A nabob is a word that comes to English from Hindi. In the English language it came to mean a fellow who returns after making a great fortune in India. When nabob John Cracroft Wilson arrived in New Zealand, he was perhaps not the fellow you would have expected to bring with him that rural England staple, a flock of sheep. You might not also expect New Zealand to take to the raising of sheep in a bigger way than even England. Even today with a diverse urban society, New Zealand hosts ten sheep for every human. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This view of a sheep herd is an attempt by the stamp designer to evoke spring. There were four stamps in the issue, one for each season. This is the lone season that implies work. Not sure what to make of that.
Todays stamp is issue A275, a 70 cent stamp issued by New Zealand on June 2nd, 1982. It was a four stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 85 cents whether used or unused.
Sheep raising was not practiced by the Maori prior to the arrival of Europeans. The islands, especially the south island, are quite suited to it with ample grassland and well distributed rainfall over the seasons. John Cracroft Wilson was stationed in India during the time of the East India Company. He was tasked there with hunting down groups of native thugs that were preying on British in residence there. Thugery is another word that came to the English language from Hindi. He was quite successful at it but when faced with a patch of ill health he decided to find a more temperate climate and chose New Zealand.
Seeking a calmer rural life, he stopped in Australia and acquired a flock of sheep. One can imagine how treacherous it must have been to move a flock of sheep by sea in the time of sailing ships. Indeed the journey was quite hard on the flock with over 1200 of them having to be put overboard. He founded an estate near Christchurch that he named Cashmere. The name was to be evocative of the Indian region of Kashmir.
Just as Mr. Cracroft Wilson was getting established in New Zealand he was called back to India at the time of the Sepoy rebellion. His success in this period against thuggery was so that he was said by the Viceroy Lord Canning to have saved more Christian lives than any man in India. Mr. Cracroft Wilson was awarded by Queen Victoria the rank of Knight Commander in the newly established Order of the Star of India. Soon however he was back in New Zealand to tend his growing sheep flock. The growing flock required him to lease three additional sheep runs.
At the time New Zealand was short of accomplished men so Mr. Cracroft Wllson was pressed into a variety of roles. He was head of the Jockey Club, the Acclimation Society, a military cavalry reserve unit, the Governor of Canterbury College. He also served in the New Zealand Parliament where he was quite the nattering nabob in debate. Dealings with the Maori were a hot topic and Cracroft Wilson proposed importing a unit of Gurkhas from India to make short work of them. The suggestion was not taken up.
The sheep industry got a big boost in 1882 when it became possible to export the meat frozen and not just the wool. At the peak the flock of sheep in New Zealand was 70 million. With land becoming more valuable, it is no longer possible to allocate so much land to the sheep. The flock is down now to 39 million, but that is still 10 for every human being and ten percent larger than the sheep flock of the UK. The decline of market price for wool meant that by the 1980s, dairy farming became the bigger industry.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another toast the Hindi language. I had no idea there were so many contributions to ours. Come again soon when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.