It’s a great privilege to be here this afternoon.
For an Englishman to come to the United States to talk about an American subject is tough,
but a great pleasure.
Wilson’s already alluded to the importance
of philately or any subject in bringing parties together
and that’s essentially what I’ve played a small part in doing on this particularly
controversial issue.
I’d also like to mention one or two people
in the audience— many of which we’ve already
come across in the other introductions, but I would like to ask Dr.
Gene Hall from Rutgers University to stand
because he’s played a very important part
in this event about which you will hear a
bit more later on.
Now, this subject is enormous, I’ve never known a subject more complicated, more controversial
and more fascinating.
So this afternoon I can only touch on some of the issues that are key to the case.
And I’m going to try to express this in simple terms.
I’m not trying to con anyone; I’m not wanting to get into the detail of any particular
matter or subject.
I’d also like to thank the Sundman brothers for producing this splendid booklet and it
allows me not to have to talk about every aspect of the subject because in here there
are four articles that are for and against the Grinnells and it’s a very balanced work.
I would only make one remark about it for those people who are judging the stamps;
the illustrations come from a variety of different sources so you shouldn’t compare a Grinnell
that’s illustrated with a missionary because that’s unfair, because the photographic
processes would have been different.
So, that’s just indicative of what the stamps look like.
Well, by way of introduction I’m only going to say that the first stamps of Hawaii were
issued in 1851 and comprised of 2, 5 and 13 cents values.
They were printed in Honolulu.
Of these, 198 copies are still believed to exist.
In 1918 a further 71 copies were discovered by George Grinnell but were rejected by the
superior court of the state of California as forgeries in November, 1922.
Since I have become involved in this matter, just in 2001, I’ve had countless conversations,
in person, on telephones across the Atlantic that I would measure in hours and emails and
letters that I would measure in inches, if not a foot’s worth by now.
This has been a great privilege and pleasure to be involved in philately’s number one debate.
I’m delighted to have played a small part in bringing all of the parties together for
the first time ever to debate this issue and most of them are here in this room today.
And I hope that those people who have never met
but who’ve been, I won’t say arguing, but debating amongst themselves, are going
to meet and shake hands at the reception afterwards
because meeting people is so important on these occasions.
The Grinnell stamps are amongst the most interesting and complicated and fascinating philatelic
expertizing challenges of all time.
In the words of the advertisement promoting this lecture: romance, drama, suspense, fraud?
There is a question mark after the fraud.
Now, the only thing that matters in this issue is the truth and in order to get to the truth
you have to be open-minded and approach the issues without prejudice.
The British Library and the Royal Philatelic Society London and its expert committee have
no vested interest in this outcome at all.
Nor have I.
We are completely neutral in the debate that’s been going on.
Only the truth matters.
Now, I do not talk for the expert committee of the Royal.
I’m not a member of the expert committee, although I have attended one of their meetings
when I took the Tapling Collection stamps along for comparison with the Grinnells.
Now, because of that I’m free to speak.
Had I been a member of the committee I couldn’t speak because we don’t allow members of
the committee to talk about the patients that they’re seeing.
I should say something about the status of the expert committee; it is the oldest in
the world having been formed in 1894.
But it operates completely independently.
It is in fact operated by a wholly owned subsidiary company RPSL Ltd. and that company has a board
of directors, but the operation of expertizing is not influenced in any way by either the
council or any of its members or any of the directors of RPSL Ltd.
The experts are paramount in their decisions and therefore they are completely independent
and that is I think how all expertizing who are in the first category should certainly  be.
Now, in order to make sense in this lecture we must get the terminology correct.
When I say missionary or missionaries I am referring to the 198 copies that are believed
to be genuine and when I use the term Grinnell or Grinnells I am referring to the 71 copies
found or discovered by George Grinnell in 1918.
I would also repeat my remarks for quality of the visual presentation you are going to see.
Once again the images came from a variety of different sources across a long period of time;
some were slides some were digital images so you shouldn’t look at something
and compare it with another because that would be completely unfair.
Now I suspect most of you have been downstairs looking at the Grinnells and the splendid
copies that are in the National Postal Museum’s collection here.
I want to ask you for a little bit of audience participation.
Will you tell me please, looking at the stamp on the screen, whether this is a missionary
or a Grinnell?
Would you put your hands up please, if you think it is a missionary?
There’s one.
Just one?
Would you like to put your hands up please
if you think it’s a Grinnell?
I see one expertizer there and one well-known expert on Hawaii;
okay...
