EAST BAY STAMP CLUB
This is a postcard from the Island of Herm which requires a private stamp in the upper right corner for postage from Herm, to Guernsey and then a British stamp for postage to the final destination. You can learn more here.
Every meeting club members bring interesting philatelic material and hang it on the clothes line. The member then describes the material on the clothes line, and provides interesting philatelic, postal, and history information about the item. Once each item has been described and discussed the members vote for their favorite.
June 21
June 6
These postcards were mailed at a shipboard Railroad Post Office and received a RPO postmark. The upper postcard mailed on a ship traveling between Portland and San Francisco and the lower card from a ship on the Sacramento River. The mail would be delivered to the post office at the next port of call of the ship.
May 17
This unusual three panel postcard documents the voyage of the USS South Dakota on it voyage to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition Seattle in 1909. (http://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/collections/exhibits/ayp).
One panel of the card has the ship’s itinerary, the next panel has a photograph of the ship, and the third panel shows important events of the history of the ship
The other postcard below shows a photograph of the dock in Bremerton where ships dropped off visitors to the Navy yard.
Why does the three part card have a 2 cent stamp and the other card a 1 cent stamp?
April 19
These three stamps were issued for use by the Chinese community in Thailand. Revenue stamps were surcharged 10, 20 and 40 Ticals to pay the postage on clubbed letters to China. The Chinese community in Siam had used private couriers to send letters to China to avoid paying Siamese postage fees. When this became illegal the Siamese post office needed to provide high value postage stamps to pay the postage on clubbed letters to China; previously the highest face values stamp had been 1 Tical.
Click image to enlarge
April 5
In May of 1918, at the close of World War 1, when Estonia won its independence from Russia the Estonian government overprinted a series of Russian stamps "Eesti post." This cover shows the series of stamps with a first day of issue cancellation.
Scott #'s 8-12,15,16,18,19
Click image to enlarge
March 15
March 15
These three covers illustrate different aspects of mailing from ships. The cover on the left (and the return address and logo on the reverse below) show a cover mailed from a German ship, presumably in port in New York, to Germany. The cover on the upper right was mailed from a German ship that had arrived in New York but the US stamp was determined to be invalid as indicated by the blue cross (X). The cover on the lower right was likewise mailed from a German ship and both US stamps were determined to be invalid, but the postage due is now 8 cents. The speculation is that the the addressee, Everett Erle, sent several similar covers to himself and the postal clerk put them in a stack and assessed the total postage due on the top piece.
March 1, 2018
By returning this reply card a POW in Russia confirms to the Swedish bank that he has received money sent to him by the bank. Sweden was neutral during World War I and it was possible to send money to POWs from the Swedish Bank.
February 15
The label on the back of the cover commemorates the 125th anniversary of packet service on ship from Victoria, Canada, to Port Angelus, Washington, USA. The ship transported the mail, for the fee indicated on the label, to a post office in the US. The US Postal Service would accept the mail once a US stamp of appropriate postage was affixed.
Click image to enlarge
August 5, 2015
This post card was written in July 11, 1910, on the 40th Anniversary of the Suez Canal opening, and the 50th Anniversary of the beginning of the construction of the canal. The other side of te card, shown below, is a map of the Africa and he Arabian Peninsula and shows what that area of the world was like on the day of the opening of the second Suez Canal on August 6, 2015.
