ (the Messieurs Rawson, Barclay, Durant St André, Rudelle and Fraser). The Gomms were sure to have attended the winter assemblies, held at Port Louis’s Masonic lodge – the Loge de la Triple Espérance – and undoubtedly they attended on the 15th.

Alas, on this occasion the Loge de la Triple Espérance was transformed into the Loge de la Triste Espérance. Although both the French and the British communities were well represented on the assembly’s organizing committee, some of the French residents of the island chose not to attend the ball as a protest at its timing, coinciding as it did with the day deemed the ‘death’ of the French language in Mauritius. Four young men ranged themselves at the door of the lodge in a picket (perhaps inspired by Antelme’s oration) and insulted those members of the French community who had put ‘rejoicings and pleasure’ above a proper regard for the gravity of the day. Their insults consisted of little more than groaning and hissing, and were more a case of bad manners than anything else (according to an editorial in Le Mauricien a week later). But the incident escalated when, in an overreaction by the government, the men were arrested and thrown into prison. They were soon set free but were then rearrested, and much bickering between the families of the prisoners and the magistrates ensued to secure their liberty again.

Sir William Gomm’s growing unpopularity (with the French at least) is often advanced as the reason behind his wife’s giving her famous ball of 30 September. Easing the tensions between the British and the French communities may well have been a moti­vating factor. However, poor Lady Gomm is popularly believed to have also been responsible for the infelicitous entertainment of 15 July, the aftermath of which long troubled the government. But it is evident from notices in Le Cernéen that she was not one of the earlier ball’s patronesses. The July ball was a regular event, but in this case unfortunately timed, that was all. Five more assemblies would follow before Lady Gomm’s famous fancy-dress ball, and the winter of 1847 was remembered – in British circles at least – as most enjoyable. Sir John Ewart, then a young soldier in the 35th Royal Sussex Regiment, recalled in his memoirs Lady Gomm’s ‘at homes’, the jeunes gens balls, the winter assemblies, two delightful balls given by a Frenchman named Vigoureux, the opera, a circus, picnics and garrison theatricals. Soldiering in Mauritius was not, it seemed, a particularly onerous duty.

A version of Nash’s lithograph of Lady Gomm’s ball, along with a ball envelope, appeared together in 1978 on a Mauritian postage stamp commemorating the famous event and the issuing of the ‘Post Office’ stamps.

Ewart remembered Lady Gomm’s fancy-dress ball as a grand occasion. The large ballroom was decadently lit by the lamps, nearly 200 in number, which clustered about the ceiling. It seemed that the lights themselves were in costume and vying for attention as the best dressed. Monsieur Fouqueraux, known as the host of some of the best balls in the island and commonly referred to as ‘Le Prince Charmant’, would probably have been in attendance, nodding approval at the exhilarating scene before his eyes. The rich brocades of the dowagers’ dresses reflected the mellow glow of the lamps, mingling with the younger ladies’ silks, tulles and laces, while the dress swords of the soldiers were as dazzling as the jewellery and as shiny as the polished wooden floor. Recalling the ball in later years, Ewart remarked that ‘for some weeks every­body was busy preparing for it… the dresses being magnificent, and the characters admirably sustained’. Guests who cared to dress according to the fancy theme chose from two groups of characters, the first from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and the other from Byron’s historical tragedy Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. ‘They marched into the room under a flourish of trumpets, pre­senting a most striking appearance.’ Ewart himself wore a kilt, as he did at a ball held by one Colonel Blanchard soon afterwards. On that score Lady Gomm’s ball triumphed too. The Colonel’s rooms, unlike those at Government House, swarmed with mosquitoes, and poor Ewart, in his kilt, was ‘exposed in a most disagreeable manner to the attacks of these voracious insects’.

Published in 1881, Ewart’s memoirs – The Story of a Soldier’s Life; or Peace, War, and Mutiny – would have been written up from diaries and from letters home, treasured and saved. Perhaps the soldier also had a copy – tucked away in a scrapbook, or fading in a frame somewhere – of the oft-reproduced image of the guests in fancy costume at Lady Gomm’s ball, for he was able to describe it accurately thus: ‘Nash, a very clever artist residing at Mauritius, made a capital sketch of these two groups, which was afterwards published.’ And yet, his sporting and social life in Port Louis so well remembered, Ewart made no mention in his memoirs of Lady Gomm’s stamped envelopes.

When a few of the ball envelopes finally surfaced, they were empty. How then was the connection between the ball and the birth of the stamps made? The popular version of the story holds that the envelopes contained invitations, but this is unlikely. According to the conventions of the day, Lady Gomm would have sent out her invitations at least three weeks, and certainly no later than a fortnight, in advance. Two of the envelopes later discovered bore the postmark 21 september 1847 – less than ten days before the ball. Given Ewart’s comment about everybody preparing for weeks beforehand, it is more likely that the famous ‘Post Office’ ball envelopes contained cards of admission, to be submitted by guests on the night at Government House. That the ball and the first use of postage stamps in Mauritius are related is an accepted connection in the island: a version of Nash’s ball engraving and a one penny ‘Post Office’ appeared together in 1978 on a Mauritian postage stamp commemorating Lady Gomm’s 1847 ball and her famous ‘Post Office’-bearing envelopes. Yet there is nothing in the official post office archives and not a mention in either of the island’s newspapers at the time to connect them. Indeed, there was no mention of the stamps in the press at all.

