Nigerian Stamps and Postal History

Last week I segued into the halfpenny surcharge issue of 1893, which utilized quantities of 4d stamps that were on hand, nearly all of which would have been printed before that time. I had hypothesized that by attempting to match these surcharges with some of the regular stamps that I had already identified, that I would be able to isolate: 1. Printings made after February 1894, where I have regular examples, but none that are surcharged. Note that it is possible that such printings could be from before February 1894, and were never surcharged, or I just don't have an example of one. However, there is a better than even chance that if a stamp only exists without surcharge, and it is from the third state of the plate, then it likely is from a later printing. 2. Additional printings made between July 1893 and February 1894 where I only have a surcharged example. Last week I sorted the surcharged stamps that I have by their settings, and the printing that they came from. Over t...

Last week I looked at the printings made from the third state of the plate, for the 4d lilac and black Queen Victoria Keyplate stamp of Lagos. This week, I am going to segue a bit and look at the half-penny provisional overprint, which appeared in August of 1893. By way of background, the quantity of halfpenny stamps that were sent to the colony in 1893 was badly mis-judged to the point where, by August 1893, there was a severe shortage of half-penny stamps. So, to alleviate the shortage, over the next six months or so, a quantity of 4d stamps were surcharged with the words "Halfpenny". According to Pemberton, a well known philatelist from the 1930's there were six separate printings of the surcharge, which were made over the six month period before fresh supplies of the halfpenny were received from London. So it is quite likely that there was one printing per month from August 1893 until about February 1894. The total quantity of stamps surcharged is not known with cert...