Courtesy of Geoffrey Dyer, Member of the Preston Philatelic Society
On 6th April 1652, Jan van Riebeck, "founding father of South Africa", under contract to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) landed at what would become Cape Town to establish a supply station for Company vessels sailing between the Netherlands and Batavia (now Jakarta). Sailing on the Dromedaris with 2 other ships, he was accompanied by 82 men and 8 women. (Dromedary camel, long known as "Ship of the Desert"!)
In 1923 Harrison & Sons first provided a proof of a 1d stamp design featuring Dromedaris. However the first contract for "London pictorials" definitive stamps went to Waterlow & Sons for typographed ½d, 1d and 6d stamps, issued in 1926. The designs lasted until 1954, with many design and printing alterations over the years.
Eight versions of the printed stamp design can be distinguished (excluding inverted watermark, perforation etc.): The Union Handbook (UHB) catalogue lists 4 Typographed (1 London, 3 Pretoria) and 27 Rotogravure "issues" (i.e. new plates or cylinders).
"SUIDAFRIKA" one word: SG 31: Typographed issue: 1926 Waterlow, 1927 Govt. Printers, Pretoria.*
SG 43, 43e: Rotogravure, Govt. Printers, Pretoria: 1930 Type I, 1932 Type II.
"SUID-AFRIKA" hyphenated: SG 56, 56i: 1934, 1940 (reduced size). Unscreened Rotogravure.
SG 106: 1943 Monochrome (red) coil stamps.
SG 115, 135: 1950, 1951 (redrawn, reduced size). Screened Rotogravure.
*In January 1927 Waterlow's typography plates (½d, 1d, 6d) were transferred from London to Pretoria. London and Pretoria printings are hard to distinguish - colours of the latter were duller, with poorer quality printing - unless a side margin is present (see later).
Apart from coil stamps, all were printed in sheets of 240 (20 rows of 12) with watermark Multiple Springbok Head.
1936 (2 Nov). Johannesburg International Philatelic Exhibition (JIPEX).
"Miniature sheets" were produced for this occasion containing six 1½d or 1d stamps with "SUID-AFRIKA" hyphenated, with "JIPEX" overprints. They were created by overprinting the normal panes of 6 stamps as in the 1935 2/6d booklets (SG SB9, the first booklets to contain hyphenated stamps: 2 panes of 12d as SG54 and 4 panes of 1d as SG56, all with inverted watermark). These booklet panes, for the first and only* time, had advertisements in their top and bottom margins, these being added in a separate printing operation. *In 1948 3/- booklets (SG SB18) were issued with similar panes carrying postal slogans at top and bottom.
For the exhibition issue, sheets of these booklet panes were overprinted "JIPEX 1936" on each stamp, and also in full on the side margins of each pane, upwards in English on the left and downwards in Afrikaans on the right. SG MS69 (1/2d), MS70 (1d).
Each printed sheet contained 21 "miniature sheets" in 3 columns of 7. There were different arrangements of advertisements in the top and bottom margins. All 21 were different for the 1d value and there were 10 variations for the ½d value. The miniature sheets were supplied in packets of 100 for sale only at the Exhibition Post Office from 2nd to 14th November 1936.
October 1946: Sale of surplus uncut booklet sheets at post offices.
No new 1d 'Dromedaris' cylinders were produced during World War II years and there were no booklet printings after the 1940 "B18" and 1941 "B19" booklets until 1948. The 1d stamps in the B18 and B19 "borderless" booklets (having no pane margins apart from the binding strip at left) were printed from cylinders made from the same pair of multipositives that had been introduced for the June 1940 Issue 15 (i.e. with the new reduced size of 18x22mm and the last to have Afrikaans as the first stamp on the sheet). These cylinders, interior 58 and exterior 6920, were made without arrows in the margins and with the 1st, 5th and 9th columns masked to produce sheets of 180 stamps. These were cut into 30 booklet panes of 6 stamps with binding margin only.
After the war there were 25,000 surplus uncut sheets of 1d stamps which were supplied to post offices in October 1946. The stamps were similar to the Issue 15 stamps (SG56 but reduced size) in all respects except for the blank columns.
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