Month: January 2025

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Netherlands 1980, reminding new Queen Beatrix that some Queens face challenges

Churchill described Queen Wilhelmina as the only “real man” among the many governments in exile in London. Perhaps because it wasn’t her first war. Quite a lesson for granddaughter and new Queen Beatrix. Things looked bright for Beatrix’s Reign, but one can never be sure. 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 stamp was issued on the fortieth anniversary of the Netherlands being conquered by Germany. Given that there was a new Queen that year the presentation comes across as a plea that the new Queen be more serious in the mold of Wilhelmina and less of the flightiness and corruption of recently abdicated Queen Julianna. See https://the-philatelist.com/2018/08/30/netherlands-1971-prince-bernhard-is-honored-for-his-part-in-dutch-aviation-before-his-reputation-tarnishes/    .

Todays stamp is issue A198, a 60 cent stamp issued by the Netherlands on September 23rd, 1980. There was one other stamp in the issue that featured Churchill and the British flag in thanks for hosting the government in exile. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.

There were 3 Queens in a row that served between 1890 and 2013.The Dutch House of Orange did have rules favoring male heirs but if their are no male offspring…. Wilhelmina assumed the throne after the death of her elderly father. He had 4 sons by his first wife but they had all died. The King remarried in old age in hope of a new heir but the only issue was Wilhelmina who in her early years had her mother serve as regent. Wilhelmina faced many wars that challenged her deeply. The first was the Boer war that saw Boer settlers of Dutch heritage fighting a losing battle with the British in South Africa. She risked war with the British when she ordered Dutch naval ships to South Africa to evacuate leaders of the Orange Free State. This gave her a loathing of the British.

Germany was threatening as World War I approached. Kaiser Wilhelm threatened her by pointing out that his bodyguards were 7 feet tall while hers were a foot shorter. She responded “That is true your Majesty, but if we release the dykes the water will be 10 feet deep.” Holland was not attacked in the war but faced the same blockaide as the Germans as they were perceived as allies of them. Kaiser Wilhelm was welcomed in Holland when he was exiled from defeated Germany. The fall of the Czar in Russia also left her personal fortune much diminished. She had been the first female billionaire. She was also facing a strong communist labor movement  at home that sought to remove her. The relative prosperity of the country at the time saved the Dutch Monarchy.

The Queen pulled an about face when Germany attacked in 1940. The government boarded British ships and was evacuated to London. The Prime Minister sought accommodation with the German invadors but Wilhelmina was now adamant about the Allied cause and had him removed from the government in exile. She became a symbol of resistance. Her home in Britain was even heavily damaged by a late in the war mini Blitz by Germany on Britain in early 1944. She returned after the war but by this point she was elderly herself. She began the tradition of abdicating to allow the next generation a long rule. That tradition continued through Beatrix abdicating in 2013 in favor of her son.

Beatrix reign was for less eventful than Wilhelmina. The power that she had was gradually disapated. She also avoided controversy by making it against the rules to quote her directly. Her son abandoned this but it seems a sensible precaution if someone is adept at putting their foot in their mouth.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the Royal House of Orange. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.

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North Vietnam 1962, we have hitched our boat to someone going places

North Vietnam’s best argument during the then upcoming Vietnam war was that the conflict should be settled amongst the Vietnamese without outside influence. If you examine their stamps of the period, it was no secret that North Vietnam was a satellite of the Soviet Union. Bet the Soviets were glad they didn’t send troops. 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.

There was a worldwide excitement to the early space race somewhat akin to a dangerous sport. You had records falling and stories of careful training of individuals that are obviously among a countries best. With the USA and the USSR involved, there were even teams to rout for.

Todays stamp is issue A97, a 30 Xu stamp issued by the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Vietnam in December 28th. 1962. It was a three stamp issue in various denominations that honor the simultaneous flight of Soviet spacecraft Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 in August 1962. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 40 cents used. The issue also exists in imperforate form, which raises the value 10 fold.

The Soviets were hard at work on the problems of putting men in space which of course had not been done before. One unknown issue was how the human body would react to extended time in weightlessness. To find out the Vostok 3 and 4 missions were scheduled. It would be the first time that two spacecraft would be in orbit at the same time. The idea was that the two ships would orbit together with their Cosmonauts life signs carefully monitored to see if there was any variation as to how the bodies coped. The missions were scheduled to last 4 days. The two spacecraft would also be able to communicate with each other by radio, a first.

