It was then that an idea came to me – if I could show in a court of law that Hans Holland’s assets were based on money his father had obtained from the sinking of the Holland Trader, then the insurance company, not the PNG government, would have the prior claim. At least it might delay things until after the stamps had been sold. Even if I could raise a loan, interest rates were high, and an extra £2,000 or £3,000 would make all the difference to our ability to keep the ship operational.
I wrote out a statement for Lewis to sign right there in the hotel, then took him along to a solicitor and had it typed, signed and witnessed as a statutory declaration. I think he was so frightened and confused that he barely knew what he was doing.
Next day, in Sydney, I checked with the newspaper offices, but to turn up any story they might have run on the amount of the insurance paid out on the Holland Trader meant searching page by page through the file copies for the last months of 1911 and probably most of 1912 as well. They suggested I contact Lloyd’s agents. This I did, and within the hour they phoned me back to confirm that the Holland Trader had been insured with a Lloyd’s syndicate. The claim was for £8,900, and it had been met in full. Payment, however, had been delayed owing to the owner having been on board and the need to wait for his will to be proved. Settlement had finally been made on January 4, 1913. And they added that, since the ship was a total loss, the Lutine Bell had been rung for her.
I got the name of the Lloyd’s syndicate from them and turned the whole thing over to the solicitors who were looking after the Munnobungle sale for me. The information was sufficient for them to get an injunction in the High Court in Port Moresby restraining the government from impounding any of Hans Holland’s assets pending proof of ownership. That was on August 18, and two days later the LCT was loading copra off a beach in the north of Bougainville for delivery to Rabaul. She sailed with Mac as Master and Perenna on board to keep an eye on him.
It was, in fact, most fortunate that we were successful in freeing the vessel without immediate payment, for I had by then discovered that it was impossible for us as foreigners to obtain a loan in Australia. A few days later I had another piece of luck – quite by accident I was able to arrange a cargo for the ship at Rabaul, a consignment of road-building equipment urgently needed in Guadalcanal. If I hadn’t been invited to the City Club sauna, I wouldn’t have heard about that cargo, and it occurred to me then that Sydney was probably the key to the successful operation of an LCT in the South West Pacific. I rented a room in Strathfield, between the Parramatta Road and the Hume Highway, installed a telephone and within a week I was in business, booking cargoes forward.
Booking them was one thing; however, getting paid for them quite another, and it didn’t take me long to realise we had a cash flow problem. Fuel bills and running costs had to be met, and by the end of September the ship was in Lae and unable to proceed to Madang for her next cargo because of an unpaid fuel bill. By reducing the freight charge, I was able to get payment in advance, but with legal charges to meet and the bank insisting we clear our overdraft, there was only one thing to do if the Holland Line was to survive. That was to return to England and sell everything we had. For Perenna it meant the wood carvings as well as the stamps, also a few other mementoes she had kept out of the Aldeburgh sale; for me it was my boat, my car, my own collection of stamps and the Solomons Seal sheet I had taken from the safe at Madehas.
I had already been notified that Josh Keegan’s big autumn stamp auction was fixed for the two days commencing October 24, and when I phoned him to say I now had a full sheet of sixty of the Solomons Seal ship labels, he said he would decide whether to include them in the auction when he had seen them; he advised me to bring them in my hand luggage, packed flat and in cellophane, and to take great care of them. He had sounded sufficiently interested for me to think we might just scrape together enough to give us the working capital we needed.
Perenna arrived in Sydney on October 20, the day before we were due to fly to England. Those few hours we had together should have been a carefree, happy interlude. The LCT was at sea, Mac was still sober and I had booked sufficient cargoes to keep the vessel going for three months. Also, Perenna had at last got some good news about Tim. The nursing home had written to say that he was much improved, had quite suddenly thrown off his lethargy and was now getting about with the aid of a frame support. But though we did our best, a sense of happy abandon was difficult to achieve, our mood overshadowed all the time by the knowledge that we were both of us putting everything into pawn for the sake of a single aged and rusting ship. We discussed it endlessly. We couldn’t help ourselves.
