The Error World (25 page)

Although Baillie kept careful records of every purchase, a prospective bidder for one of his items would have no idea of how much he paid and how much the stamp had accrued in value. In the first Baillie sale of Great Britain, the catalogue of which I had pored over for hours and learnt almost by heart, there were at least twenty classic errors I would have been proud to own. The stamp I wanted from him most, the 1961 is 3d Parliamentary, had probably been bought from David and Mark Brandon many years before, and soon I would have to compete with them at the auction to ensure they didn't buy it back. Richard Ashton knew the Brandons well, along with the other error collectors I would now have to regard as my opposition, and although he was a traditionalist he understood the appeal of missing colours and Queen's heads. He showed me some nice errors in the draft Australian catalogue on his desk, and then he told me about the time a woman came into his place of work with an item he had never seen before.

In 1963, when he was still in his teens, Ashton was working at Harmer Rooke, an auction company owned by Stanley Gibbons. A nervous young woman was at the front desk of his office in Arundel Street, near the Strand. She said she had just bought a sheet of stamps from the post office and there was something wrong with them. When she took them out of her bag she showed Richard Ashton a set of British stamps commemorating the opening of the Trans-Pacific Cable (COMPAC: COMmonwealth PACific Cable). Almost nine million were sold, but in the central panel of this particular sheet, twenty-four of them were missing black, which meant the word 'Commonwealth' and the cable running around a blue globe weren't there. A senior buyer from Stanley Gibbons arrived within a few minutes to make her an offer. 'I can't remember how much,' Ashton says, 'but I do remember catching her on the way down as she fainted.' Gibbons exhibited the sheet at a big stamp show, and then sold it for £600; in 2006, just one of the twenty-four sold at auction for more than £3,000.

Ashton, an owlish and affable man, did not grow up with stamps. He was born just after the Second World War. His parents had arrived in England penniless from the Channel Islands, while others in his family had been interned in Germany. His father was keen for his son to become an engineer, but after a day-release visit to Dagenham Motor Works from his technical college, Richard realised his calling lay elsewhere. He replied to an advert in a London evening paper for a trainee accountant, and the firm that answered was Stanley Gibbons. Inevitably, Ashton had collected stamps as a child, but his knowledge was limited. When, during his job interview, he was asked how he would detect a watermark on a stamp, his prospective employers were probably expecting an answer involving benzene and a tray. Ashton said he would hold the stamp up to a light, which is exceptionally ineffective. But he got the job, and started working at Harmer Rooke. He soon moved away from accounts to work in the stamp room, and found he had a photographic memory.

After sixteen years with Gibbons, Ashton moved to Sotheby's. Sotheby's held its first big stamp auction in 1872, and sales continued until the First World War, but were discontinued when one of its experts failed to return at the end of it. It was decided to relaunch the philatelic department in the 1970s, and Ashton slowly worked his way up. His big moment came in 1982, when word reached him that Sir Maxwell Joseph wished to sell his collection of Cape of Good Hope. Ashton's eyes began to water as he told me the tale.

And my eyes lit up. My father had once represented Sir Maxwell in a minor legal matter. It was big news at our house. Sir Maxwell was the sole owner and proprietor of Grand Metropolitan Hotels, and rarely a day went by when he didn't appear in the
Evening Standard
business section. He started collecting Cape of Good Hope for the same reason that most young people do—the unusual triangular shape. He then branched out to pre-stamp postal history going back to the Dutch settlement, and then to the end of the Boer War and the Siege of Mafeking. 'He would buy individual items at auctions, but like Count Ferrary he'd much prefer to infuriate his rivals by buying complete collections. It was a surprise when he decided to sell up.' Ashton only found out what lay behind his decision shortly before the sale.
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Sotheby's had to bid for the honour of hosting the auction. Its principal rival was a one-man philatelic industry called Robson Lowe, a grand old patriarch of British stamps who knew more stamp people, and had seen more stamp things, and wrote more articles and books than any other. He also ran an auction house, and Richard Ashton knew it would be a challenge to persuade Sir Maxwell Joseph not to go with him. So before he and his Sotheby's colleagues went to see him in his office in Oxford Street they came up with an interesting proposal.

'I was terrified,' Ashton recalls. 'He was sitting behind this huge desk, and he sat back and said, "Well, you better tell me how you're going to sell my collection.'" The Sotheby's people said that for maximum impact they proposed to offer it as one single sale, about a thousand lots over three days. Robson Lowe had told him it would be four or five auctions. Sotheby's also proposed issuing a hardback catalogue, something it had only done about half a dozen times before.

Sir Maxwell thought this was a novel approach, but then posed the inevitable question: 'What are you going to charge me?' This was the clincher; an average vendor's commission was 15 per cent, although this would decrease for a major sale. The Sotheby's team said, 'After the auction you pay us the commission that you think we've earned.' Richard Ashton remembers Joseph looking straight at him as he said, 'Done.'

Then they asked him why he was selling. 'Put it this way,' he answered. 'If the day should come when I die, I've got three children, and I don't want them falling out over my stamp collection. It's indivisible, but the money from it can be split three ways.' This was the same reason offered by Geoff Hurst when he was asked why he was selling the shirt he wore when he scored the hat-trick in the World Cup Final: he had three daughters and how on earth would they split the shirt when he died? Sir Maxwell didn't tell Ashton that he had already been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Unfortunately, Sir Maxwell died a month before his sale. In the few months between striking the deal and the design of the catalogue, his cancer had spread. He was confined to bed for much of the time that Ashton was pricing the estimates for each lot, and he died on the day the catalogue was published. Ashton sent a copy to him at home, and he heard from Lady Joseph that he did get to see it.