Now, would you like to put your hands up if you don’t know? [laughter]
Most people here are very wise
[laughs].
Now, the answers to this is that this stamp was lot 32 in the sale of the Honolulu advertiser
collection auctioned in 1995 by Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries Inc. in New York
where it was described as Grinnell reproduction of the 13 cent and realized 1,500 dollars.
It is not a Grinnell and the man that looked at it, in the audience, thought it was a Grinnell
[laughs].
You sure have a photographic memory Fred.
Well, I say this not to embarrass Siegels or Thurston Twigg-Smith who I had the privilege
of meeting in 1980 but to demonstrate to you just the fact that hardly anyone has ever
seen a Grinnell.
Let’s ask you, who’s seen a Grinnell before
today?
Put your hands up if you’ve seen a Grinnell before today.
Just the owning families and the gentleman at the
back whom I don’t recognize, so very very few indeed.
And yet, so many people have given me definitive answers to the question of are these real
missionaries or not.
So there is a great deal of ignorance around and that of course has fueled prejudice one
way or the other.
So we’ve established that some of the people that claim to know don’t.
Sorry, that’s very unfair Fred, teasing you.
The standard of proof in expertizing is another particularly difficult subject because it
cannot be like in a court of law, necessarily.
Sometimes you have to rely on circumstantial evidence or the balance of probabilities.
So, in looking at evidence, if you looked at evidence that would come up to absolute
proof in court of law standards, you’d probably never arrive at any kind of answer, whatever.
So the expertizer’s job, particularly in this case, is very very tough indeed.
The possible outcomes of this are going to be that the expert committee decides that
they are genuine, they are forgery, genuine of unknown status or no opinion/we don’t know.
It could be any of those.
During the course of the last two years I’ve kept all that correspondence and copies of
emails and I now have a pile about like this sitting in the office which in due course
will be available to researchers at the British Library’s discretion because some of it
is a little confidential at the moment.
The expert committee has already had access to anything it wants to see.
I’d also like—despite whatever the outcome might be—to actually salute the owners of
the stamps for determinedly keep going with proving what they have and trying to get to
the truth whatever that is.
There’s enormous prejudice across all of the time since 1918 with people not having
open minds and it works on a several bases, they really hope to prove what it is and we’re
here to help them do that.
And quite frankly, if you owned Grinnells
wouldn’t you want them to be genuine missionaries?
I mean, who wouldn’t?
Put your hands up.
It’s unanimous.
So I salute them for continuing to keep going under what has been quite an onslaught at
times but I’ll come to that a little later on.
Now my involvement in this, I should explain, probably in the 1970’s I undertook a program
of philatelic reading and one of the books that I read was the Meyer Harris book,
Hawaii and its Stamps and Postal History, published in 1948.
And of course, that informed my opinion as to what the Grinnells were which essentially
was that they were forgeries.
My predecessor at the British Library, Bob Schoolley-West, was very fortunate in going
on holiday to California where he met a friend of his and the subject of philately naturally
came up and when philately came up, it became apparent that the friend had a friend who
is called Pat Kalhane and it wasn’t long before the two met.
Pat was able to tell Bob all that’s been going on in the more recent years in looking
at the evidence, particularly in Hawaii.
Bob returned to London and it wasn’t long before he came to see me and told me about the Grinnells
and I must admit that my first reaction was based on my own prejudice of course
and I remember saying it so very clearly, “but they’re forgeries aren’t they?”
Bob told me more about the issue and I said “okay, lets keep an open mind,
let’s make the Tapling Collection copies available for this research purpose.
After all, why do we have a National collection—what’s it there for?”
That was a very easy decision to make indeed.
So after some discussion, Pat came over to London with a number of the Grinnell stamps
and on the memorable day of the 3rd of July, 2001 a little group comprising of me, Pat,
representing the owners, Dr. Tracey Chapman and Dr. Greg Smith, both of the department
of chemistry of University College London,
and Dr. Gene Hall who had come over from
New Jersey, gathered at the British Library.
I think Bob Schoolley-West was there, yes he was, let me put a tick next
to that query because this is going to be written up.
I must get that right… he’d shoot me.
The first thing we did was meet at my office and we looked at the stamps and it was determined
we should have a good look visual inspection under natural daylight and a little bit of
me was still doubtful about them I must admit, but as soon as Pat took them out and as soon
as I produced the sheets from those in the Tapling Collection it was immediately obvious
to me that these were no ordinary forgeries if they were forgeries and if you mixed them up,
you’d have trouble telling them apart.