To my surprise we were met at Heathrow by Tubby Sawyer. I didn’t need to ask him why he was there. Almost the first thing he asked me, after I had introduced him to Perenna and she had gone to phone the nursing home, was whether there were any more sheets of the Solomons Seal, and when I told him all the rest were burned, he said, ‘Marvellous! That’s marvellous! You can tell me all about it as we drive down to the country. But first Josh wants to see you. He’s made the sheet a separate lot and included it in the catalogue.’
Perenna came back radiant. ‘I spoke to him. He even came to the phone himself. He’s so much better.’ Tubby was leading us out to the car park. ‘I’m to ring up again this evening. They say I can see him tomorrow. And to think at one time I despaired of ever seeing him alive again!’
At his office in the Strand, Josh Keegan greeted Perenna as though she were some sort of princess. ‘I have to tell you, dear lady, you’ve made my first big auction. I’ve had acceptances from just about every dealer of importance. I don’t know what it’s going to fetch, that little collection – your great-uncle’s, isn’t it? – but there’s no doubt about the interest it has aroused. I’m serving champagne. There! I’m a businessman, Miss Holland, and I don’t do a silly, show-off thing like that unless I’m on to a winner. And we will have a bottle right now. It’s the best thing after a long flight.’ And as one of the girls came in with a bottle and four glasses on a plastic tray decorated with Penny Blacks under Perspex, he turned to me and in quite a different voice said, ‘Now, where is the sheet? I want to see it.’
While I was getting it out of my briefcase, he picked up a copy of the catalogue, which was lying on his desk, and held it up for us to see. ‘There you are. I’ve taken a chance on what you told me on the phone from Sydney.’ And there it was, on the cover – a reproduction of the two Solomons Seal proofs under the heading: The Incredible Has Finally Happened, and then, below the facsimile of the proofs: The only remaining sheet (60) of the blue Solomons Seal Ship Label is being delivered to the J. S. H. Keegan offices from Sydney in time for this unique auction offering – design collection, proofs, and resulting sheet of the most startling transplant ever perpetrated. ‘There!’ he exclaimed again. ‘You can’t say I haven’t done you proud, eh?’
It was Perenna who asked him what it was all about, but he laughed and shook his head, looking like a learned professor in a relaxed moment as he toasted her, raising his glass and smiling. ‘Commander Sawyer – Tubby – he’s driving you down to Essex, I gather. He’ll explain it.’ And he added hastily, ‘But I think I must say this: The fact that it has aroused a great deal of interest doesn’t mean they’ll bid the price up to a ridiculous figure. They’re businessmen, all of them, and a glass of champagne or two won’t stop them keeping their feet firmly on the ground. We’ve got them to the auction. What happens then … ’ He shrugged. ‘Now, that sheet please.’
By then I had got it out of my briefcase, and he stood looking at it in silence for a long time, the magnifying glass screwed in his eye. Then he shook his head. ‘Pity! All those blotches, and only part original gum. Pity it isn’t mint. If it were in mint condition … ’ He hesitated. ‘But then, I don’t know. Maybe it’s better like this. It’s so obviously been in the heat and humidity of the Solomons. Yes, better perhaps, more real-looking, more genuine. And a nice shade of blue, a genuine P
erkins Bacon blue.’ And he winked at Tubby, laughing quietly to himself. ‘It really is quite humorous. He’ll tell you. Very funny indeed. Perkins Bacon, of all people. Such a stuffy, banknote sort of outfit. Theft, forgery … you tell ‘em, Tubby. That’s what I said to Mr Slingsby here when he came to see me months ago, I said I wouldn’t spoil it for you, so you tell ‘em – later.’ He re-filled Perenna’s glass and said, ‘You’ll be attending the auction, I hope, Miss Holland? It could make quite a bit, that sheet.’
She glanced at me, and I nodded. Nothing would stop me being there after what he had said. Five thousand pounds … if that sheet made £5,000, I thought we could manage. That would about double the total capital we could raise. It should just be enough. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Mr Keegan – I’ll be there, listening with bated breath.’
