Saint Vincent, with notes and publishers' prices

by Francis John Hamilton Scott Napier; Sir Edward Denny Bacon

Section I.

This section of the Reference List comprises all issues printed and perforated by Messrs. Perkins, Bacon & Co., London; that is, from the first issue of 1861 until the end of 1881, when the last stamps printed by this firm made their appearance. For about half this time unwatermarked paper was used, and afterwards each stamp was watermarked with a star. We shall consider these two papers, as well as their minor varieties, in later notes, but we must here give a detailed description of the perforations, three simple and one compound, found in the stamps included in Section I. During all this time only two perforating machines were employed, except in 1862, when for one particular stamp, namely, the yellow-green Six Pence, another machine was used. With this exception all the stamps printed by Messrs. Perkins, Bacon & Co. were perforated by one or the other of the two first-mentioned machines, and it is of these two that we now propose to treat, leaving the description of the perforation of the 1862 Six Pence to the note on Issue 2, as it is altogether an exceptional stamp, and need not be taken into account just at present.

The two machines we have now to consider were both single-line, or guillotine ones; that is, they made but one line of perforation at a single stroke. These two machines, as well as the perforations made by them, we have elected to call “A” and “B,” so that in the Reference List the perforations of the stamps are called “A” or “B,” or “B × A,” instead of being, as is usual in philatelic writings, labelled with a number denoting the number of holes found in a space of 2 centimetres. Further on we shall endeavour to make plain and justify our reasons for so doing.

The method now in use for describing the perforations of stamps succeeded a previous clumsy and inaccurate system of counting the actual number of notches along the top or bottom of a stamp, as well as those down one side, so that the perforation of each stamp was denoted by two numbers. These numbers depended as much on the size of the stamp as on the spacing of the holes, and we suppose the system proved to be unworkable, as we do not think it was ever adopted in a catalogue, although it was certainly the first manner in which philatelic writers ever specified differences of perforation. It was soon abandoned for the well-known method in general use at the present day.

This latter system, invented by Dr. Legrand, was evidently intended by its original contriver to apply to lines of perforation of which the holes were so regularly spaced that all intervals of 2 centimetres in the same line contained the same number of holes, all these holes being exactly the same distance apart. Irregularity in the spacing of the holes does not seem to have been contemplated, but, as the vast majority of machines make holes spaced at regular intervals, this system of taking a gauge of 2 centimetres, applying it to a line of perforations, and counting the holes contained in that space in order to get a number by which that particular perforation may always be identified, works admirably in practice in by far the greater number of cases. St. Vincent is one of those cases in which it entirely fails to satisfy our requirements (that is, in as far as the stamps of Section I. are concerned), and its misuse has led to the recording of such a bewildering number of different perforations, simple and compound, that no one has ever yet been bold enough to give a properly arranged list of them, or to attempt to explain how so many varieties arose. A description of the two perforations will explain all this.

That made by the A machine is well known in many other British Colonies—Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Ceylon, Grenada, Natal, Queensland, St. Helena, Trinidad, Turks Islands, Western Australia—that is, in most of the Colonies whose stamps were printed from plates prepared by Messrs. Perkins, Bacon & Co., and is one of the best known perforations in the world of Philately. Although its eccentricities are trifling compared with those of its fellow, the B machine, since it was in use in St. Vincent before that one, we take the description of its perforation first.

The gauge in 2 centimetres varies from 14 to 15, this variation arising from a slight, but frequent, irregularity in the spacing of the pins or plungers of the machine. It may be possible by moving a gauge backwards and forwards along a line of perforations to hit off a space of 2 centimetres containing rather more than 15 or fewer than 14 holes, but we have not been able to do so ourselves. With the best of goodwill the limits we have attained are 14 in one direction and 15 in the other, and we rather suspect that the frequent records seen of a gauge of 15½, and sometimes even of 16, in St. Vincent, have all been obtained from the Six Pence of 1862, as that is the perforation with which this stamp (for which the A machine was never used) is most frequently found. The difference of gauge between 14 and 15 can often be found by moving a perforation-gauge a few holes only to the right or left, so it is evident that we can get both extremes on one single side of one particular stamp, and also haply all the measurements which lie between these limits. The variation between 14 and 15 is of course very slight, and since intermediate gauges are those generally found, had we in St. Vincent to deal only with the A machine, we might, with no great degree of inaccuracy, and for the sake of general simplicity, call the perforation of the A machine “14½,” or “14 to 15”; but since it was used so much in conjunction with a far more irregular machine—that is, the one we have called “B”—it is better to treat them both in the same manner, and call the first one “A,” rather than label it with a gauge which, strictly speaking, does not belong to it.

This perforation A, either alone or compounded with B, was in use from the first issue of stamps in 1861 until 1878; after that the B machine was used exclusively up to 1882, when Messrs. Perkins, Bacon & Co. ceased to supply stamps to the Colony.