Some Insights on Identifying Netherlands Indies Cancels

Some Insights on Identifying Netherlands Indies Cancels

By Stuart Leven

Collecting cancels of some postal administrations is easier than with others. When I first started collecting cancels as a step up from collecting mint and used stamps I selected Sarawak which had about 25 post offices listed at the time and New Guinea, which had even less. Since I had illustrations of all the cancels available from various reference handbooks, this made collecting and identifying the cancels somewhat easy. Simply superimposing a stamp with a partial cancel on the illustrations would in most cases allow you to easily identify the cancel.

However, collecting cancels of the Netherlands East Indies presented real challenges. I started with squared circle cancels of 1893 to 1916 which listed some 250 post offices. Possession of a good reference catalogue that illustrates all the town and station cancels, and a recently purchased starter collection is a real advantage. But there are still obstacles to face – if you do not have the beginning letters of the town name it is difficult to come up with the towns given in the cancel listing.

A long time collector of Netherlands Indies supplied me with the reference tools I have used to identify the squared circle cancels. This was in the form of a reverse spelling list of all 250 towns which is an alphabetically ordered list of all the town names spelled backwards. This allowed me to identify town names with just the last few letters. Only the middle letters posed a problem.

As I expanded the types of cancels I collected into straight line, train-stop cancels and the short- and long bar cancels(I think the long bar cancel has some 800 plus towns), I found that only lists of towns existed in the reference materials. It was time to generate a new help-tool.

Paul Bulterman’s book includes a list of towns and all the cancel types used at those towns and even some alternate spellings used by the towns. There are simply too many towns to search each for a combination of letters to find the town’s name. It is time to get my computer involved to generate a database to help with identification. I chose the database program PARADOXwhich allowed me to search(query) only a few letters of the town name to generate a list of possibilities. It took about a month to code the database with all the town names and all the types of cancels for each town and each spelling variation.

With these new tools I wasnow ready to start the process of identifying stamps with only part of the town cancel. To summarize, if you have the start of the town name you have all of them listed in one place in the lists of cancels types and in the cancel albums. The database is no longer needed here.

Fig. 1. Cancel number 1

Let’s start with a stamp with only the last four letters of the town name LANG on a long bar cancel (Fig. 1). My search gives me 14 towns ending in LANG of which 11 have used long bar cancels. My next step is to look at the

proportion of the letters and the arc on the long bar on the stamp to try to guess the number of letters in the town name. In this case it is maybe 75% of the entire town name. This allows me to eliminate all the towns with more than seven letters or less the six. Now I am down to only three possible towns. If you have a part of the next letter that might be the leg of an A or R you can eliminate maybe more as O, E and T will not fit, but the three towns all have A as the next letter.

That leaves only three towns to work on: TJALANG, MALANG and GALANG. First we need to determine which type of long bar cancel we have. Bulterman’s handbook lists eight types and even more are listed by the Study Group Zuid West Pacific(ZWP). This one is a Bulterman type LB2. First we go to the TJALANG album page in the collection and compare our cancel with the LB2s there. There’s almost a match, but the letters are a little different and the bars in the outer ring biffage(or dashes in the outer ring) are different. Notice the TJALANG over the point of the second A ‘ ‘ (no bar) where our cancel has the bar over the A ‘-‘ (suggesting the possibility that more then one type of LB2 cancel exists) so we can eliminate TJALANG. Next on to MALANG we find that no type LB2 is present near the date on our cancel. Lastly, there is GALANG, for which we have several examples with the complete image of cancel. We have a match of letter size and spacing, the cancel type is correct and the bars in the biffage match. Our cancel is GALANG.

Fig. 2. Cancel number 2

Now let us look at one with some letters in the middle of the town name ALA – (Fig.2). Here the dash indicates a long town name with part continued in the lower arc of the cancel. We also see ANG in the bottom arc. If my database could sort both groupings of letters at one time it would save a little time. However a sort on ALA (I did not code the hyphen) gives me 66 hits, but after noting where the ALA is in the town name and with an ending of ANG – I am left with only four possibilities: KOEALASIMPANG, PADALARANG, SEGALAHERANG and TJIPADALARANG. We can eliminate SEGALAHERANG because it did not open until 1943 and TJIPALARANG did not have a type LB cancels.

Now let’s check to see if the two cancels we have left used the split name type. For this we go to Peter Storm van Leeuwen’s book which lists all the variations of spelling, hyphens and split names. This allows us to eliminate PADALARANG leaving only KOEALASIMPANG. The cancel type is a Bulterman type LB1 and a check of the 3 types of LB1 cancels for KOEALASIMPANG gives us a match on one of them.

There are two basic systems to classify the long bar cancels, the first is listed in the Bulterman handbook published in 1981 which classifies the long bar cancels into eight basic types (Fig.3).

Fig. 3. Bulterman longbar classification chart

This system has four types with both solid and broken outer circle. I found that the number of vertical bars in sections "B" & "D" differ in the cancels and the crosses in the "E" section differed in number and style from the same towns. In my classification I added some code letters to cover some of the differences.

I used this system for some 10 years until the second classifying system came along in the ZWP publication of 1999 (Fig. 5.). This system covers many more of the variables, which included some I had not noted while using the Bulterman system.

The ZWP system has 15basic types but other cancel features are looked at in the cancel identification files that are listed for each town,such as,biffage and dicht (a major consideration in the Bulterman system). The placement of crosses on the cancels with the biffage outer circle is also looked at (a code here would be - 3.5 - 11 - 4). This would correspond to the cross at the left being 3.5 biffage from the bottom of the date bar, the second is 11 and third is down 4 from the right side. There are a few drawbacks for the ZWP system. If you do not have a complete strike of the cancel you may not be able do the fine tuning on the identification or for types 12 through 15, i.e.,if you do not have a "3" in the date you can not tell if it is round or flat type.

A

B

C

D

E

Fig. 4. Diagram of cancel sections as referred to in this article.

Fig. 5. The ZWP classification chart

Now let us classify Cancel number 1 using both systems.

1) Bulterman – our cancel has the narrow date bar and the 12 hour date code system - and biffage outer ring making it easy to come up with type LB2.

2) ZWP – our cancel is also identified by the same points with the exception of biffage identification as type 1 or LS10G1 biffage.

LS = the vertical bars do not touch the inner ring of sections "A" & "E"

10 = 10 vertical bars

G1 = the 12 hour date system

and Cancel number 2 in both systems.

1) Bulterman – our cancel has wide date bar, the 12 hour dating system and biffage outer ring which give us type LB1.

2) ZWP – our cancel has the wide date bar, 12 vertical bars which touch the inner circles, the 12 hour date system with large letter "V" give us an easy identification of type 2 or KOEALA - / SIMPANG LB12G1 biffage (no dash after KOEALA would result in another type listed as KOEALA / SIMPANG LB12G1 biffage).

LB bars touch inner circle

12 = 12 bars

G1 = the 12 hour date system

In conclusion, it tends to get more complex to identify cancels the more you study them.

References:

Paul Bulterman. Poststemples Nederlands Indie 1864-1950. Kunstdrukkerij Mercurius, Wormerveer, Nederland. 1981. 579 pg.

Peter Storm van Leeuwen. PoststempelCatalogus Nederlands Indie 1864-1942. Nederlandsche Vereeniging van Postzegelhandelaren, Den Haag. 1995. 236 pg.

De Langebalkstempels Ingedeeld in Typen. In:Mededelingenblad van de Studie Groep Zuid West Pacific (ZWP). 32e Jaargang No. 2 (number 122). mei 1999.