David Beech:
It’s a great privilege to be here this afternoon. For an Englishman to come to the United States to talk about an American subject is tough, but a great pleasure.
Wilson’s already alluded to the importance of philately or any subject in bringing parties together and that’s essentially what I’ve played a small part in doing on this particularly controversial issue. I’d also like to mention one or two people in the audience— many of which we’ve already come across in the other introductions, but I would like to ask Dr. Gene Hall from Rutgers University to stand because he’s played a very important part in this event about which you will hear a bit more later on. Now, this subject is enormous, I’ve never known a subject more complicated, more controversial and more fascinating. So this afternoon I can only touch on some of the issues that are key to the case. And I’m going to try to express this in simple terms. I’m not trying to con anyone; I’m not wanting to get into the detail of any particular matter or subject. I’d also like to thank the Sundman brothers for producing this splendid booklet and it allows me not to have to talk about every aspect of the subject because in here there are four articles that are for and against the Grinnells and it’s a very balanced work. I would only make one remark about it for those people who are judging the stamps; the illustrations come from a variety of different sources so you shouldn’t compare a Grinnell that’s illustrated with a missionary because that’s unfair, because the photographic processes would have been different. So, that’s just indicative of what the stamps look like.
Well, by way of introduction I’m only going to say that the first stamps of Hawaii were issued in 1851 and comprised of 2, 5 and 13 cents values. They were printed in Honolulu. Of these, 198 copies are still believed to exist. In 1918 a further 71 copies were discovered by George Grinnell but were rejected by the superior court of the state of California as forgeries in November, 1922. Since I have become involved in this matter, just in 2001, I’ve had countless conversations, in person, on telephones across the Atlantic that I would measure in hours and emails and letters that I would measure in inches, if not a foot’s worth by now. This has been a great privilege and pleasure to be involved in philately’s number one debate. I’m delighted to have played a small part in bringing all of the parties together for the first time ever to debate this issue and most of them are here in this room today. And I hope that those people who have never met but who’ve been, I won’t say arguing, but debating amongst themselves, are going to meet and shake hands at the reception afterwards because meeting people is so important on these occasions.
The Grinnell stamps are amongst the most interesting and complicated and fascinating philatelic expertizing challenges of all time. In the words of the advertisement promoting this lecture: romance, drama, suspense, fraud? There is a question mark after the fraud. Now, the only thing that matters in this issue is the truth and in order to get to the truth you have to be open-minded and approach the issues without prejudice. The British Library and the Royal Philatelic Society London and its expert committee have no vested interest in this outcome at all. Nor have I. We are completely neutral in the debate that’s been going on. Only the truth matters. Now, I do not talk for the expert committee of the Royal. I’m not a member of the expert committee, although I have attended one of their meetings when I took the Tapling Collection stamps along for comparison with the Grinnells. Now, because of that I’m free to speak. Had I been a member of the committee I couldn’t speak because we don’t allow members of the committee to talk about the patients that they’re seeing.
I should say something about the status of the expert committee; it is the oldest in the world having been formed in 1894. But it operates completely independently. It is in fact operated by a wholly owned subsidiary company RPSL Ltd. and that company has a board of directors, but the operation of expertizing is not influenced in any way by either the council or any of its members or any of the directors of RPSL Ltd. The experts are paramount in their decisions and therefore they are completely independent and that is I think how all expertizing who are in the first category should certainly be.
