Occasionally, the story of a stamp is more about the postmark or cancel than the stamp itself.

In this case, it’s definitely the whole story.

Absent of the cover on which this stamp lived, we can only guess at the journey it may have taken, but what we do know is that at 7.30PM on 18th March 1912, this stamp was in Runcorn, Cheshire.

The stamp had already received a cancel in Barbados and you can just make out a small portion of that in the top left-hand corner, but the majority of it may have appeared ‘clean’ to a postal worker looking at it. During this period, great store was placed on making sure that every stamp that went through the postal system received the appropriate cancel, and postal workers were instructed to ensure that the entire stamp was cancelled. The original ‘light’ cancel may have seemed too weak to this worker who then applied a wonderful ‘socked on the nose’ Runcorn cancel on top.

And this is precisely the reason we should leave stamps on cover, as for now, we can only guess at the story that led this stamp to be in this state.

So for now, it goes into my ‘Barbados used Abroad’ stockbook, which at some point I will add to the website as a new section.