On that basis, we then proceeded to the studio where the Raman machine exists.
Now, the Raman machine, I’ll explain in very simple terms because that’s the only
way I understand it and we’ve got an expert sitting in the audience, is a piece of equipment
that is making a great deal of difference in philatelic expertizing.
In very simple terms, the Ramen machine is a device that points a laser beam at a stamp.
Now, not a laser beam as in James Bond movies but a laser beam that doesn’t destroy anything.
And one can point, using a microscope, a laser beam at the crystals in the ink and by the
reaction you get in reflected light that comes out on a screen in the form of a spectrum,
this has peaks and according to where those peaks are and the combinations of peaks,
you can tell what that ink is made of.
Now, we did this with the Grinnells and we did this with the Tapling Collection copies
and we found that the ink in both cases was made from the same substance, Prussian blue.
The paper, in both cases, also contained paper brighteners of
ultramarine blue.
We also did some tests on some of the postmarks and found similar results.
Now, this was particularly significant because it meant that the Grinnells were not made
of something that was only invented or discovered or materialized after the period in question.
If the Grinnels had been made of ink that could only have been made in 1880 or 1890
it would have instantly proved them to be forgeries, but it didn’t and we were all
very excited by this possibility.
Now, one has to be very careful about the interpretation of these results and that’s
why I’ve read out who was there because it is not just a technical question but a
question of technical and philatelic interpretation.
First, we were particularly taken with the paper brighteners question,
but subsequent work I’ve done using the Raman machinery
has demonstrated that lots of the nineteenth-century
papers have such paper brighteners and recent tests with the Mauritius issues of 1858- ’62,
the Britannia issues show that they also have paper brighteners.
So, one needs to be careful about that.
The tests from the University College, London were supervised by Professor Robin Clark who’s
a member of the leading scientific organization in Great Britain; he’s a fellow of the Royal
Society and he joined us later in the day
and certainly asked many testing questions
as to our methodology earlier on and of course Gene was there all the time checking on what
we were doing too.
Now, what’s so important about Gene being
there and Robin being there was that it was
possible to be sure that our methodology was the same and Gene had done some pioneering
work in November 2000 and the results that we got from the Grinnells was absolutely identical
so that was particularly significant.
So in many ways we’d done the test twice.
This was an enormously important and exciting day in the history of the Grinnells.
The discussions then or in subsequent weeks when everyone had gone home had turned to
the question of expertization because none
of the Grinnells had actually been submitted
to a recognized expert committee.
And, um...
It was agreed, after some debate, that they should be submitted to an expert committee.
The owners—and I’ve got “owners” in my notes here in bold type—felt that
North American expertizers were prejudiced against the Grinnells
and felt unable to submit the stamps to them.
Most unfortunately this has been backed up by discussions I’ve had with some of those
people involved and I think that’s a great shame.
This was also very much to my surprise.
I think it’s very unfortunate indeed if owners of philatelic material don’t have
confidence in expertizing organizations and I make that comment not to be destructive
but for constructive purposes.
Discussions then, took place as to who should be expertizing them and once again, underlined,
the owners, made the decision to submit 55 copies to the expert committee of Royal in  London.
Now, you might say “why the Royal in London?”
Well, one of the reasons I think is because once again nobody has any vested interest,
the Royal Expert Committee is neutral, there is no prejudice
that I have ever detected there about these issues.
As we’ve already established, the expert
committee is independent and it has also access
to the Raman machinery and its own video-spectral comparator which looks at papers and inks
under various types of lights and conditions and can record those data onto a computer.
In addition to that, it of course also has access to the twelve copies of the missionary
stamps at the British Library and just this week the extra copies—I think there are
10 copies here at the Smithsonian— so 22
copies have been used of the missionaries
to compare with the Grinnells.
So that’s a fair proportion out of the 198 that exist.
I’d also mention that the stamps were submitted with several volumes of supporting material
and all this took place in February or early March in 2002.
When we were discussing how long this process would take, I advised the owners it would
take anywhere between 6 months and two years to complete and already we’re getting near
the two years, and well, you don’t hurry
important things.
Now I’m going to show you just a few pieces here; this is just to give you some further
whetting your appetite.
This is a Grinnell item paying the 13 cent rate on the back of an envelope an absolutely
fabulous piece I think this is the best piece in the collection.
And here is one of the covers here at the
Smithsonian, beautiful item.
I was looking at this yesterday and looking at the letter inside which is dated.
And here are the Smithsonian’s four single copies of the four types that there are.
