Blue Penny
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Red Penny or Blue Penny | |
|---|---|
 A Mauritian Blue Penny |
|
| Country of production | British Empire |
| Location of production | Mauritius |
| Date of production | 20 September 1847 |
| Nature of rarity | First stamps of the British Empire produced outside of UK and with wrong wording |
| Estimated existence | |
| Face value | Red: one penny Blue: two penny |
| Estimated value | |
The Mauritius Post Office postage stamps are amongst the rarest and most valuable stamps in the world. They are also known as the Blue Penny and the Red Penny.
Their value is due to two factors — they were the first stamps of the British Empire to be produced outside the United Kingdom and in their initial issue were printed with the wrong wording. They are therefore even rarer than they would have been had they been printed correctly.
Two stamps were issued, a red one penny (1d) and a blue two penny (2d). 1500 of each were issued from the first print run on 20 September 1847, many of which were used on invitations sent out by the Mauritian Governor's wife for a ball which she was holding that weekend.
The quirk of these stamps was that they had "Post Office" rather than the more conventional "Post Paid" printed on the side. Later print runs had "Post Paid" and any existing stamps from the original run can therefore easily be identified and authenticated. There is a traditional story which seeks to explain why the stamps were incorrectly worded, which has recently been challenged by philatelists.
The few surviving stamps are mainly in the hands of private collectors but they are on public display in the British Library in London, including the envelope of an original invitation to the Governor's ball complete with stamp. Another place where it can be seen is at the Blue Penny Museum in Mauritius.
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[edit] Tradition
The traditional view can be seen in any stamp reference book of the 1878 "les timbres de l'ile Maurice" written by Jean-Baptiste Moens, or 1920s and 1930s such as Fabulous stamps, written by John Nicklin in 1939 or Les Timbres-Post de l'Île Maurice written by Georges Brunel in 1928.
This held that the man who produced the stamps, Joseph Barnard, was a half-blind watchmaker and an old man who absent-mindedly forgot what he was supposed to print on the stamps. On his way from his shop to visit the postmaster, a Mr Brownrigg, he passed a post office with a sign hanging above it. This provided the necessary jog to his memory and he returned to his work and finished engraving the plates for the stamps, substituting "Post Office" for "Post Paid".
[edit] Revision
This is an entertaining story but more recent research by Peter Ibbotson in The Barnard myth and Harold Adolphe and Raymond d'Unienville in The life and death of Joseph Osmond Barnard (The London Philatelist, vol 83, pp 263–265 December 1974) have shown that it is probably just a legend.
As Adolphe and d'Unienville say, "It is much more likely that Barnard used 'Post Office' because this was, and still is, the legal denomination of the government department concerned". The plates were approved and the stamps issued without any fuss at the time.
Joseph Barnard was an Englishman of Jewish descent from Portsmouth who arrived in Mauritius in 1838 as a stowaway, thrown off a commercial vessel bound for Sydney. He was not a watch-maker, although he may have turned his hand to watch repairs, not half-blind, and certainly not old — he was born in 1816 and was therefore 31 years old when he printed the stamps in 1847.
[edit] Books and Research
An excellent book, "Blue Mauritius" by Helen Morgan, was released in 2006. This is a detailed, thorough and exellently researched book covering everything to do with the famous Penny Blue stamps from Mauritius, including the social and economic factors that brought about the modern postage system in Mauritius, and the craze of philately that soon arose.