Tubby, with a proper sense of the dramatic, held off from telling us until we had reached his house. He needed his books, he said, to explain it all properly, but that was just an excuse to get the story of the Solomons sheet out of me first. Once we were in his comfortable black-beamed living room with drinks in our hands, and Perenna had phoned the nursing home again to arrange a time to visit her brother next day, he took down from his bookshelves the larger of the two blue-covered volumes of the Perkins Bacon Records. As he stood there, holding it out to me and saying, ‘Ever browsed through these books?’ I knew we were in for one of his lectures. But this time, with so much at stake, he had my full attention.
‘You should,’ he said. ‘To anybody interested in printing, any British collector, they’re fascinating. They don’t cover the GB printings – that was dealt with by Sir Edward Bacon himself in his Line-Engraved Postage Stamps of Great Britain. I’ve got a copy of the 1920 first edition here somewhere. But all the other printings … This first volume deals with British Colonial issues; the other one deals mainly with printings for foreign countries.’ He opened the larger of the two, turning to the end where he had marked it with a slip of paper. ‘Here it is, five-o-nine – the last chapter. That’ll give you the background.’ And he turned it round so that we could read it. It was headed The Beginning of the End.
The Home Government exercised the strictest supervision over the production of the postage stamps of Great Britain, but the Agents General of the Colonial Office, first George Baillie and then Edward Barnard, as also the Agents for the various Colonial Governments, in no way controlled the production of the stamps ordered. The quantity was merely checked on arrival in the Colony. Perkins Bacon classed postage stamps in the same category as needle, soap and tobacco labels, and although the firm usually produced only the supply of stamps ordered, in some cases the quantity printed was greatly in excess of the number immediately required.
This method continued until Penrose G. Julyan was appointed Agent General for Crown Colonies towards the end of 1858. The following documents make it clear that he considered that the dies, plates, paper and other material for the production of stamps ordered and paid for by his department should be under his control.
‘It was back in 1851,’ Tubby went on as we both looked up to indicate we had finished reading, ‘that Perkins Bacon were invited to tender for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia labels. Up to then the only stamps they had printed were the GB Penny Blacks and Red and the Twopenny Blues. During the next seven years they printed stamps for some twenty-five or thirty of our colonies, including Western Australia, and since they were really banknote printers, regarding stamps as much the same as tobacco labels, they probably were a little slack. On Julyan’s appointment as Agent General a running battle began, de Worms recording pages of correspondence interspersed with his comments. What the Agent General was complaining about initially was late delivery, colour discrepancies and other technicalities. Then, in April 1861, he discovered the printers had been approached by Ormond Hill on behalf of two or three stamp collecting friends of his and had released specimens of everything they had printed, six of each stamp. Julyan blew his top over that, switching his attack to security.’
He began refilling our glasses. ‘Well, there you are, Roy. That’s the background. But you’ll never guess what it led to.’ He was smiling, enjoying himself. ‘Ormond Hill, you see, was Superintendent of Stamping at the Inland Revenue. He was also Rowland Hill’s brother. In the circumstances Perkins Bacon’s protest that they’d seen nothing wrong in sending him cancelled specimens seems reasonable enough. But Julyan took a different view. In the end, he demanded that all dies, plates, stocks of watermarked paper and stamps printed in excess of orders, everything in fact relating to each colony should be delivered to the Agent General’s offices.’ He put down the decanter and came back to the desk. ‘Now turn to the end of the book, the last page but one. Perkins Bacon had argued that, if not stored by experts, the plates would rust or otherwise deteriorate. And they’d been fairly dilatory in meeting Julyan’s demands.’ He leaned forward, pointing halfway down page 525. ‘Now read those two letters. Then you’ll begin to understand why I wanted that collection, why the auctioning of the Solomons Seal die proofs is attracting so much attention.’
The letters read:
Office of The Agents-General
for Crown Colonies,
6,Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.
2nd June, 1862.
Gentn.