Once again, if you look at the 2 cents and the 13 cents they look different to the 5
and the 13 cents of the other type and that’s because the 2 cents and the 13 cents
are in fact on backing paper.
So one must be very careful to not be distracted by what’s behind a stamp or adjacent to
it, or, in fact, the color of the postmark.
And lastly, this wonderful cover, the only combination cover that’s here,
that’s absolutely unique.
Well now, I’ve mentioned evidence before and the way that it cannot be dealt with in
the same terms as a court of law so let’s
have a look at this evidence.
I’ve divided it into two; there’s of the stamps and of the background circumstances.
Now, the first thing to say is that the Grinnells are not the same as the missionaries.
They are typographically different.
There is no doubt about that at all.
These are Grinnells and one of the questions that this poses is why would any forger
want to forge damaged stamps?
The comparison of rare stamps, historically, has always been a very difficult issue.
If your stamps are so rare that they’re all around the world
and it’s very rare for them to be in the same place at the same time;
how do you expertise one when it comes along singly.
Today, four copies of the Post Office Mauritius are thought to be lithographic forgeries,
but no one has had them all together to do the research.
Eventually it will happen and we’ll compare
the ones in London with those that might be
submitted to an expert committee or in other places under a controlled test and we’ll
find out and it will probably be the Raman and other machinery that will tell us
the answer to those questions.
So, expertizing has moved on from the magnifying glass days onto more technical days and this
is going to resolve many of the outstanding questions.
Now, the other point about the Grinnells is that none of them are repaired in any way,
which is entirely consistent with an original find, all of them being forgeries of course.
Whenever you see one piece of evidence in this you always find a conflicting piece that
takes you back into a neutral territory.
Now, the two copies on the outside are from the Tapling Collection and the 2 cents…
if you look very carefully, at the top and
bottom the frame lines is completely added in.
You’ll see a slightly different blue color and if you look at the 5 cents on the right,
the top right hand, where the red is, is entirely added on.
It’s entirely fake.
So many of these stamps seem to have been ripped off covers or someone was trying to
remove them from covers and the stamps are incredibly thin and on fragile paper and many
many of them are repaired.
I think that Cal Hamm, in his excellent paper which is in the booklet says that 60% of them
have been repaired and I wouldn’t disagree with that.
But none of the Grinnells have, but that’s consistent with them being a find or forgeries.
Now, no examination has been made of the 198 missionary stamps nor of the Grinnells and
nobody knows whether there are Grinnells amongst the 198 missionary stamps.
Now, you were confused today by what I’ve
shown you and that was unfair, it was deliberate
but it proves a point.
So, I think one of the things that those interested in this subject need to do is to have—and
it’ll take many years to do—is to have
high quality digital photographs made of both
Grinnells and of missionaries so that accurate one to one comparisons of typefaces can be
made to prove that they’re either of one
group or the other, or to prove that they’re
a forgery of a different description, and
we’ve already had an example of this today.
Now this will take, I don’t know, 50 years
to do?
Owners are reluctant to part with their stamps, stamps are locked away in bank vaults and
so before the real truth comes out could be
a long way into the future.
I think that’s a study someone ought to
agree to do, to arrive at the most important thing,
which is the truth.
Now, there’s one very important difference apart from typographically, although it is typographical,
is that the types of the stamps—each stamp comes in two types—in one type the
‘P’ of postage is flushed with the edge and in another type it’s indented.
Now, this is the page from the Tapling Collection that was written up by the first curator there,
Sir Edward Bacon early in the 1890s, and at
that time, nobody knew the arrangement of
the two types because they come in pairs, one type next to anothers.
So only having singles, he arbitrarily called one “type one” and the other “type two.”
But a little later on... oh, there's the Tapling collection copies taken off the page.
But a little later on, this cover was discovered and written about in 1904.
Now, this is the only example of a horizontal pair of missionaries and it’s the proving piece
that the arrangement of the two types was the reverse of what Sir Edward Bacon had originally thought.
But the Tapling page was still written up in the old form.
Now, the Grinnells are in the earlier version of these two types.
So one asks the question, why, if they are forgeries and they may well have been made
some time between 1890 and 1904, but that’s if they’re forgeries, who knows.
Now, this gentleman Brewster Kenyon has been by some people criticized as being the forger of the Grinnells.
If that’s the case, that’s the hypothesis, and he published a book in 1895
and I’ve got some photocopies here in which he said of the first issue, “type faced stamps printed
on very thin bluish wove paper in horizontal
strips of various lengths.”