Now, in order to make sense in this lecture we must get the terminology correct. When I say missionary or missionaries I am referring to the 198 copies that are believed to be genuine and when I use the term Grinnell or Grinnells I am referring to the 71 copies found or discovered by George Grinnell in 1918. I would also repeat my remarks for quality of the visual presentation you are going to see. Once again the images came from a variety of different sources across a long period of time; some were slides some were digital images so you shouldn’t look at something and compare it with another because that would be completely unfair. Now I suspect most of you have been downstairs looking at the Grinnells and the splendid copies that are in the National Postal Museum’s collection here. I want to ask you for a little bit of audience participation. Will you tell me please, looking at the stamp on the screen, whether this is a missionary or a Grinnell? Would you put your hands up please, if you think it is a missionary? There’s one. Just one? Would you like to put your hands up please if you think it’s a Grinnell? I see one expertizer there and one well-known expert on Hawaii; okay... Now, would you like to put your hands up if you don’t know? [laughter] Most people here are very wise [laughs]. Now, the answers to this is that this stamp was lot 32 in the sale of the Honolulu advertiser collection auctioned in 1995 by Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries Inc. in New York where it was described as Grinnell reproduction of the 13 cent and realized 1,500 dollars. It is not a Grinnell and the man that looked at it, in the audience, thought it was a Grinnell [laughs]. You sure have a photographic memory Fred. Well, I say this not to embarrass Siegels or Thurston Twigg-Smith who I had the privilege of meeting in 1980 but to demonstrate to you just the fact that hardly anyone has ever seen a Grinnell. Let’s ask you, who’s seen a Grinnell before today? Put your hands up if you’ve seen a Grinnell before today. Just the owning families and the gentleman at the back whom I don’t recognize, so very very few indeed. And yet, so many people have given me definitive answers to the question of are these real missionaries or not. So there is a great deal of ignorance around and that of course has fueled prejudice one way or the other. So we’ve established that some of the people that claim to know don’t. Sorry, that’s very unfair Fred, teasing you.
The standard of proof in expertizing is another particularly difficult subject because it cannot be like in a court of law, necessarily. Sometimes you have to rely on circumstantial evidence or the balance of probabilities. So, in looking at evidence, if you looked at evidence that would come up to absolute proof in court of law standards, you’d probably never arrive at any kind of answer, whatever. So the expertizer’s job, particularly in this case, is very very tough indeed. The possible outcomes of this are going to be that the expert committee decides that they are genuine, they are forgery, genuine of unknown status or no opinion/we don’t know. It could be any of those. During the course of the last two years I’ve kept all that correspondence and copies of emails and I now have a pile about like this sitting in the office which in due course will be available to researchers at the British Library’s discretion because some of it is a little confidential at the moment. The expert committee has already had access to anything it wants to see. I’d also like—despite whatever the outcome might be—to actually salute the owners of the stamps for determinedly keep going with proving what they have and trying to get to the truth whatever that is. There’s enormous prejudice across all of the time since 1918 with people not having open minds and it works on a several bases, they really hope to prove what it is and we’re here to help them do that. And quite frankly, if you owned Grinnells wouldn’t you want them to be genuine missionaries? I mean, who wouldn’t? Put your hands up. It’s unanimous. So I salute them for continuing to keep going under what has been quite an onslaught at times but I’ll come to that a little later on.
Now my involvement in this, I should explain, probably in the 1970’s I undertook a program of philatelic reading and one of the books that I read was the Meyer Harris book, Hawaii and its Stamps and Postal History, published in 1948. And of course, that informed my opinion as to what the Grinnells were which essentially was that they were forgeries. My predecessor at the British Library, Bob Schoolley-West, was very fortunate in going on holiday to California where he met a friend of his and the subject of philately naturally came up and when philately came up, it became apparent that the friend had a friend who is called Pat Kalhane and it wasn’t long before the two met. Pat was able to tell Bob all that’s been going on in the more recent years in looking at the evidence, particularly in Hawaii. Bob returned to London and it wasn’t long before he came to see me and told me about the Grinnells and I must admit that my first reaction was based on my own prejudice of course and I remember saying it so very clearly, “but they’re forgeries aren’t they?” Bob told me more about the issue and I said “okay, lets keep an open mind, let’s make the Tapling Collection copies available for this research purpose. After all, why do we have a National collection—what’s it there for?” That was a very easy decision to make indeed. So after some discussion, Pat came over to London with a number of the Grinnell stamps and on the memorable day of the 3rd of July, 2001 a little group comprising of me, Pat, representing the owners, Dr. Tracey Chapman and Dr. Greg Smith, both of the department of chemistry of University College London, and Dr. Gene Hall who had come over from New Jersey, gathered at the British Library. I think Bob Schoolley-West was there, yes he was, let me put a tick next to that query because this is going to be written up. I must get that right… he’d shoot me.
