Thursday 20 June 2013

More Labuan


Nothing rare but may be of interest to some. Good non philatelic postal history of Labuan is costly. The place was not that big or developed and hence the volume of commercial mail tended to be much smaller than the other Bornean territories.


I had a choice of two similar post cards and somehow chosen the better one with 3c uprated by another 1c for the UPU rate to Batavia.  It was posted on 7/NOV/00, transited at Singapore on NO12/1900 and arrived at Batavia, present day Jakarta on 15/NO/1900. There is also a "departure" Labuan CDS of 8/NOV/00.
There is a message in Dutch at the back when I have not deciphered to find out whether it was actually commercial mail.



This is a rather attractive 1914 incoming registered cover from Kiefer, Oklahoma, USA.  It was posted on APR/20/1914 and took 2 days to go to New York where it transited. Then it was more than a month by sea before it arrived in Singapore on 29 MY/1914. It arrived in Labuan on 3 JN/1914. We have a D10 cancellation with an A prefix for probably morning mail. The prefixes A-D for this cancellation has been said to denote time codes for different periods during the day. The prefix could possibly extend to F as is known to be present with D8.
Registered covers are good to collect as they were obliged to have so many markings. The crayon stroke and "2", that I have little idea. And also there is the number 89541. These markings were probably to do with the batch of mail that was processed in the sorting office in New York or Singapore.

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