Portal:Philately/Selected biography archive

Selected biography archive

Selected biography archive 1

Portal:Philately/Selected biography archive/1

Ralph Allen (1693–1764) was a British mine owner, entrepreneur and philanthropist, who became a Post Office clerk in Bath and on February 13, 1712 became its Postmaster and remained so until 1848. He became Mayor of Bath in 1842.

At age twenty-seven Allen received a seven-year contract to control the Cross or Bye Posts that had begun to appear in the seventeenth century; for this he paid £6,000 per year but even though he only broke even he continued. He reformed the postal service by creating a network of postal roads that did not pass through London. It is estimated he saved the Post Office £1,500,000 over a 40 year period having renewed the seven-year contracts until his death.

Prior Park, his Palladian mansion was his home from about 1834 until his death. It was built from Bath Stone from his own Combe Down and Bathampton Down Mines and located on a hillside overlooking the city of Bath.

Selected biography archive 2

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Sir Rowland Hill (1795–1879) was a British teacher and pamphleteer who popularised the concept of penny postage at a rate of a penny per half ounce, without regard to distance. He is usually credited in the UK with originating the basic concepts of the modern postal service.

Hill published his famous pamphlet Post Office Reform: its Importance and Practicability in 1837 in which he called for postage to be prepaid by the sender. Hitherto postage had been paid by the recipient. He suggested the prepayment be proven by prepaid letter sheets or adhesive stamps.

In 1840 his proposals led to the introduction of the world's first postage stamp; the Penny Black.

Selected biography archive 3

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Philip Ferrari de La Renotière (1850–1917) was an early stamp collector who assembled what is considered the most complete stamp collection that ever existed. Ferrary started collecting in his youth, then inherited a great fortune, which he dedicated to the purchase of rare stamps and coins. Although he lived in Paris, Ferrary frequently travelled, meeting with dealers and often paying them in gold on the spot. He was impulsive in his buying and seemed to be indifferent to price.

He owned some of the most notable stamps known, like the unique Treskilling Yellow of Sweden, the 1856 British Guiana 1c magenta and the only unused copy of the Two Cent Hawaii Missionary of 1851.

Selected biography archive 4

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Benjamin Kurtz Miller (1857-1928) was a Milwaukee attorney who donated the first complete collection of U.S. stamps ever assembled to the New York Public Library in 1925. Great rarities and philatelic items in the Benjamin Miller Collection are the One-Cent Z Grill (two copies known), the rarest of all U.S. stamps.

Miller started late in life at the age of 61 when he bought one of the famous Inverted Jenny stamps in 1918. By the early 1920s, Miller was on the way to his ultimate achievement: collecting one of every U.S. postage stamp in the Scott catalogue of his day. He collected many varieties such as, color shades, frauds and forgeries, fresh unused stamps, and varied cancellations.

The collection was displayed at the library for more than 50 years. However it was locked away after a theft of some items in 1977. Even though a bulk of the collection was recovered it did not come back on display until recently; some of the collection was at the National Postal Museum in 2006 and 2007.

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Heinrich von Stephan (1831–1897) was a general post director for the German Empire who reorganized the German postal service. He was integral in the founding of the Universal Postal Union in 1874, and in 1877 introduced the telephone to Germany.

His career began in the Prussian post in 1849 and in 1866 he was in charge of federalizing the postal service that had been run by the Thurn und Taxis family. He was named Postmaster General of the German Empire in 1876, the Undersecretary of State in charge of the post office in 1880, and the Minister of Postal Services for Germany in 1895.

Early on he worked to establish a uniform postage rate throughout Germany. His general goal of standardization and internationalization is evident in his work to combine the postal service with the telegraph service in Germany, and in his efforts to organize the International Postal Conference in Bern in 1874, in which the Universal Postal Union was established. He introduced the postcard to Germany in 1870; the postcard came into widespread use in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War as a method of communication between units in the field.

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Henry Bishop (1611–1691) was Postmaster General of the United Kingdom and inventor of the first postmark used on mail. In 1660, at The Restoration, Henry Bishop paid £21,500 per year to farm the Post Office for a term of seven years. Bishop was the first officially appointed Postmaster General to Charles II, but within a year of taking office he was accused of abuses. Bishop gave up the remainder of his lease to Daniel O'Neill.

The "Bishop Mark", which takes his name, introduced in 1661, was designed to show the date on which a letter was received by the post and to ensure that the dispatch of letters would not be delayed.

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Edward Benjamin Evans, RPS (3 November 1846 – 21 March 1922), a British army officer also known as "Major Evans", was a distinguished philatelist, stamp collector, and philatelic journalist. His philatelic specialization included Mauritius, the Confederate States of America, the Mulready envelopes, and the Indian feudatory states.

His Mauritius collection started after he was posted there in 1876. Evans assembled an extraordinary collection that included a famous example of the One Penny Red "Post Office" Mauritius and several unused Two Pence "Post Paid" in indigo and dark blue. He published many articles on the stamps of the Confederate States in the Stanley Gibbons Monthly Journal, which he edited for 23 years. His Mulready envelope collection was purchased by King George V and now resides in the Royal Collection. Read more...