The first thing we did was meet at my office and we looked at the stamps and it was determined we should have a good look visual inspection under natural daylight and a little bit of me was still doubtful about them I must admit, but as soon as Pat took them out and as soon as I produced the sheets from those in the Tapling Collection it was immediately obvious to me that these were no ordinary forgeries if they were forgeries and if you mixed them up, you’d have trouble telling them apart. On that basis, we then proceeded to the studio where the Raman machine exists. Now, the Raman machine, I’ll explain in very simple terms because that’s the only way I understand it and we’ve got an expert sitting in the audience, is a piece of equipment that is making a great deal of difference in philatelic expertizing. In very simple terms, the Ramen machine is a device that points a laser beam at a stamp. Now, not a laser beam as in James Bond movies but a laser beam that doesn’t destroy anything. And one can point, using a microscope, a laser beam at the crystals in the ink and by the reaction you get in reflected light that comes out on a screen in the form of a spectrum, this has peaks and according to where those peaks are and the combinations of peaks, you can tell what that ink is made of. Now, we did this with the Grinnells and we did this with the Tapling Collection copies and we found that the ink in both cases was made from the same substance, Prussian blue. The paper, in both cases, also contained paper brighteners of ultramarine blue. We also did some tests on some of the postmarks and found similar results. Now, this was particularly significant because it meant that the Grinnells were not made of something that was only invented or discovered or materialized after the period in question.
If the Grinnels had been made of ink that could only have been made in 1880 or 1890 it would have instantly proved them to be forgeries, but it didn’t and we were all very excited by this possibility. Now, one has to be very careful about the interpretation of these results and that’s why I’ve read out who was there because it is not just a technical question but a question of technical and philatelic interpretation. First, we were particularly taken with the paper brighteners question, but subsequent work I’ve done using the Raman machinery has demonstrated that lots of the nineteenth-century papers have such paper brighteners and recent tests with the Mauritius issues of 1858- ’62, the Britannia issues show that they also have paper brighteners. So, one needs to be careful about that. The tests from the University College, London were supervised by Professor Robin Clark who’s a member of the leading scientific organization in Great Britain; he’s a fellow of the Royal Society and he joined us later in the day and certainly asked many testing questions as to our methodology earlier on and of course Gene was there all the time checking on what we were doing too. Now, what’s so important about Gene being there and Robin being there was that it was possible to be sure that our methodology was the same and Gene had done some pioneering work in November 2000 and the results that we got from the Grinnells was absolutely identical so that was particularly significant. So in many ways we’d done the test twice. This was an enormously important and exciting day in the history of the Grinnells.
The discussions then or in subsequent weeks when everyone had gone home had turned to the question of expertization because none of the Grinnells had actually been submitted to a recognized expert committee. It was agreed, after some debate, that they should be submitted to an expert committee. The owners—and I’ve got “owners” in my notes here in bold type—felt that North American expertizers were prejudiced against the Grinnells and felt unable to submit the stamps to them. Most unfortunately this has been backed up by discussions I’ve had with some of those people involved and I think that’s a great shame. This was also very much to my surprise. I think it’s very unfortunate indeed if owners of philatelic material don’t have confidence in expertizing organizations and I make that comment not to be destructive but for constructive purposes. Discussions then, took place as to who should be expertizing them and once again, underlined, the owners, made the decision to submit 55 copies to the expert committee of Royal in London. Now, you might say “why the Royal in London?” Well, one of the reasons I think is because once again nobody has any vested interest, the Royal Expert Committee is neutral, there is no prejudice that I have ever detected there about these issues. As we’ve already established, the expert committee is independent and it has also access to the Raman machinery and its own video-spectral comparator which looks at papers and inks under various types of lights and conditions and can record those data onto a computer. In addition to that, it of course also has access to the twelve copies of the missionary stamps at the British Library and just this week the extra copies—I think there are 10 copies here at the Smithsonian— so 22 copies have been used of the missionaries to compare with the Grinnells. I think that’s a fair portion to compare out of the 198 that exist. I’d also mention that the stamps were submitted with several volumes of supporting material and all this took place in February or early march in 2002. When we were discussing how long this process would take, I advised the owners it would take anywhere between 6 months and two years to complete and already we’re getting near the two years, and well, you don’t hurry important things.
Now I’m going to show you just a few pieces here; this is just to give you some further whetting your appetite. This is a Grinnell item paying the 13 cent rate on the back of an envelope an absolutely fabulous piece I think this is the best piece in the collection. And here is one of the covers here at the Smithsonian, beautiful item. I was looking at this yesterday and looking at the letter inside which is dated. And here are the Smithsonian’s 4 single copies of the four types that there are. Once again, if you look at the 2 cents and the 13 cents they look different to the 5 and the 13 cents of the other type and that’s because the 2 cents and the 13 cents are in fact on backing paper. So one must be very careful to not be distracted by what’s behind a stamp or adjacent to it, or, in fact, the color of the postmark. And lastly, this wonderful cover, the only combination cover that’s here, that’s absolutely unique.