The missions were successful with both Cosmonauts surviving well. The were a few hiccups. Vostok 4’s life support system malfunctioned sending the temperature in the capsule dropping precipitously. The radio contact with Vostok 4 was garbled with ground control misunderstanding Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich as giving the code word to get me home now. Thus his mission ended early.

Cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev, callsign Falcon, flew on Vostok 3 and later again on Soyuz 9. When he died in 2004 the breakup and disunity of modern Russia intruded. Nikolayev was a Chuvash, an ethnic group of Turks that live near the Volga river. Nikolayev’s daughter, a prominent Moscow Doctor, wanted her father buried in a heroes cemetery in Moscow. This was not allowed as the local Chuvash leader required that he be buried in his hometown where he no longer had family. Well he did die there, so it must have meant something to him.

Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, callsign Golden Eagle, flew on Vostok 4 and later again on Soyuz 14. He stayed on in the Soviet Air Force until 1993 rising to be a Major General. Popovitch was Ukrainian but the breaking apart did not effect him as directly. He was from the Crimea so ethnically Russian. He died in 2009.

Both of todays Cosmonauts had prominent wives. Nikolayev’s wife was Velentina Tereshkova, the first and youngest female to go to space.  Popovich’s wife was Marina Popovich, test pilot and the first Soviet woman to break the sound barrier, which she did in 1964. She was known affectionately as Madame Mig. She got some notoriety late in her life by writing a book called UFO Glasnost claiming the Soviet Air Force had many interactions with UFOs and that the KGB guarded 5 UFO crash sites. Both marriages ended in divorce.

Well my drink is empty and I will join with our now North Vietnamese friends in toasting the Soviet Cosmonauts. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.

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Germany 1993, in the end, all of Germany decides to remember Herbert Frahm as Willy Brandt Statesman

The center right in Germany really had it in for the politician with the alias Willi Brandt. After all there was the exile, the fighting for Norway against Germans, the abandonment of all the lost land, the loose living, the strange payments coming from both the CIA and the Stasi. How could you choose him to be the leader of West Germany? Well he had JFK and the 68ers on his side. They reveled in his differences, after all they were themselves different, and they were the future. 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.

The year before this stamp, as part of the same series of stamps on deceased German statesman, Germany did a stamp honoring political rival Konrad Adenauer, Brandt was portrayed as a younger man with intelligent eyes. Adenauer is cast as old, dark, and bitter. This gets into the generational shift. Brandt was himself too old to be a 68er but like JFK had a youthfulness they could identify with. When the 1960s political rivals are then remembered in the 1990s, Adenauer naturally gets the short end, His people and manner are just gone.

Todays stamp is issue A803, a 1 DM stamp issued by Germany on November 10th 1993. It was a single stamp for Brandt, but there were many similar stamps for dead German statesman. No not East Germans, but they had many stamps in their time and place. Interestingly most of their guys resembled Adenauer more than Brandt. The uprisings of the late 60s arose from the left. However the decrepit old left leadership in the East were not the type to harness it. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 90 cents used.

Herbert Frahm was born in Lubeck to a single mother, a store cashier in 1913. He was raised by  his step grandparents. That does sound modern. From a young age he was an SPD party activist while working for a ships broker. With the Nazis coming into power, SPD activists were no longer welcome and Frahm invented the name Willi Brandt and went into exile in Norway. He worked as a journalist in Norway and kept contact with fellow SPD activists in Germany by posing as a Norwegian student under another alias and visiting. The Nazis in 1938 purged the roles of German citizens who left due to them including Frahm. Frahm then applied and received Norwegian citizenship under the Willy Brandt alias. He volunteered for service in the Norwegian army when Germany invaded and was captured and briefly a POW. Upon release he moved to neutral Sweden, At wars end he quickly went to Berlin employed as a Norwegian diplomat. Back in Germany, he rejoined the reformed SPD under the Willy Brandt name under which he reapplied and received German citizenship. He wrote for an SPD newspaper and quickly rose in politics. The occupying powers approved of him since he lacked Nazi connections. In 1950, the CIA paid him secretly 170,000DM which is now about 400,000 Euros.

