By Nick Salter Guest Contributor, [email protected]
British Mail in Santo Domingo (El Correo Ingles en Santo Domingo). By Daniel A. Mueses, Juan M. Prida and Gregory Todd. In English and Spanish, 236 pages, color illustrations. With an addendum, 38 pages. ISBN: 978-1-64255-423-3. The book can be ordered direct from the author at [email protected]. The cost is $25 plus shipping charges.
The stamps of the British Empire will be a familiar sight to most collectors. The colorful pictorials and exotic destinations remain perennially popular, from the worldwide collector to the specialist.
But there are a group of stamps that pre-date the dedicated issues of the British colonies themselves and are among the very first stamps used in international mail, those of the British Post Offices Abroad.
British Post Offices (BPO) were operating on a truly international scale prior to the establishment of most national domestic postal services. Nineteenth-century trade expansion saw these post offices opening up in most corners of the globe, many in what were or would become British-owned territories. But this network of post offices was also prevalent in countries that had yet to establish their own postal system, feeding in to the routes plied by the packet boats.
The post office was invariably serviced through the British Consulate and was initially set up to facilitate correspondence between Great Britain and its soldiers and sailors posted overseas.
A British Post Office would be established in a newly acquired territory, using the stamps of Great Britain cancelled with a dedicated handstamp to denote its international origins. Eventually, the inauguration of the UPU rendered the service unnecessary. The BPO then passed control over to the local administration, which would take on the responsibility of issuing dedicated stamps for the country concerned.
Not all BPOs were located in dependent territories, though. Britain had established a vast maritime network and maintained consuls in locations across the globe, many of which never formed part of the Empire, particularly in Latin America.
British Mail in Santo Domingo is the tale of just one of those far-flung destinations where the British Post Office established a presence. The book focuses on the brief period that the BPO operated in the Dominican Republic and provides a detailed insight into how the system worked up until the country’s own postal service became fully established in the 1870s.
We start with a brief introduction to the history of the international postal system and the journey up until the issuance of the Penny Black in 1840. This is followed by an explanation of how the program of installing overseas British Post Offices abroad became established in the 1850s and how they integrated with maritime trade: the packet boats that moved mail, cargo and people around the globe.
The island of Hispaniola is divided into two nations: Haiti in the west and the Dominican Republic in the east. Back in the 18th century, correspondence with the wider world was minimal and only three examples of mail have been known to have been dispatched from the lands forming the Dominican Republic in the entire 18th century. It wasn’t until the Royal Mail Steamship Packet Company started to call at the island’s ports in the 1840s that the volumes started to increase.
In 1857, Great Britain embarked on its expansion of its post offices across the globe, and in 1867 established an office in Santo Domingo. In just four years, it was closed. It re-opened again in 1876 before closing finally in 1881. By this time, the Dominican Republic had joined the UPU and it was no longer necessary to be supported by the BPO network.
The first 100 pages cover this story in detail before embarking on the philately itself (see Figure 1 example). The two post offices of Puerto Plata and Santo Domingo were allocated the obliterator cancels C-86 and C-87 respectively. Examples of the British stamps carrying these cancels are well-illustrated, together with details of the plates used throughout their usage.
Figure 1. Note the side-by-side English and Spanish translations and the specialized information provided.
This is then followed by a detailed study of the comparatively few surviving covers, including some very attractive covers with a mix of multiple Victorian-era stamps combined with the first issues of the Dominican Republic. After the publication of the book in 2018, further covers came to light and have been subsequently been published in a separate addendum to provide a comprehensive inventory of the known covers extant (Figure 2).
Figure 2. From the brief addendum, a cover that came to light after the first publication.
Existing collectors of early Dominican Republic will already be familiar with the work of Mueses, who has written extensively on the philately of the country with a focus on the early issues. The book is co-authored by Juan Prida and Gregory Todd and published in English and Spanish.
Much as the book will appeal to Dominican Republic collectors, it also serves a wider purpose for any collector interested in the establishment of the British Post Offices Abroad and their formative role in the development of international postal communications.