Well now, I’ve mentioned evidence before and the way that it cannot be dealt with in the same terms as a court of law so let’s have a look at this evidence. I’ve divided it into two; there’s of the stamps and of the background circumstances. Now, the first thing to say is that the Grinnells are not the same as the missionaries. They are typographically different. There is no doubt about that at all. These are Grinnells and one of the questions that this poses is why would any forger want to forge damaged stamps? The comparison of rare stamps, historically, has always been a very difficult issue. If your stamps are so rare that they’re all around the world and it’s very rare for them to be in the same place at the same time; how do you expertise one when it comes along singly. Today, four copies of the Post Office Mauritius are thought to be lithographic forgeries, but no one has had them all together to do the research. Eventually it will happen and we’ll compare the ones in London with those that might be submitted to an expert committee or in other places under a controlled test and we’ll find out and it will probably be the Raman and other machinery that will tell us the answer to those questions. So, expertizing has moved on from the magnifying glass days onto more technical days and this is going to resolve many of the outstanding questions.
Now, the other point about the Grinnells is that none of them are repaired in any way, which is entirely consistent with an original find, all of them being forgeries of course. Whenever you see one piece of evidence in this you always find a conflicting piece that takes you back into a neutral territory. Now, the two copies on the outside are from the Tapling Collection and the 2 cents… if you look very carefully, at the top and bottom the frame lines is completely added in. You’ll see a slightly different blue color and if you look at the 5 cents on the right, the top right hand, where the red is, is entirely added on. It’s entirely fake. So many of these stamps seem to have been ripped off covers or someone was trying to remove them from covers and the stamps are incredibly thin and on fragile paper and many many of them are repaired. I think that Cal Hamm, in his excellent paper which is in the booklet says that 60% of them have been repaired and I wouldn’t disagree with that. But none of the Grinnells have, but that’s consistent with them being a find or forgeries. Now, no examination has been made of the 198 missionary stamps nor of the Grinnells and nobody knows whether there are Grinnells amongst the 198 missionary stamps.
Now, you were confused today by what I’ve shown you and that was unfair, it was deliberate but it proves a point. So, I think one of the things that those interested in this subject need to do is to have—and it’ll take many years to do—is to have high quality digital photographs made of both Grinnells and of missionaries so that accurate one to one comparisons of typefaces can be made to prove that they’re either of one group or the other, or to prove that they’re a forgery of a different description, and we’ve already had an example of this today. Now this will take, I don’t know, 50 years to do? Owners are reluctant to part with their stamps, stamps are locked away in bank vaults and so before the real truth comes out could be a long way into the future. I think that’s a study someone ought to agree to do, to arrive at the most important thing, which is the truth.
Now, there’s one very important difference apart from typographically, although it is typographical, is that the types of the stamps—each stamp comes in two types—in one type the ‘P’ of postage is flushed with the edge and in another type it’s indented. Now, this is the page from the Tapling Collection that was written up by the first curator there, Sir Edward Bacon early in the 1890s, and at that time, nobody knew the arrangement of the two types because they come in pairs, one type next to the others. So only having singles, he arbitrarily called one “type one” and the other “type two.” A little later on, this cover was discovered and written about in 1904. This is the only example of a horizontal pair of missionaries and it’s the proving piece that the arrangement of the two types was the reverse of what Sir Edward Bacon originally thought. But the Tapling page was still written up in the old form. The Grinnells are in the earlier version of these two types. So one asks the question, why, if they are forgeries and they may well have been made some time between 1890 and 1904, but that’s if they’re forgeries, who knows. Now, this gentleman Brewster Kenyon has been by some people criticized as being the forger of the Grinnells. If that’s the case, that’s the hypothesis and he published a book in 1895 and I’ve got some photocopies here in which he said of the first issue, “type faced stamps printed on very thin bluish wove paper in horizontal strips of various lengths,” but how could he say that in 1895 if the first pair wasn’t discovered until 1904? That’s some of the principal evidence of the stamps being forgeries or of some other unknown status, who knows. But it is a difficulty, complication of the argument, one that’s typical of the story throughout. You’ll notice I’m very carefully not giving you answers to these questions. Here we have a horizontal pair of the Grinnells where you can see the arrangement of the ‘P’ under the ‘H’ and you see they are reversed.
