XIX. Other pre-1958 stamps
This will be a slightly disorganised business. Not least because I possess almost none of the stamps I’m talking about here. The purpose of this page is very much just to collect my notes on these subjects in one place.
1. The railway stamps
These have been exhaustively researched and described by Professor Rainer Fuchs, and I have nothing whatsoever to add to his erudite commentary. His detailed exhibition of these stamps can be seen here, and his own website on the same topic is here. The gist, in a sentence, is that these stamps were for the convenience of persons who happened to live near a railway station, but not a town with a post office — franked with one of these stamps, a letter could be posted at a railway station. A passing train would pick the letter up and carry it to the nearest post office, whereupon it would be transferred to the ordinary mails. The letter had to be franked with full postage on top of the railway stamp.
These stamps aren’t commonly encountered in trade, and one is left with the impression that the railway postal service was more of a gimmick than a vital part of the postal infrastructure.
2. The WWII-era provisional handstamps, aka the “Habbaniya Provisionals”
These crude handstamps are conventionally —though, I think, inaccurately— known as the “Habbaniya Provisionals”. In May 1941, the British air force base at Habbaniya was besieged by Iraqi and German forces. The traditional explanation of these stamps is that they were prepared by the British, during the siege, to meet the postal needs of the garrison after supplies of regular postage stamps had been exhausted. Rainer Fuchs wrote about these stamps in the Spring 2016 issue of the Middle East Philatelic Bulletin (available here) and endorsed this explanation, albeit with reservations. In response to Dr Fuchs, Professor Ghazi Karim wrote a brief article in the January 2018 issue of the Levant journal where he cited an obscure 2009 Arabic-lanaguage publication by one Mounzer Baqous, which claimed the handstamps were “…used instead of regular postage stamps in the period between 1-15 January [1942] due to the shortage of postage stamps during this period because of the Second World War.”
I consider that Dr Karim and Mr Baqous are correct, and that, rather than having anything to do with the siege of Habbaniya, these handstamps were employed on a wider (perhaps nationwide) basis, and they were simply a part (albeit, an exceptional and short-lived part) of the civil mails in early 1942. There indeed seems to have been a certain shortage of postage stamps in Iraq around then, presumably caused by the war, as I discussed over here. The purported usage window of 1-15 January 1942 is too short, seeing as the Al-Maqal cover is dated 24 January, but these covers are rare enough that it cannot have extended much longer than that. In any event, the handstamps surely cannot relate to the siege of Habbaniya, which ended about seven months earlier. On top of this, the idea of the British producing a provisional stamp in Arabic only, with no English, is somewhat implausible (as Dr Fuchs notes). On top of that is the additional implausibility of the besieged British requiring postage stamps — how were their letters to have left the base, if it was surrounded by their enemies?
I’ve seen these handstamps with the following place-names on the top line. As well as these, the Baqous publication apparently shows a Mosul cover.
Habbaniya (fig. 1)
Junoubi Baghdad (fig. 2)
Adhamiya (fig. 3)
Kifri(?) (fig. 4)
Basra (fig. 5)
Al-Maqal (fig. 6)
Although this is a short list, we have a wide spread of locations, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, which may indicate the authorisation to use these handstamps was nationwide(?). The similarity of the design between these disparate locations also suggests that the authorisation was made centrally by the postal authority.
The Basra and Al-Maqal handstamps are in violet, the others in black. A large dealer’s lot in an October 2023 Spink auction had three covers with Basra handstamps (e.g. fig. 5) — none has the fils value on the third line filled in, though they all have a cursive endorsement of some sort next to the handstamp. The Al-Maqal cover in my collection has a clear “10” on the third line, for the standard internal rate.
I’ve seen a total of six covers — the three Spink ones just mentioned, my own, and two images from the Baqous publication reproduced in Dr Karim’s item in the Levant journal. None of the handstamps is postmarked. The two Karim covers have postmarks on their reverses, of the same location as the handstamps — a cover with a Junoubi Baghdad handstamp is postmarked Junoubi Baghdad 15 January 1942, and a Habbaniya cover is postmarked Habbaniya 11 January 1942. My own cover has an Al-Maqal handstamp and is postmarked Al-Maqal 24 January 1942. So, cautiously, it would seem that the practice was for the post office to postmark the covers, but not the handstamps themselves. Spink unfortunately didn’t show the reverse of their covers.
These covers all seem to have been sent to internal destinations. The Al-Maqal cover, with transit and destination postmarks, and censor stamp, evidently did pass through the mails. Likewise the two “Baqous” covers — one has a censor mark but no arrival mark, and the other has both censor mark and arrival mark.
The handstamps are rarely seen in trade, so evidently their use wasn’t widespread.
An unanswered question is why these handstamps came to be known as the “Habbaniya Provisionals” in the first place. There seem to have been at least two(?) complete sets of the handstamps in the trade over the years, and both of these name Habbaniya in the top line. I haven’t seen any sets with other place names. My best guess is that Habbaniya happened to have a collector on location at the relevant time, who saw the handstamps on sale at the local post office and had the financial resources to buy a full set of them. He brought them back to the UK, and in the fulness of time the actual explanation of the handstamps was forgotten, replaced with a conjecture (not at all unreasonable, on the face of it) that, if Habbaniya produced such crude items, it must have done so at its most desperate moment.
The same Spink dealer’s lot also has these two covers, with a large single-line “postage paid” handstamp, with no place-name. The different ink colours and sizes of the stamp suggest that these are from different locations. I have no more information, and no images of the reverses.
3. Meter stamps
These are rarely seen, and seem to have been a short-lived experiment. I haven’t seen these discussed anywhere. I’ve seen one cut piece (pictured here) and four covers, in the same Spink dealer lot I mentioned in section 2 above. None of the covers is dated but two have wartime markings, so I’d put these around the same date as the provisional handstamps (and, perhaps, they were intended to meet the same purpose).
All of these I’ve seen read “U 1” in the bottom corners.
The four covers all seem to have been to internal destinations.
4. The Kurdistan stamps
These were emitted by local magnate Mahmud Barzanji during his 1922-24 rebellion against the British. Deeply unattractive objects which, no doubt, were intended principally as a propaganda gesture. I don’t know if they did any genuine postal service. Rainer Fuchs once again says all that needs to be said, in the autumn 2015 edition of the Middle East Philatelic Bulletin, available here.
21 July 2025