But how could he say that in 1895 if the first pair wasn’t discovered until 1904?
That’s some of the principal evidence of
the stamps being forgeries or of some other
unknown status, who knows.
But it is a difficulty, complication of the argument, one that’s typical of the story 
 throughout.
You’ll notice I’m very carefully not giving
you answers to these questions.
And, here we have a horizontal pair of the Grinnells where you can see the arrangement of the ‘P’
under the ‘H’ and you see they are reversed.
I now want to turn to the question of postmarks because the Grinnells that have circular red
postmarks on them… it is a distinctive type
that only appears on the Grinnells
and it’s the one on the right of the screen.
It only appears there.
So you have a distinctively different stamp with a distinctively different postmark
and  that, of course, in very simple terms— although there’s other evidence—does tend to bid
against the stamps.
These are not particularly wonderful illustrations, but nonetheless it proves the point that they
are very different.
If you look at the word ‘Paid’ for example.
Now, turning to the question of the backgrounds.
If you accept the original story of the meeting in 1918 of George Grinnell and Charles Shattuck
and Grinnell’s acquisition of the 71 stamps, a lot of the subsequent story must be taken
at face value and a great deal of very splendid work has been done in proving the circumstances
and the facts and that work is the subject of some of the volumes that’s been submitted
to the Royal.
No doubt that will be publicly available in
due course.
Now, there is the man himself, taken a few years later, I think.
And here is Charles Shattuck at that famous meeting in 1918.
1918 of course was a wonderful year for philately because there were two major finds.
There was the Grinnell find and there was sheet of the inverted Jenny that some very lucky philatelist bought
the complete lot.
Amazing, a philatelists dream.
Now, George Grinnell was a school teacher and a man who was very much into culture.
That’s the house where the two met by the
way.
But he wasn’t used to dealing with business transactions involving tens of thousands of
dollars and when these stamps came along I think this probably showed to some extent
because he originally offered a certain number of copies for $100,000 and eventually sold
a greater number of copies for only $65,000.
So he was working on his own, he probably
didn’t use anyone else.
When the court case took place subsequently he was probably very poorly advised
and he didn’t, for example, bring on any expert witnesses to counteract other expert witnesses
that were brought in.
In fact, some of the evidence at the trial was contradictory because one particular person,
one of the witnesses said that the stamps were produced photographically
and another witness went on to say that there
were differences between the two types.
Well, there’s a contradiction and why the
judge never picked up on that fairly fundamental point,
no one will ever know, but if that had been thought about,
then the result may well have all been different, who knows.
There’s a number of other outstanding questions that come along and I think the next slide
is interesting because it shows part of the transcript of the trial where the acquisition
of the stamps by George Grinnell was described and the sum of $5 was put on the table.
Charles Shattuck didn’t seem to want any money for these he didn’t think that they
were of any significance whatever, but $5
certainly passed hands and this is part of
the trial transcript which exists in parts still today.
It’s a document which is about this thick.
One or two issues remain today like, why did George Grinnell tell John Klemann that
43 stamps existed when in fact 71 did?
We don’t know the answer to that.
Why did Klemann sue Grinnell?
Why didn’t Klemann just go back and say “we don’t think they’re any good can
we have our money back please.”
How did it get to a court case that went on
for some time?
These are interesting questions that we’ll probably never know the answers to and if
someone does know they ought to be writing it up and telling us.
$65,000 was a lot of money; why didn’t they
just have it back in exchange and avoid a
court case that was very painful for everyone?
I have to look at the court case and say “well, how independent were some of the witnesses there?”
The person that was actually buying a great deal of the stamps was the wealthy collector Caspary.
Now, he had one of the most important collections in the world at the time and of all time and
he brought in witnesses who were dealers,
which was fine, but how neutral were they?
How independent were they?
Were they involved in selling stamps to Caspary?
They certainly came up with some interesting evidence and I’ve already alluded to two
elements of it that were contradictory, so
one must ask several questions over that.
Why did the Secret Service become involved?
Who told them about this because these are not United States fiscal objects which would interest
them but of the Kingdom of Hawaii before Hawaii became part of the United States.
These are a pair of the 5 cents that were taken in by the Secret Service and they were
marked on the reverse and you can see where the arrow is.
The secret serviceman certainly wasn’t a philatelist was he?
And he put those marks on this; a number of those that exist; in that sort of thing.
We certainly know they were genuine Grinnells.
In this whole issue I’ve been struck by the extent of feeling in this matter.
I’ve never witnessed such passion in any philatelic subject before.