I now want to turn to the question of postmarks because the Grinnells that have circular red postmarks on them… it is a distinctive type that only appears on the Grinnells and it’s the one on the right of the screen. It only appears there. So you have a distinctively different stamp with a distinctively different postmark and that, of course, in very simple terms— although there’s other evidence—does tend to bid against the stamps. These are not particularly wonderful illustrations, but nonetheless it proves the point that they are very different. If you look at the word ‘Paid’ for example.
Now, turning to the question of the backgrounds. If you accept the original story of the meeting in 1918 of George Grinnell and Charles Shattuck and Grinnell’s acquisition of the 71 stamps, a lot of the subsequent story must be taken at face value and a great deal of very splendid work has been done in proving the circumstances and the facts and that work is the subject of some of the volumes that’s been submitted to the Royal. No doubt that will be publicly available in due course. 1918 of course was a wonderful year for philately there were two major finds, there was the Grinnell find and there was sheet of the inverted Jenny that some very lucky philatelist bought the complete lot.
Amazing, a philatelists dream. Now, George Grinnell was a school teacher and a man who was very much into culture. That’s the house where the two met by the way. But he wasn’t used to dealing with business transactions involving tens of thousands of dollars and when these stamps came along I think this probably showed to some extent because he originally offered a certain number of copies for $100,000 and eventually sold a greater number of copies for only $65,000. So he was working on his own, he probably didn’t use anyone else. When the court case took place subsequently he was probably very poorly advised and he didn’t, for example, bring on any expert witnesses to counteract other expert witnesses that were brought in. In fact, some of the evidence at the trial was contradictory because one particular person, one of the witnesses, said that the stamps were produced photographically and another witness went on to say that there were differences between the two types. Well, there’s a contradiction and why the judge never picked up on that fairly fundamental point, no one will ever know, but if that had been thought about, then the result may have all been different, who knows.
There’s a number of other outstanding questions that come along and I think the next slide is interesting because it shows part of the transcript of the trial where the acquisition of the stamps by George Grinnell was described and the sum of $5 was put on the table. Charles Shattuck didn’t seem to want any money for these he didn’t think that they were of any significance whatever, but $5 certainly passed hands and this is part of the trial transcript which exists in parts still today. It’s a document which is about this thick. One or two issues remain today like, why did George Grinnell tell John Klemann that 43 stamps existed when in fact 71 did? We don’t know the answer to that. Why did Klemann sue Grinnell? Why didn’t Klemann just go back and say “we don’t think they’re any good can we have our money back please.” How did it get to a court case that went on for some time? These are interesting questions that we’ll probably never know the answers to and if someone does know they ought to be writing it up and telling us. $65,000 was a lot of money; why didn’t they just have it back in exchange and avoid a court case that was very painful for everyone.
I have to look at the court case and say “well, how independent were some of the witnesses there.” The person that was actually buying a great deal of the stamps was the wealthy collector Caspary. Now, he had one of the most important collections in the world at the time and of all time and he brought in witnesses who were dealers, which was fine, but how neutral were they? How independent were they? Were they involved in selling stamps to Caspary? They certainly came up with some interesting evidence and I’ve already alluded to two elements of it that were contradictory, so one must ask several questions over that. Why did the Secret Service become involved? Who told them about this because these are not US fiscal objects which would interest them but of the kingdom of Hawaii before Hawaii became part of the United States. These are a pair of the 5 cents that were taken in by the Secret Service and they were marked on the reverse and you can see where the arrow is. The secret serviceman certainly wasn’t a philatelist was he? I mean to put those marks on this; a number of those that exist; in that sort of thing. We certainly know they were genuine Grinnells. In this whole issue I’ve been struck by the extent of feeling in this matter. I’ve never witnessed such passion in any philatelic subject before. Nor have I seen people with such firm opinions expressed without seeing the evidence without ever seeing any of the stamps. You can go some way in expressing opinions but if you don’t actually see the real thing how do you know it’s ever going to work? How do you know what you’re looking at?
