The magic of collecting things …… a century and more of stamp albums … part 2

Now, today I have been trawling old stamp albums which belonged to me and our Stella.

The first was passed down to me sometime in the early 1950s and had already been lovingly looked after by someone else.

I can’t exactly date the album but there are clues that suggest it will have been produced some time in the 1920s and no later than the late 1930s.

So, one page refers to the Irish Free State, others to the British Dominions of Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and to the Italian Possessions and Colonies which were lost after the last world war.

Added to which there is no Israel, only the “British mandated territory of Palestine”

And I suppose it is of former European overseas empires, which help anchor it sometime before 1945.

India is listed as (British) with a separate section for the Indian Native States, and a whole swathe of modern African countries are listed under their colonial names, like Nyasaland Protectorate, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and the Belgian Colonies.

Looking through it is to be confronted with several nasty dictators, including Hitler and Franco.

Although some of the stamps clearly postdate the interwar years and were added in a time when I was less aware of chronology.

But happily, there are enough to place the album in that time before the Second World War, making it a sort of history book.

Pictures; stamps from a stamp album, from the collection of Andrew Simpson