In the weeks before the auction, Sotheby's received a lot of criticism for selling the entire collection in one go, rather than spread over a year; buyers will be overwhelmed, people said, and run out of money. But Sotheby's sold every lot, one of the few sales at the auction house that fetched over £1 million. The Lear-like disposal of the collection had given his daughters financial security, and philatelists throughout the world had gained from the dispersal. But Ashton's celebrations were muted, for he still had to see Sir Maxwell's executors about the commission; they were not stamp people, and contractually they owed Sotheby's nothing. But they liked the boldness of the existing arrangement, and they offered a handsome percentage. Ashton told me Sotheby's probably would have settled for no commission at all, being satisfied with the buyer's premium alone and the great privilege of selling one of the greatest collections ever assembled.

After that, many other fine sales followed, but none rivalled the immense challenge and privilege of curating the Baillie collection. Lady Baillie thought it might be worth £800,000 rather than the £11 million Sotheby's estimated. Dealers—there may have been about thirty Baillie bought from regularly—were equally surprised, as many thought they were his main suppliers.

Ashton first met Baillie around the time of the Sir Maxwell Joseph sale, and he began to think of him as a friend as well as a client. He was deeply saddened when he died at the end of 2003, and he was keen to ensure that his stamps were handled well. All the big auction houses have staff employed primarily to keep track of the changing fortunes of great collectors. Obituaries are studied carefully; contacts are pursued among divorce lawyers. Richard Ashton confirmed the benefit of a subtle approach: Is there anything we can do to help? 'It sounds rather macabre,' he told me, 'but if you don't do it, someone else will.'

But before Sotheby's competed to handle the Baillie sale, he was called in for a probate valuation. He was astounded. 'It didn't matter which book I picked up,' he remembered, 'every one was a gem. There were items I remembered from auctions twenty years ago and didn't know who had bought them, and there they were.' Ashton told Lady Baillie that Sotheby's were going to show people what a wonderful accomplishment it was that her husband had formed this great collection. The catalogues would end up being a memorial to him. Lady Baillie said, 'the wider the distribution the better'.

And so here, on 1 October 2004, was my chance.

The 1961 1s 3d Green Parliamentary Conference without the blue Queen's head. Baillie's example consisted of a progressive row of three stamps (the first perfect with the blue present, the second with the blue half-gone, the third with the blue gone altogether), and the estimate on it appeared to me to be quite reasonable. I could afford even the top estimate of £2,500 plus a buyer's premium of 17.5 per cent. I doubted that anyone could be as determined to buy it as I was. A total of 5,760,000 were printed in their perfect form, six were imperfect, and now there was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to realise an ambition.

I set two alarms on the morning of the sale, even though it began at 10.30 and my lot probably wouldn't be on the block until 1 p.m. I didn't tell anyone where I was going. I had three credit cards in my pocket. I arrived early and signed up for a bidding paddle, but there was a lot of other business to be got through before the
QE
2 errors, including many fine blocks of George V Seahorses, the stamps that had done for me in the school stamp competition. This was a bad omen, and not the only one in the saleroom that morning. Many of the hundred or so other people present, far more experienced than me, were startled at the steep prices that many of the lots were reaching, some of them twice or three times the upper estimate. Several dealers I knew spent much of the morning tutting and shaking their heads. This was a terrible indication.

The two major
QE
2 errors before mine each went very high. The Post Office Savings Bank without black attained £13,000, £4,000 more than the upper estimate, while the European Postal and Telecommunications Conference strip, in which the green dove erroneously turned white, went for £6,000, more than three times the estimate, to a bidder on the phone.

And now it was my turn. I knew that the £2,000–£2,500 estimate was going to be much too low. I thought I could afford £6,000.

The bidding began slowly. After a few bids we were at £4,000 and the interest seemed to be petering out. I thought to myself, 'I'm going to be okay.' I put up my paddle. The auctioneer said, '£5,000, new bidder.' For a moment there was silence. This was going to be a great day for me.

Then a white-haired woman at the very front, seated by a desk, said '£10,500'. I knew who the woman was. It was Mary Weekes, a stamp agent acting on behalf of anonymous clients. Her bid of £10,500 was the amount she had needed to clear the under-bidder. I may have imagined it, but I think that at that moment a movie cliché happened in the saleroom: there was collective sucking-in of breath. And then the gavel came down and I felt empty inside, like an amateur who has just discovered hidden rules in a professional game.

I'd failed to buy my favourite stamp and I might never have the chance again.

And yet what had I missed and what had I saved?

The answer to the first: a small piece of paper, gummed on one side, produced in 1961 at the printing works of Harrison & Sons of London and High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, whose machinery had for one second run out of blue ink.

The answer to the second: about £6,000, the price I was prepared to bid up to, roughly three times the estimate.

Rationally, financially, a good outcome. Yet I was morose for a week. I would have been elated to have got it, but also guilty at having spent so much. So there was a problem: stamps were no longer making me happy.

I have decided to sell my stamps. This could be an error. Unfortunately, I have little choice.

Everyone has their own story of how they fell out of love with stamps, and many can remember the exact date. For some it was 13 February 2001, the day picture stamps went self-adhesive. Not for me. I've always been a great fan of pictures of dogs in baths and cats in shoulder-bags, and the set that appeared on 13 February was satisfying. There was a dog in a bath, a cat in a bag, a dog on a bench and a cat in a sink, all black and white and arty, ten first-class stamps in a booklet that you peeled off and applied like sticking plaster. They made me wonder what had taken Royal Mail so long to get its act together.