Some little while ago, Vince and Carol Arigo, owners of some of the stamps, produced an article, The Grinnell Hawaii Missionary Stamps, Addressing the Critics: The Results of Scientific Research and Discoveries in Prominence and this was published in The Chronicle in 2002. Even in London, I detected there was an outcry by those people who had closed minds. There was a call for peer review, why wasn’t this peer reviewed? And the people concerned seemed to have missed the point that in long running research questions it’s perfectly in order to have one article that takes one view only and then a reverse view elsewhere and in this particular case, an article written by one of the interested parties absolutely without any change or editing was very important evidence indeed to record in the periodicals for research. I got the impression in fact, that those people asking for peer review might have changed the article dramatically and defeated the whole purpose, were not looking for peer review at all, but censorship and this is based on small mindedness and prejudice and I hope that lots of people are going to learn some lessons by that point. I make it only to be constructive. There have been times also when I’ve felt that some people have understood that the stamps are on trial not anyone else. Now in bringing this to a conclusion, I must tell you how the expert committee are going to report this in due course. They’re going to put a research article onto the website of the Royal Philatelic Society London which will be heralded by an email to the interested parties and to the press so that the results of the deliberations, whatever that is, are immediately available. The article may not be illustrated there but it certainly will then appear for the permanent record in the Royal Journal of The London Philatelist. Now, the expert committee is still looking at evidence and if there are any owners of these stamps that would like to make them available to the expert committee—they’ve seen 22 so far—would you speak to Patrick Pierson or to Wilson and he will make the contacts. Also, a paper based on this lecture will appear in The Collector’s Club Philatelist sometime in the New Year. I’d just like to close, before we get to questions—I’m not off the hook yet—by thanking those people who’ve helped me with this presentation and with information: Jenny Holm, Bob Schoolley-West, Dr. Gene Hall, Professor Robin Clark in London and Wilson. Of course, Alan and his staff, who have been absolutely superb in setting up this memorable occasion for me. If you have any questions I’ll attempt to avoid them—answer them. [Laughter and applause]
Who has the first impossible question? You should come up to the microphone in the center of the room.
Audience Member:
Could you comment on how the Grinnells and missionaries are typographically different?
David Beech:
How long have you got? [laughter] We could be here all night if I attempted to answer that question. I suspect it’s not going to be suitable for today. All I can really say is that they are, and it’s entirely consistent of course and this is the evidence for the stamps in the fact that they are made from moveable type. So, it comes really in two forms; the type moves because moveable type moves. It could be, for example, that various printings have been made, we don’t know that. That’s why the study of all the examples are going to be crucial for actually finally establishing that, because nobody knows in which order those stamps were printed. We know that the last one came around in 1852 but when they started printing the others did they start with the 2 or did they start with the 5 or with the 13? And if they kept the type standing and then they moved the different parts around it was going to move. The ornamentation is part of the detail, but if you look across lots of originals and lots of Grinnells you will see that they all vary in quality of printing and typeface to some extent. So, the final answer to that question is: when the study has been done we’ll really know a lot more about them
Audience Member:
If I understood you correctly, you said the postmarks between Grinnells and missionaries were different. If that’s the case, then how can one reconcile that? Is there any clue in the dates that could explain that difference?
David Beech:
Well, there are 3 types of cancellations on the stamps. There’s manuscript, there are black grids and there’s circular red which we saw a little earlier, lets see if we can go back. Now, the postmark on the right only exists on the Grinnells now the significance of that to an expertizer is to say well, there’s a forgery on a forgery. But there may be other evidence that proves otherwise and some has been written. The important thing about having this here today is that you should go away and read the point that’s been made there. Otherwise, I know this subject will be here all night but, that is essentially it, those are the facts; the interpretation of course is a much more complicated issue.
Audience Member:
You have placed a lot in the Tapling Collection copies as sort of a baseline for a lot of your studies yet the Tapling Collection has the quote “reputation” unquote, of containing many forgeries. I can’t speak for the missionaries, I have no idea, but certainly in some of the Latin American countries of which I am much more familiar with their philately, there are a number of extremely suspicious pieces there. Could you comment on how you can be sure that, Grinnells or missionaries, the copies in the Tapling Collection are the “real McCoy?”
