Nigerian Stamps and Postal History

          Bradbury Wilkinson, a printing firm based in New Malden, Surrey, UK, was responsible for some of the most beautiful stamps of the British Commonwealth between the early 1930's and early 1950's. Indeed who can forget the 1933 Centenary issue of the Falkland Islands, the iconic 1929 PUC pound of Great Britain, the 1933 Wilberforce Issue of Sierra Leone and the 1934 Centenary Issue of St. Helena? They were master engravers and excelled at bi-colour designs. As much as I admire De La Rue's work, the printing of this firm is in my opinion, the best out of the four major UK firms that dominated stamp production at that time: Waterlow & Sons, De La Rue, Bradbury Wilkinson and Harrison & Sons.  It is a pity then that their involvement in Nigerian philately was limited to just five issues:  The 1937 Coronation issue.   The low value King George VI definitives, of which the 1/- is shown above. The 3d and 6d 1949 Univers...

         Waterlow and Sons is another well established printing firm that was based in London Wall in London, United Kingdom. Their work was prevalent near the turn of the 20th century, when they printed beautiful, mostly bi-coloured stamps for North Borneo, Labuan, Uruguay, Costa Rica and a large number of other Latin American countries, as well as the exquisite monocoloured stamps of Niger Coast Protectorate. They more or less disappear as a printer of stamps after 1913 and do not reappear until the 1930's. From this point on, they are a major player in the production of British Commonwealth engraved stamps until about 1961 or 1962, when photogravure replaces engraving as the preferred method of stamp production, and Harrison and Sons becomes the dominant printing firm. A distinguishing characteristic of their later work is that the vast majority of their stamps are monocoloured, and their colours are often cooler tones as opposed to warmer ones. Printin...

Understanding the work of the firms that printed Nigeria' postage stamps is absolutely critical if you want to be able to study and understand the country's stamps. Each of these firms used their own papers, their own inks and their own gums, as well as their own printing processes. These things evolved over time as well and understanding precisely how this happened and how the characteristics of paper, ink and gum changed over time is one of the cornerstones of British Commonwealth Philately in general. While there were a couple of firms in Israel and Portugal who printed a few of the issues of Biafra and some commemorative sets issued between 1963 and 1965, these comprise only a very small number of Nigeria's stamps. So we can ignore them for the purposes of this discussion, since familiarity with their work is only essential to understanding the specific issues that they produced, rather than Nigerian philately as a whole. By and large, nearly all stamps issued for Ni...

Nigerian philately can be divided into three broad areas, each of which can be further subdivided into smaller areas. Philatellically speaking, the issues of Nigeria can be relatively complex to a budding specialist, although they can also be made as simple as you wish. At the broadest level, the country can be broken down as follows: Pre-Federation Nigeria - all the issues from 1874 to 1914.  Federated Nigeria to independence - all issues from 1914 to 1960. Federated Nigeria after independence -all issues from 1960 to date. Pre-Federation Nigeria Before 1914 During the pre-federation period, Nigeria actually consisted of five separate crown colonies and protectorates, each of which issued its own stamps, or had its own handstamps: Lagos, which first issued stamps in 1874 and was amalgamated into Southern Nigeria in 1906. Niger Coast Protectorate, which first issued stamps in 1892 and was amalgamated into Southern Nigeria in 1906. Niger Company Territories, w...

I originally created this blog more than five years ago as a project to document as much information as I could about Nigerian stamps and postal history because this was my chosen field of collecting. However, after several false starts the blog kind of died. Part of the reason was that my marriage of 12 years fell apart, but the main reason was that in rebuilding my life, I decided to make an complete change of direction and left my profession of public accounting to become a full time stamp dealer - something I have dreamed of doing my whole life. So for most of the past two years I have been focused on building my business. My primary are of Specialty has been Canada, so nearly all my time has been spent writing articles for my other blog dealing with Canadian philately. Consequently, I was not working much with my Nigerian stamps, which made writing articles difficult. However, last week I had to count inventory for our fiscal year end and that brought me back in contact with ...