[159] Dr Birkbeck Hill, on one occasion, told me that in the article on my father which he was asked to write for the D.N.B. he said of the adhesive stamp that its invention had been “wrongfully attributed to Mr James Chalmers”—words which nowhere appear in the article as it now stands. “The proprietors of the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,'” wrote my brother in “The Origin of Postage Stamps,” pp. 14, 15 (note), “did not avail themselves of the offer I had made to place them in communication with those from whom official information could be best obtained—indeed, they appear to have made no application to the Post Office for information of any kind.... Meanwhile, as it afterwards turned out, they were abundantly supplied with Mr P. Chalmers' ex parte, and, to say the least, singularly inaccurate statements. With the editor of the 'Dictionary of National Biography' I had no communication whatever.” Is it after this careless fashion that much of our “island story” is compiled? If so, what wonder that long before the present day wise men should have declared that all history needed to be rewritten?
[160] One of these claimants was a man connected with a well-known national museum; and his pretensions were to us a never-failing source of amusement. He was distinguished for two peculiarities: one being a passion for slaughtering the reputations of his friends; the other, the misappropriation to his own credit of all originality in any reforms or inventions projected by them. So far as I am aware, only one claimant was of my own sex; and she, at least, had the courage of her opinions, for, instead of biding her time till the postal reformer was no more, the poor insane creature wrote direct to him, saying she was the originator of the entire plan, and begging him to use his influence with the Government to obtain for her an adequate pension. The stories connected with some of the other claims are quite as curious as the foregoing.
[161] Inaccuracy of memory applies to other things than invention of postage stamps. Here is a curious instance. “Sir John Kaye, in writing his history of the Sepoy War, said he was often obliged to reject as convincing proof even the overwhelming assertion, 'But I was there.' 'It is hard,' he continues, 'to disbelieve a man of honour when he tells you what he himself did; but every writer long engaged in historical enquiry has had before him instances in which men, even after a brief lapse of time, have confounded in their minds the thought of doing, or the intent to do, a certain thing with the fact of actually having done it. Indeed, in the commonest affairs of daily life we often find the intent mistaken for the act, in retrospect.' Kaye was writing at a period of not more than ten to twelve years after the events which he was narrating. When you extend ten years to twenty or twenty-four, memories grow still more impaired, and the difficulty of ensuring accuracy becomes increasingly greater.” (Thus “The Reformer,” A. and H. B. Bonner, vii. 36, 37.) Most of the claims to invention of the postage stamp seem to have been made considerably more than ten, twelve, twenty, or twenty-four years after its introduction—some of them curiously, or, at any rate, opportunely enough, forty years or so after; that is about the time of Rowland Hill's death, or but little later.
[162] For the adhesive stamp, see “Post Office Reform,” p. 45, and “Ninth Report of the Commissioners of Post Office Inquiry,” p. 38. The impressed stamp is mentioned in “Post Office Reform” at p. 42, and also in that “Ninth Report.” The writer of the “Encyclopædia Britannica's” article (xix. 585), while quoting Rowland Hill's description of the adhesive stamp, adds: “It is quite a fair inference that this alternative had been suggested from without,” but gives no reason for hazarding so entirely baseless an assertion. The article, indeed, bears not a few traces of what looks like personal malice; and it is a pity that the editorial revising pen, whether from indolence or from misunderstanding of the subject on its wielder's part, was suffered to lie idle.
[163] These are the actual words made use of. See “Second Report of the Commissioners of Post Office Inquiry,” Question 11,111.
[164] Thus the Treasury Minute.
[165] “In the end there were selected from the whole number of competitors four whose suggestions appeared to evince most ingenuity,” wrote my father. “The reward that had been offered was divided amongst them in equal shares, each receiving £100” (“Life,” i. 388). Sir Henry Cole gives their names as follows:—“Mr Cheverton, Mr C. Whiting, myself, and, I believe, Messrs Perkins, Bacon & Co. After the labour,” he adds, “of reading the two thousand five” (?six) “hundred proposals sent to the Treasury, 'My Lords' obtained from them no other modes of applying the postage stamp than those suggested by Mr Hill himself—stamped covers or half sheets of paper, stamped envelopes, labels or adhesive stamps, and stamps struck on letter-paper itself.”—(“Fifty Years of Public Life,” i. 62, 65, 66.)
[166] So profoundly did Rowland Hill feel the importance of this fact that he invariably scouted a suggestion occasionally made in the early days of the postal reform that his own head should appear on at least one of the stamps. The some-time postmaster of New Brunswick, who caused his portrait to adorn a colonial stamp now much sought after by philatelists on account, perhaps, of its rarity, for it was speedily abolished, seems to have been of quite a different frame of mind.
[167] This earliest stamp was a far finer and more artistic piece of workmanship than any of its successors; and has only to be compared with the later specimens—say, for example, with King Edward's head on the halfpenny postcards and newspaper bands—to see how sadly we have fallen behind some other nations and our own older methods, at any rate in the art of engraving, or, at least, of engraving as applied to the postage stamp.
[168] In the paper drawn up by Rowland Hill, “On the Collection of Postage by Means of Stamps,” and issued by the Mercantile Committee in June 1839, he had recommended that, for convenience' sake, the stamp should be printed on sheets each containing 240, arranged in twenty rows of twelve apiece; and they are so printed to this day. It has been asserted that at first the sheets were printed in strips of twelve stamps each; but there is no truth in the statement. Archer's perforation patent, which makes separation of the adhesives easy, and is therefore a boon to the many of us who are often in a hurry, was not adopted before the mid-'fifties.