I beg to draw your attention to my letter of 12th ultimo requesting you to forward to this Office the Postage Stamps, Paper Moulds, and facsimiles in your possession, and shall be obliged by receiving a reply to that communication.
I am, Gentn,
Your obedient Servant.
P. G. Julyan
Messrs Perkins, Bacon & Co.
This was the end of the struggle, but up to the last Perkins Bacon were able to produce an excuse, a strange admission for a firm of Security Printers.
69 Fleet Street, E.C.
June 3, 1862.
Dear Sir
We beg to apologize for the delay which has arisen in sending you the P Stamps, Envelopes & Moulds in our possession, but the loss of time on other matters forced upon us by the discovery of a thief in our employ, has occasioned the apparent neglect. We hope to be able to send all by the beginning of next week.
We are Dear Sir
yr obdt serts
Per Proc. Perkins Bacon & Co.
J. P. Bacon
P. G. Julyan Esq.
Agent General.
I looked up at him, not entirely sure what it meant.
‘That’s all we know about it,’ he said. ‘We don’t know who this thief was or what he stole. Maybe it was banknotes. Perkins Bacon were banknote and bond printers long before they started printing the Penny Blacks in 1840. If you look at the top of that page, you’ll see a letter from the Agent General referring to delivery of fifty facsimiles for preparing Natal Bonds. It could have been notes the thief stole, or bonds or some of the excess sheets or printed stamps. As you will have gathered, Perkins Bacon were in the habit of running off extra sheets. At their best they were very meticulous printers, always concerned about colour, which was sometimes liable to fading, and they found it difficult to get paper with the right depth of watermarking.’ He glanced at Perenna. ‘The watermark is achieved simply by a slight thinning of the paper. And gum – gum was a problem, too, particularly when the order was for the tropics.’
He hesitated, a significant pause as he turned back to me. ‘On the other hand, it could be that the thief had been borrowing material for a friend of his, a would-be forger, say. He could have borrowed dies, plates even. Copies could have been made of them, and then the borrowed dies or plates returned. It might have been going on for some time.’
I realised what he was suggesting then, that the use of Perkins Bacon dies and plates need not have been confined to just this one label.
‘A nasty thought,’ he murmured. ‘It would raise doubts about the authenticity of some of the rarer mint-condition stamps. After all, the mania for stamp collecting goes back even further than t
he Ormond Hill controversy.’
‘But it would surely have been easier to steal printed stamps.’
‘I don’t think so. Perkins Bacon’s security wouldn’t have been that bad. Any stamps the thief could have got his hands on would have been from cancelled sheets. They would have been overprinted with the word SPECIMEN. But it’s very doubtful whether they would have regarded Colonial stamp dies as objects liable to be stolen. Josh says security at Perkins Bacon was very strict for GB dies, but probably quite negligible as regards the dies for foreign and colonial issues, and a print shop like theirs would have been full of stored plates and dies.’
But by then I had remembered something he had said to me here in this room, so long ago it seemed now. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘The seal – that’s from an early Newfoundland stamp. Didn’t you say those stamps were printed in America?’
He nodded. ‘That’s quite correct. The 1865–70 set was a completely new issue printed by the American Bank Note Company of New York. The Seal-on-Icefloe die was used for the five-cent brown, also for the two later issues, first in black, then in blue. After that the seal was re-designed, and the printing switched to Montreal.’
‘You’re surely not suggesting there was a thief at the American printing house, too?’
‘No, of course not.’ He sounded quite shocked. ‘The seal was designed by Jeens on the instructions of Perkins Bacon, and the die was made by them here in London and sent across to New York. In addition to the seal, Perkins Bacon engraved and cast a die of the Jeens Codfish design. But that design was used for banknotes only. The Jeens Codfish has a straight tail; the codfish on the two-cent stamp a curled-up tail. The seal, on the other hand, was used for both banknotes and stamps.’ He picked up the Records book, turned back the pages and, having found what he wanted, pushed it across to me again. ‘There’s de Worms’s account of what happened.’
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