A Very Common Stamp From Hungary With a Great Story

...but it's even better from the back!

In 1943, Hungary issued a series of stamps featuring historical heroes. The 4f value features Janos Hunyadi, a general and Governor of Hungary in the 15th Century.

After the end of World War II in 1945, the stamps were overprinted with new values. The 4f (forint) value was overprinted three times, with this stamp being the third overprint, 10f on 4f in carmine, SG800 Scott 657. Numerous overprint errors exist on this provisional issue, and it's a minimum value stamp in all catalogues.

In 1946, the Hungarian currency, the Pengo, collapsed, and Hungary went through a period of hyper-inflation. 

Reminiscent of Germany in the early 1920's, stamps with a face value of 500,000 billion pengos were issued during 1946, before the currency reform later in the year. Prior to the issue of the high face-value stamps, remaining stocks of low face value definitives were overprinted with a code, with the stamp being sold at the relevant rate for that code on a given day. The modern equivalent would be the "Forever" stamps.

In this case, our stamp was overprinted with "TI. 2.", which was an abbreviation for "Tavolsagi level", or "Inland letter", thus becoming SG890, Scott 811. I'm assuming that the "2" represented a different rate, but would appreciate feedback on this.

So there we have a stamp overprinted twice, telling the story of the collapse of an economy after a long and bitter war. The story should end there. That is, until you turn the stamp over.

Trans-Atlantic Mail in the Age of Steam

The SS Bremen

The SS Bremen,  a German ocean liner launched in August 1928, undertook her maiden voyage from Bremerhaven to New York on July 16 1929. She was of 51,656 tons and 286.1 metres in length, and carried over 2,100 passengers and 966 crew. 

She arrived in New York in 4 days, 17 hours, 42 minutes, taking the west-bound Blue Riband speed record from the “Mauretania”. On her return voyage, she took the east-bound Blue Riband in 4 days, 14 hours, 13 minutes. She was the only ocean liner to achieve two speed records on her first two voyages. She completed 190 transatlantic voyages, and was the first ocean liner of her size to traverse the Panama Canal. 

A variety of postmarks are known, but manuscript and stamped cachets were applied for mail posted outside Germany. A Catapult Mail service, using a Heinkel He 12 seaplane mounted between the funnels (the catapult is just visible in the photo above), was in use from 1929 to 1936, when the speed of the Zeppelin “Hindenburg” made the service redundant. Catapult covers don't form part of my collection, as they are quite gaudy and usually covered in an abundance of cachets (reminiscent of the Tonga "Tin Can" covers).  An excellent site on the catapult process and catapult mail can be found here 

My preference lies with non-philatelic trans-atlantic mail.

Postal History - A 1943 Cover Tells It's Story

The Reason That I Love Postal History

The term "Postal History" was coined by the great Robson Lowe:

"Postal history is the study of postal systems and how they operate and, or, the study of postage stamps and covers and associated material illustrating historical episodes of postal systems"

That's quite a mouthful, that can be abbreviated to "what can this cover tell me?"

There is a belief that Postal History relates to very old material. I'd like to show that a relatively common cover from WWII can tell a fascinating story of it's travels and it's times

This is the cover.