Mystery remains over who committed forged green stamp crime

IN 1870 the telegraph systems throughout the United Kingdom were nationalised and run by the Post Office.

The Stock Exchange in London was one establishment that benefited greatly from the development of the telegraph systems as stock prices could be quickly and efficiently communicated to all parts of the country.

If a member of the Exchange wanted to send a stock quote by telegram they would write their message on a telegram form and take it with their payment of at least one shilling to a clerk.

The clerk would then give them a Queen Victoria 1/- Green postage stamp which was in current use at the time, for them to apply it to the form.

The basic charge for a telegram was 1s for up to 20 words - plus 3d for each additional five words - and the 1/- green was by far the commonest stamp used.

An example of a genuine stamp

The clerk then cancelled the stamp with a dated postmark to indicate that payment had been made.

However, a dishonest clerk or clerks in the exchange supplied forged stamps for the forms in order to steal the expensive one shilling fees without depleting the stock of genuine one shilling green stamps which were subject to audit.

The fraud was successful because the forged stamps were only used on certain days, and the stamps were such convincing forgeries that they were not retained by the customers who only handled them briefly.

After the telegrams were sent the forms were filed before being bagged up for disposal.

It is thought that thousands of counterfeit 1 shilling stamps were applied to telegraph forms for at least a year between 1872 and 1873.

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The fraud was not detected at the time and could have remained undetected had all the stamps been destroyed as originally intended.

But it would appear that at least one bag had been retained by the Stock Exchange for a period after which they were supposed to be sent for pulping at the paper mills.

Some of the forms eventually came into the hands of stamp dealers - and the fraud finally came to light some 25 years later.

In 1898, an observant philatelist noticed there were some clear differences between the 1/- stamps that had been applied to some of the forms.

He noticed that the letters in the corners of the stamps in some cases had what is now known as “impossible” letters that did not correspond with the possible sheet positions.

At that time postage stamps included letters in the corners of the stamps that corresponded to their positions on the printed sheet of stamps.

The letters run on the top row from A-A; A-B; A-C to A-L etc. and vertically down the sheet to the T row T-A; T-B; T-C along to T-L.

It was also noted that the genuine 1/- stamps were printed on watermarked paper showing a rose spray, whilst the forgeries were on plain paper.

The forgeries were printed by the lithography process which produced a coarser lower quality stamp, whereas the original stamps were printed using typography and had a slightly crisper appearance.

To this day no one knows the names of the perpetrators who committed this highly profitable crime, and kept all the proceeds which must have run into thousands if not tens of thousands of pounds between 1872 and 1873.

The forged stamps are now worth more than the original ones to collectors and can command a premium if they are still on part of the Telegram forms and have the “impossible letters” in the corners.

* The stamps pictured here form part of the collection of a North East philatelist.

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