Friday 27 April 2012

Retour again

It really has been the month for postal history. This incoming cover from Switzerland to Brunei has to be philatelic with all these nice stamps arranged in a very attractive fashion. It was posted in Basel on 8th December 1930 with a registration label. It has been marked in red (? by convention)  as "Unknown Unclaimed Retour".

The back of the cover has a lot of interesting markings. Firstly, there is a Singapore Registration cancellation dated 1030am 31 DE 1930. The letter has taken 23 days to reach Singapore probably via one of the Mediterranean ports such as Marseilles after being transported by train.
It took another week to reach Brunei on 7 JAN 31. The postmark for Brunei is quite interesting. It looks like Proud D7 but with year missing the first 2 digits. Not only that, the year 31 is placed more to the right.
It was marked as "Undelivered Unknown" in red. They must have tried their very best as the letter went back to Singapore on 9 Mar 1931 as seen by the faint registration cancellation after 2 months. One can speculate whether this Mr Edgar Writhlington ever existed for it would not have been difficult to trace him in a small place like Brunei.
Finally, the letter was returned to Basel arriving on 4 April 1931.
I have decided that, in future, I should be showing interesting items from the other parts of British Borneo.

 An unrelated Retour item from Penang. Maybe interesting for some. This is relatively recent cover from 1955. It has the marking RETOUR in violet(by convention?) and again writing in red for "retour" and "no such number"

As it was on government service, no postage applied when it was sent back to the sender, the treasurer of the Penang & North Malaya Motor Club. Could have been done with a better cachet from the Dead Letter Office.

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