He rose to be mayor of West Berlin and the head of the SPD party. When JFK became American President in 1961 he openly supported Brandt over aging long time Chancellor Adenauer. Brandt lost the election in 1961 but got a great deal of positive world publicity during the construction of the Berlin wall by the East in the early 1960s. As the administration of West Berlin was separate from West Germany, he changed his affiliation to a safe SPD seat in Rhineland to get into the Bundestag.

The SPD and Brandt finally had their day in 1969 with the first SPD government since 1930. Social spending increased while military draft terms shrank as one would expect of a left government. What was new was Ostpolitik, that sought closer relations with the East. A peace treaty was signed with Poland and the East German government was better recognized, To achieve this, Brandt gave up German claims to land that had been taken at the end of the war. This especially angered Germans who had been forced to move west from the end of war ethnic cleansing. In 1972, several members of his coalition thought he had gone too far on this and called a vote of no confidence. Most thought Brandt would lose but he won by three votes. It turned out the East German Stasi had paid a few Christian Democrats to vote for Brandt.

Speaking of Stasi there was a close aid of Brandt that turned out to be one. Gunter Guilliaume had crossed from East Germany in 1956 but was a Stasi plant. When this was discovered, Brandt resigned under pressure from more conservative factions of his own party. The Stasi came to realize what a blunder it was as Brandt was their friend. He remained in the Bundestag, and was a thorn in the side of the next SPD German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

My drink is empty. Come again soon when there will be another story to be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.

 

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Sri lanka 1972, UNESCO would prefer if you would read more-guess less

Sounds like an instruction to me on how to make these articles better. But no, The United Nations  had figured out that book output was not keeping up in newly independent areas. In fact in terms of percentages it was going down. Thus we have slogans and conferences to embarrass them about it. 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 stamp is from Sri lanka, newly renamed from Ceylon that year, shows the logo of the UNESCO International Book Year 1972. The budget for the book year was only $100,000. What was left after the professionally done slogans and logos? Well there was a conference in Paris, where plenty of people already read and wrote books.

Todays stamp is issue A163, a 20 cent stamp issued by Sri lanka on September 8h 1972. It was a single stamp issue that came out on World Literacy Day. So you know, two birds one stamp. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 50 cents used.

UNESCO was formed in Paris under the auspices of the United Nations in 1946 to increase international collaboration in areas like education to promote universal respect for justice and human rights. Even that sounds like a good excuse to have many action packed expense account conferances. I nominate Johnny Dollar to represent the USA at the next one. UNESCO was a successor to a similar program of the League of Nations. If it doesn’t work the first time, try, try again.

Lets look at the world circa 1970 when the idea of a book year in 1972 was cemented. 70 % of the worlds population lived in parts of the world that only produced 19% of the worlds books. This had not improved with the decline in colonialism. In fact it had gotten worse down from 24% of the worlds books 20 years before. The problem was most acute in Africa where 10% of the worlds population  produced only 1.5% of the worlds books. Most of the newly independent African nations had created zero books. Imput from publishers and bookselling organizations was that it was never cheaper to produce and distribute a book. Naturally UNESCO lept into action, or rather scheduled conferences.

Regional conferences were held in Tokyo for Asia in 1966. In Accra, Ghana for Africa in 1968. In Bogotá for Latin America in 1969. In Cairo for Arab states in 1972. Then the conferences moved to where UNESCO was more comfortable, the big cities of Europe. A “Books on Books” fair was put together as part of the prescheduled book fair in Frankfurt, Germany. This display then hit the road to Paris and then around the world for the next two years. Some of the stunts revolving around the book year was printing the logo on textbooks made in Mexico that year that the government was paying for anyway. There was a manuscript contest for would be publishers in Rwanda and a “book flood” in Fiji that saw one classroom of 35 school children receive 500 books. Gee we have a logo, and slogans, now how about some photo opportunities.

Well my drink is empty and I am afraid I will not be pouring another to toast UNESCO. If you are not going to solve a problem, you shouldn’t expect people to pay you to rub their nose in it. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.