Nor have I seen people with such firm opinions expressed without seeing the evidence without
ever seeing any of the stamps.
You can go some way in expressing opinions but if you don’t actually see the real thing.
How do you know it’s ever going to work?
How do you know what you’re looking at?
Some little while ago, Vince and Carol Arigo, owners of some of the stamps, produced an article,
'The Grinnell Hawaiian Missionary Stamps: Addressing the Critics Results of Scientific Research and Discoveries in Provenance',
and this was published in The Chronicle in 2002.
Even in London, I detected there was an outcry by those people who had closed minds.
There was a call for peer review, why wasn’t this peer reviewed?
And the people concerned seemed to have missed the point that in long running research questions
it’s perfectly in order to have one article that takes one view only and then a reverse view elsewhere.
And in this particular case, an article written by one of the interested
parties absolutely without any change or editing was very important evidence indeed to record
in the periodicals for research.
I got the impression in fact, that those people asking for peer review that might have changed
the article dramatically and defeated the
whole purpose, were not looking for peer review at all,
but censorship and this is based on small mindedness and prejudice
and I hope that lots of people are going to learn some lessons by that point.
I make it only to be constructive.
There have been times also when I’ve felt that some people have understood that the
stamps are on trial not anyone else.
Now in bringing this to a conclusion, I must tell you how the expert committee are going
to report this in due course.
They’re going to put a research article onto the website of the Royal Philatelic Society London
which will be heralded by an email to the interested parties and to the press
so that the results of the deliberations, whatever that is, are immediately available.
The article may not be illustrated there but it certainly will then appear for the permanent
record in the Royal Journal of The London Philatelist.
Now, the expert committee is still looking
at evidence and if there are any owners of
these stamps that would like to make them
available to the expert committee—they’ve
seen 22 so far—would you speak to Patrick
Pierson or to Wilson and he will make the contacts.
Also, a paper based on this lecture will appear in The Collector’s Club Philatelist sometime in the New Year.
I’d just like to close, before we get to
questions—I’m not off the hook yet—by
thanking those people who’ve helped me with this presentation and with information:
Jenny Holm, Bob Schoolley-West, Dr. Gene Hall, Professor Robin Clark in London and Wilson, of course.
Alan and his staff, who have been absolutely superb in setting up
this memorable occasion for me.
If you have any questions I’ll attempt to avoid them—answer them.
[Laughter and applause]
Who has the first impossible question?
You should come up to the microphone in the center of the room.
Could you comment on how the Grinnells and the missionaries are typographically different?
The question was, could I comment on how they're typographically different?
How long have you got?
[laughter] We could be here all night if I
attempted to answer that question.
I suspect it’s not going to be suitable for today.
All I can really say is that they are, and it’s entirely consistent of course and this
is the evidence for the stamps in the fact that they are made from moveable type.
So, it comes really in two forms; the type moves because moveable type moves.
It could be, for example, that various printings have been made, we don’t know that.
That’s why the study of all the examples are going to be crucial for actually finally
establishing that, because nobody knows in which order those stamps were printed.
We know that the last one came out in 1852 but when they started printing the others
did they start with the 2, or did they start
with the 5, or with the 13?
And if they kept the type standing and then they moved the different parts around it was going to move.
The ornamentation is part of the detail, but if you look across lots of originals and lots
of Grinnells you will see that they all vary in quality of printing and typeface to some extent.
So, the final answer to that question is: when the study has been done we’ll really
know a lot more about them
Thank you.
If I understood you correctly, you said the postmarks between Grinnells and missionaries were different.
If that’s the case, then how can one reconcile that?
Is there any clue in the dates that could explain that difference?
Well, there are 3 types of cancellations on the stamps.
There’s manuscript, there are black grids and there’s circular red which we saw a
little earlier, lets see if we can go back.
There we are.
Now, the postmark on the right only exists on the Grinnells now the significance of that
to an expertizer is to say well, there’s a forgery on a forgery.
But there may be other evidence that proves otherwise and some has been written.
And, the important thing about having this here today is that you should go away and read
the point that’s been made there.
Otherwise, I know this subject will be here all night but, that is essentially it, those
are the facts; the interpretation of course is a much more complicated issue.
You have placed a lot in the Tapling Collection copies as sort of a baseline for a lot of
your studies yet the Tapling Collection has the quote “reputation” unquote,
of containing many forgeries.
I can’t speak for the missionaries, I have no idea, but certainly in some of the
Latin American countries with which I am much more familiar with their philately,
there are a number of extremely suspicious pieces there.