Chapter 2

Message in a Bottle

Mauritius believed in having a new postal ordinance about every year (on the same principle as a horticulturist bedding out tulips) until they discovered which kind did best on their own particular soil, and what suited the public.

Rev. C. S. Morton, ‘A Study of the Early Postal Issues of Mauritius’, London Philatelist, 1924

In the early 1600s, Mauritius was still plentiful with giant tortoises and the strange, fat, flightless dodos. The island provided food, fresh water and safe harbour to the ships that plied the trading routes from Europe around the Cape of Good Hope to the east. It also provided news and information. On the Île aux Tonneliers, an islet near the entrance to the main harbour on the island’s west coast (the future Port Louis), ships’ crews deposited letters and instructions in upturned bottles left hanging from trees, in the hopes that others would collect and carry their mail to its intended destination. Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff found a group of such letters left by Dutch sailors at Mauritius during his expeditions of 1607–12. Preserved in the archives of the Amsterdam chamber of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (United East India Comp­any), they are some of the earliest-known letters written from the island.

This was the reality of communication in a maritime world. The carriage of mail depended upon the vagaries of shipping. There were no regular schedules and no guarantees that, once consigned to a ship, mail – or even the ship – would arrive intact. Emanuell Altham wrote at least two letters from the ship Hopewell, anchored in the waters off Mauritius in June 1628, to his brother in England. Similar in content, both letters noted that a certain Mr Perce would deliver up a jar of ginger, some beads and a live dodo to Altham senior. The duplication was undoubtedly an insurance against one of the letters going astray and they had probably been sent via different ships (a common practice that continued well into the nineteenth century). Both of Altham’s letters arrived, surviving for a time in the family archives, but of Mr Perce and his charges, nothing more is known.

It wasn’t until 1772, when Mauritius was in French possession, that an official postal service within the island was established. There had been an inland postal service under the French, but it had been tied to the delivery of the Port Louis newspaper, and only those who subscribed to the newspaper received their mail in addition for free. Through a combination of decentralization and the subsequent British blockade of Mauritius during the Napoleonic Wars, a general deterioration of all mail services to and within the island followed. The inland service fell into disuse and it was not revived by the British until 1834.

Before the advent of regular government-run mail services in 1848, outgoing mail relied on mercantile shipping interests. Masters of vessels were obliged by government ordinance to deliver up post office mail, packets, letters and newspapers to the postmaster within twenty-four hours of anchoring in the colony, or face a fine and imprisonment. Under British rule, all masters of British vessels about to proceed to sea were to give the postmaster at least twenty-four hours’ notice of sailing dates and destinations, so these could be advertised and the mail made up. Missing the mail was a serious occurrence, obliging the postmaster to report to the Colonial Secretary, as in May 1847, when the mail came down to the HMS Rattlesnake too late, and part of the mail for Sydney was missed.

James Stuart Brownrigg had been Colonial Postmaster in Mauritius since 1843. It was the Irishman’s first appointment under the colonial Mauritian government. When he had originally taken charge, it was, he later recalled, a post office in name only. With ‘an indefatigability and zeal but few in a tropical climate would have done’, Brownrigg strove to raise the department ‘into one of utility to the public’.

By 1847, during what would later be recognized as a pivotal year of postal reform, the island’s first postage stamps were issued. Brownrigg was supported by six clerks. There were also deputy postmasters located around the island, along with letter carriers, convict couriers and a few messengers. Most of the employees had been newly appointed in June of that year. Mail delivery was seen as a suitable alternative for those convicts unfit for hard labour and most of the post office’s courier work was undertaken by convicts of Indian origin. While the legwork was done by Indians – brought in small numbers to Mauritius as convicts, servants and labourers from the mid-eighteenth century, well before the waves of Indian immigrant labour began in the 1830s – most of the clerks employed during the 1840s were of Franco-Mauritian or British extraction. However, there were two clerks born in Madras and the distinct­ively named ‘Trusty Messenger’ Grain d’Or (Grain of Gold) was an ex-government slave far from his homeland of Mozambique.

Brownrigg and his clerks worked a long day and a full week. Despite the wide streets of Port Louis and its location right on the harbour, the city absorbed the heat of the tropical days and held on to it fiercely. Understandably, then, the post office day began in the cool of morning at 7 a.m., Monday to Saturday, but it was a long day, dealing with letters, newspapers and parcels for distribution, and the clarks could expect to finish at 5 p.m. in winter and 6 p.m. in summer. Sundays brought a little respite, the opening hours being from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

‘Mrs Lloyd’s postman, Mauritius’.

Close to the harbour’s main landing place at the Place d’Armes, Port Louis’s post office was situated in a rented building on the corner of rue Farquhar, a narrow street which ran directly into the lively bazaar, and had the advantage of proximity to Government House and other public buildings. Until a purpose-built post office was erected in the 1860s down at the harbour, the post office premises were the bane of the successive postmasters’ lives. They were too hot and too small – ‘Noxious effluvia coming from passages and stores on either side is constantly so intolerable as to be prejudicial to health,’ wrote Brownrigg in 1849. On the day after Lady Gomm’s fancy-dress ball in 1847, when the postmaster might happily have been reflecting on the successful introduction of postage stamps and the penny post to the town, he was writing an urgent request to the Colonial Secretary for a carpenter to do something to his office to stop mice eating the mail. All the clerks would eventually have special hand stamps on their desks to cover such miserable eventualities as eaten by rat or missent to mauritius.