David Beech:
Thank you… [laughter] You can always tease your friends and that certainly proves it. Well, thank you for asking a very good question, I’ll tease you back now. We don’t of course. It’s the same principal as all the rest of it. Before the real studies have been done across all the stamps we don’t actually finally know. But what we do know— and you’re right about certain forgeries in the collection, although it’s not that peppered with forgeries—there’s 2 points: firstly, we know that the collection has actually been in existence and together from a particular time. In a previous write up, in Thomas Tapling’s time, he in fact exhibited this page and we have photograph of it in the 1890 Philatelic Exhibition in London and it was Sir Edward Bacon the first curator that wrote this up a little later in his handwriting in 1893 I expect. The beauty about collections which have remained intact is the very reverse of the point you made and that is of course that if you had a collection that’s been there since 1891 you know you haven’t got the 1905 forgeries. So the argument works both ways. All I can say is that two weeks ago we celebrated the centenary of the Tapling Collection being on exhibition at the British Library and the British Museum before and no one has ever come along and said any of them are forgeries. That’s not a complete answer but I suspect it’s like all of the copies, and we could say that about any of the copies for that matter, until someone has actually undertaken all the research… how do we actually know. So really it comes back to the point about stamps that are very very rare, what are the opportunities for comparing them? And it’s why Patrick Pierson has come across from London to look at the copies here at the Smithsonian and also is appealing to anyone else who has copies, to make them available to the expertizing exercise. I think they’d quite like to see 50 copies, a quarter of the missionaries— that would be good if it could be done.
Some group or other really ought to start that research project.
Audience Member:
I hate to admit that I was a little late so you may have discussed this already. Are there any plans to chemically analyze the inks and the paper on a known original as compared to the Grinnells?
David Beech:
That has been done using the Raman technology and the answer was that the inks and the postmark inks and the paper brighteners were all made of the same substance.
What that demonstrates is that none of the inks from the Grinnells were made at a later date, so they’re contemporary materials. It doesn’t make them genuine necessarily but it means that one could reject them instantly if the materials they were made of were made much much later.
Fred here comes the real question.
Audience Member:
I deeply appreciate your remarks. Thank you for tricking me. You didn’t have a category, “neither of the above.”
David Beech:
That was your trap. In philately you have to watch out for traps everywhere.
Audience Member:
Given that the type is not like any genuine stamp, and given that there were six presses in Hawaii at the time and Honolulu was a relatively small town and these presses all produced product that can be compared. What has been done to identify which press, and whether there was any typeface of that kind that’s seen on the Grinnell in Hawaii in 1851?
David Beech:
Well that’s a question for the expert committee. No, I’m not going to duck that, it is their question. I know Fred that you’ve issued a challenge for someone to come up with the same typeface as on the Grinnells. Possibly one of the problems is that the Grinnells have not been widely illustrated. That’s a factor. I’m not quite sure what you can do at this late date to take that further forward. Perhaps you’ve got an answer for us?
Audience Member:
I’ve looked.
David Beech:
And you’ve found no evidence?
Audience Member:
I’ve found nothing.
David Beech:
That’s part of the evidence.
Audience Member:
According to what I’ve read on the Internet, Prussian blue ink was made by deception. Was there any hearking back to that original deception to determine who might have done that?
David Beech:
I’m not quite sure I understand the question. You mean, if they’re forgeries, who was the forger?
Audience Member:
Well, the man who made Prussian blue went to the dye maker to make a red ink and the dye maker deceived him, he was a soap maker actually and he made a blue ink which was Prussian blue instead. So, someone may have been doing the ‘call and response’ in that regard to hark back to that original deception.
David Beech:
Well that’s possible but we know when the stamps were found in 1918. The tests that we’ve done recently were not available at that time so I don’t think that would apply at all because the modern tests would tell you exactly what they’re made of.
Audience Member:
As I understand it, all the ones that are accepted as missionaries share the same type and same appearance as the Honolulu CDS. And all the Grinnells are of different type and a different Honolulu CDS where it has that CDS. It is an interesting point that should be pursued I’m sure to try to explain satisfactorily why you don’t have cross fertilization between the two large bodies of stamps. Why all of those in the Grinnells find should be sequestered, so to speak, and not found, and not a one of the ones with those characteristics should make it into the body of what are known as the missionaries.