Could you comment on how you can be sure that,
Grinnells or missionaries, the copies in the
Tapling Collection are the “real McCoy?”
Thank you…
[laughter] You can always tease your friends and that only proves it.
Well, thank you for asking a very good question, I’ll tease you back now.
We don’t of course.
It’s the same principal as all the rest of it.
Before the real studies have been done across all the stamps we don’t actually finally know.
But what we do know— and you’re right about certain forgeries in the collection,
although it’s not that peppered with forgeries—there’s two points: firstly, we know that the collection
has actually been in existence and together from a particular time.
Um, in a previous, um... let's see if we can find the page
Coming up next.
In a previous write up, in Thomas Tapling’s time, he in fact exhibited this page and we
have photograph of it in the 1890 Philatelic
Exhibition in London and it was
Sir Edward Bacon the first curator that wrote this up a little later in his handwriting in 1893
I expect.
The beauty about collections which have remained intact is the very reverse of the point you
made and that is of course that if you had a collection that’s been there since 1891
you know you haven’t got the 1905 forgeries.
So the argument works both ways.
All I can say is that two weeks ago we celebrated the centenary of the Tapling Collection being
on exhibition at the British Library and the British Museum before, and no one has ever
come along and said any of them are forgeries.
That’s not a complete answer but I suspect
it’s like all of the copies, and we could
say that about any of the copies for that matter, until someone has actually undertaken
all the research… how do we actually know?
So really, it comes back to the point about
stamps that are very very rare, what are the
opportunities for comparing them?
And it’s why Patrick Pierson has come across from London to look at the copies here at
the Smithsonian and also is appealing to anyone else that has copies,
to make them available to the expertizing exercise.
I think they’d quite like to see 50 copies,
a quarter of the missionaries— that would
be good if it could be done. Um, but uh...
Some group or other really ought to start that research project.
Sir?
I hate to admit that I was a little late so you may have discussed this already.
Are there any plans to chemically analyze the inks and the paper on a known original
as compared to the Grinnells?
That has been done using the Raman technology and the answer was that the inks and the postmark
inks and the paper brighteners were all made of the same substance.
What that demonstrates is that none of the inks on the Grinnells were made at a later date,
so they’re contemporary materials.
It doesn’t make them genuine necessarily but it means that one could reject them instantly
if the materials they were made of were made much much later.
Fred here comes the real question.
I deeply appreciate your remarks.
Thank you for tricking me.
It was a pleasure.
You didn’t have a category, “neither of
the above.”
That was your trap.
In philately you have to watch out for traps everywhere.
Given that the type is not like any genuine stamp, and given that there were six presses
in Hawaii at the time and Honolulu was a relatively small town and these presses all produced
product that can be compared.
What has been done to identify which press, and whether there was any typeface of that
kind that’s seen on the Grinnell in Hawaii
in 1851?
Well that’s a question for the expert committee.
No, I’m not going to duck that, it is their question.
I know Fred that you’ve issued a challenge
for someone to come up with the same typeface
as on the Grinnells.
Possibly one of the problems is that the Grinnells have not been widely illustrated.
That’s a factor.
I’m not quite sure what you can do at this late date to take that further forward.
Perhaps you’ve got an answer for us?
I’ve looked.
And you’ve found no evidence?
I have found nothing.
That’s part of the evidence.
The Lady?
Sorry, can't hear you. Can you come up to the microphone?
According to what I’ve read on the Internet, Prussian blue ink was made by deception.
Is there any harking back to that original deception to determine who might have done that?
I’m not quite sure I understand the question.
You mean, if they’re forgeries, who was the forger?
Well, the man who made Prussian blue went to the dye maker to make a red ink and the
dye maker deceived him, he was a soap maker actually and he made a blue ink which was
Prussian blue instead.
So, someone may have been doing the ‘call and response’ in that regard to hark back
to that original deception.
Well that’s possible but we know when the stamps were found in 1918.
The tests that we’ve done recently were not available at that time so I don’t think
that would apply at all because the modern
tests would tell you exactly what they’re made of.
Rob?
As I understand it, all the ones that are accepted as missionaries share the same type
and same appearance as the Honolulu CDS.
And all the Grinnells are of different type and a different Honolulu CDS where it has that CDS.
That's right.
It is an interesting point that should be pursued, I’m sure, to try to explain satisfactorily
why you don’t have cross fertilization between the two large bodies of stamps.
Why all of those in the Grinnells find should
be sequestered, so to speak, and not found,
and not a one of the ones with those characteristics should make it into the body of what are known
as the missionaries.
You’ve hit the nail on the head and I would say that was possibly one of the key pieces of evidence
or arguments in this question.
How do you explain it?
One of them is that they are forgeries.
Another is well, perhaps it’s that they aren’t. I don’t know.
I know that Vince and Carol have written on that, I can’t remember exactly what their
argument to that was but certainly all these arguments and the point that they’ve made
about this has been submitted to the expert committee. So this is being taken into account.
There is an answer to that for the owners of the stamps.
Sir?
Well it’s not a question; it’s just a follow up on the last item.
It was the question of the provenance. It was the question of the son working in the type shop,
taking off to the other island, the possibility that he served as a postmaster there.
That argument and that provenance, that history, is in the brochure and I would invite people to read it there.
But I didn’t feel that they should go home feeling there was no answer.
No indeed and I would thank you for that.
I think the answer is that, one can only, as I said in the beginning,
cover certain aspects of this and that this gives you more information, more background because if we
get into detail we’ll be here for a week
I can tell you, I’ve been involved in these discussions.
It’s very very difficult to discuss questions of detail of typography here without drawing
facilities and everyone being fully on the ball and understanding what’s going on.
So it’s not really possible to discuss in this forum those sorts of issues.
But it’s written down in the book that’s why it’s been structured in this sort of way.
Any more questions?
Yes two more coming up.
Not so much a question but a point of information.
There’s a wonderful exhibit just a few blocks away from here at the Folger Shakespeare Library
on fakes, forgeries and facsimiles in another realm that might be of interest.
Something else to do in town?
Thank you for that.
Excuse me.
You mentioned just today that you’d be seeking collectors who own missionaries and
Grinnells to submit them to you.
Has that request been publicized prior to
now and is today the first time you’ve had
access to the Smithsonian stamps as well?
I’m wondering if you intend to publicize the call for missionaries in the philatelic
press or if that’s already been done.
Patrick Pierson who is the chairman of the expert committee has examined the missionaries
here for the first time this week, yesterday in fact, and the call has been made by me firstly  today.
And we’ll have to think about how we might
do that further afield.
Does anyone here actually own any missionaries?
[One audience member raises hand] One, where is it?
At home…
Why didn’t you bring it? [laughs]
You didn’t tell me to bring it!
[laughter]
Well this came up from a conversation earlier in the week where the importance of seeing
the maximum number of copies was going to be very very useful indeed.
We’ll have to think about… or the experts will have to think—I’m not involved but
I’m sure Patrick is keenly listening in the back there and will have to consider how that might be done.
Well good luck to you.
It does seem like it ought to be publicized more widely and does seem like a great idea
because perhaps you’ll find more typographical twins to the Grinnells.
Or more Grinnells, or more just forgeries. Who knows?
Thank you
Thank you
Okay one more question and the gentleman in the green shirt has it.
You referenced the existence of prejudice on the part of North American expertizing
services and I was wondering if you would have any views on whether that’s a systemic
problem or whether it’s particular to this
question of the Grinnells and if you have
any recommendations as to how the expertizing services can be improved or what organized
philately in North America can do to avoid
prejudice in the expertizers.
Well that’s a very good question.
I’ve only detected any prejudice in any expertizing
that’s a general prejudice, on this particular
issue.
One can detect prejudice where someone is the owner of the stamps of course or someone
has a vested interest, perhaps an auctioneer or a dealer or whatever.
I think the best way of dealing with independence is to set up organizations independently.
And I don’t make the remark against anyone in particular but dealer involvement can be a
good and a bad thing and it’s often difficult to know where the vested interest lies.
It’s also very difficult for anyone, any business expertizing for colleagues.
There must be problems involved in that.
The Royal of course is entirely composed of amateurs so it’s a relatively straightforward thing
for us and it’s very easy also to say it.
Prejudice, how can you expel prejudice in anything?
All you can do is your best.
I think the thing you can do is approach any question with an open mind.
It’s up to each individual to understand that that’s how you approach expertizing questions.
If you’ve had a history or you’ve been exposed to something, you have an entrenched view.
To change that view takes a lot to move it.
I think that’s one of the reasons why the two owning families came to the Royal in London,
away from possible prejudice perhaps or where there is prejudice and away from those who’ve
been involved, to get a fresh look.
But it’s a very difficult thing it’s the same as anything where you’re judging anything
as you get it perfect.
There’s no such thing as the perfect world.
Thank you very much.