David Beech:
You’ve hit the nail on the head and I would say that was one of the key pieces of evidence or arguments in this question. How do you explain it? One of them is that they are forgeries. Another is well, perhaps it’s that they aren’t I don’t know. I know that Vince and Carol have written on that, I can’t remember exactly what their argument to that was but certainly all these arguments and the point that they’ve made about this has been submitted to the expert committee so this is being taken into account there is an answer to that for the owners of the stamps.
Audience Member:
Well it’s not a question; it’s just a follow up on the last item. It was the question of the provenance it was the question of the son working in the type shop, taking off to the other island, the possibility that he served as the postmaster there. That argument and that provenance, that history, is in the brochure and I would invite people to read it there. But I didn’t feel that they should go home feeling there was no answer.
David Beech:
No indeed and I would thank you for that. I think the answer is that, one can only, as I said in the beginning, cover certain aspects of this and that this gives you more information, more background because if we get into detail we’ll be here for a week I can tell you, I’ve been involved in these discussions. It’s very very difficult to discuss questions of detail of typography here without drawing facilities and everyone being fully on the ball and understanding everything what’s going on so it’s not really possible to discuss in this format those sorts of issues but it’s written down in the book that’s why it’s been structured in this sort of way.
Any more questions? Yes two more coming up.
Audience Member:
Not so much a question but a point of information. There’s a wonderful exhibit just a few blocks away from here at the Folger Shakespeare library on fakes, forgeries and facsimiles in another realm that might be of interest.
David Beech:
Something else to do in town? Thank you for that.
Audience Member:
You mentioned today that you’re you’re seeking collectors who own missionaries and Grinnells to submit them to you. Has that request been publicized prior to now and is today the first time you’ve had access to the Smithsonian stamps as well? I’m wondering if you intend to publicize the call for missionaries in the philatelic press or if that’s already been done.
David Beech:
Patrick Pierson who is the chairman of the expert committee has examined the missionaries here for the first time this week, yesterday in fact and the call has been made by me firstly today. And we’ll have to think about how we might do that further afield. Does anyone here actually own any missionaries? [One audience member raises hand] One, where is it?
Audience Member:
At home…
David Beech:
Why didn’t you bring it? [laughs]
Audience Member:
You didn’t tell me to bring it! [laughter]
David Beech:
Well this came up from a conversation earlier in the week where the importance of seeing the maximum number of copies was going to be very very useful indeed. We’ll have to think about… or the experts will have to think—I’m not involved but I’m sure Patrick is keenly listening in the back there and will have to consider how that might be done.
Audience Member:
Well good luck to you. It does seem like it ought to be publicized more widely and does seem like a great idea because perhaps you’ll find more typographical twins to the Grinnells.
David Beech:
Or more Grinnells, or more just forgeries, who knows.
Audience Member:
Thank you
David Beech:
Thank you. Ok one more question and the gentleman in the green shirt has it.
Audience Member:
You referenced the existence of prejudice on the part of North American expertizing services and I was wondering if you would have any views on whether that’s a systemic problem or whether it’s particular to this question of the Grinnells and if you have any recommendations as to how the expertizing services can be improved or what organized philately in North America can do to avoid prejudice in the expertizers.
David Beech:
Well that’s a very good question. I’ve only detected any prejudice in any expertizing
,that’s a general prejudice, on this particular issue. One can detect prejudice where someone is the owner of the stamps of course or someone has a vested interest, perhaps an auctioneer or a dealer or whatever. I think the best way of dealing with independence is to set up organizations independently and I don’t make the remark against anyone in particular but dealer involvement can be a good and a bad thing and it’s often difficult to know where the vested interest lies. It’s also very difficult for anyone, any business expertizing for colleagues there must be problems involved in that. The Royal of course is entirely composed of amateurs so it’s a relatively straightforward thing for us and it’s very easy also to say it. Prejudice, how can you expel prejudice in anything? All you can do is your best. I think the thing you can do is approach any question with an open mind. It’s up to each individual to understand that that’s how you approach expertizing questions. If you’ve had a history or you’ve been exposed to something, you have an entrenched view; to change that view takes a lot to move it. I think that’s one of the reasons why the two owning families came to the Royal in London, away from possible prejudice perhaps or where there is prejudice and away from those who’ve been involved, to get a fresh look. But it’s a very difficult thing it’s the same as anything where you’re judging anything as you get it perfect. There’s no such thing as the perfect world. Thank you very much.
