Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Hey I think I bought something from the same ebay seller! Mine came with the address in bold marker, too. LOL I wonder if we've been bidding against each other?
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Hmmm, I think mine was a buy it now, too. This was actually the second cover I've gotten from him/her that was an FDC. However, the first one had extra postage affixed. Did you also receive a few freebies?
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Here are the two covers I received; the top one had added postage
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The current fancy cancels from Canada Post (... and just about every city has one) look like the old FD postmarks. My guess is that the Post Office is assuming they were cancelled for a collector, using the current fancy cancels, and are not reading the date.
David
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"My guess is that the Post Office is assuming they were cancelled for a collector, using the current fancy cancels, and are not reading the date."
Another possibility is that some post office has lots of old, unsold, first day covers which are bound for the trash can. This seller buys them at the post office, maybe at a discount, adds additional postage as required, and mails it then and there. Is that even possible?
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Ravi, yes, that is possible. The entire first class, or airmail, or whatever service must be paid at time of mailing, regardless of amount of face already on the envelope, as that mail has already been cancelled and is no longer valid for moving the mail.
Because Canada Poste is the primary supplier of official FDCs, your scenario makes sense. Whether that's what happened....
David
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Philatelia, Wow, i see what you mean..could be the same dude...i buy quite a bit from him at the Orapex show every year..but i do not care for taking a chance through the mails !!!
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David's response is right on the mark. I called Brian Grand Duff (owner of All Nations Stamps & Coins in Vancouver) to ask what his understanding of the "legality" of posting official Canadian FDC's. He's been in the stamp trade all of his life (I'm not sure of his age, but he's at least 50), but with all of that experience he's uncertain if Canada Post has any regulations concerning the use of FDCs.
One of the problems is that the bulk of Canada Post's business is carried out in postal substations, which are commercial sales outlets franchised by Canada Post, staffed by the employees of stores where they are located or operated as independent franchises. (At least I think that "defines" the meaning of "postal substation" in Canada.) The people who staff the substations work at arm's length from Canada Post, are poorly trained, and normally have zero knowledge of or interest in philately. I suspect that if you bought an FDC from a substation and wanted to mail it, the clerk might refuse to accept it, or might agree, or might ask you to pay regular postage on top of the cost of the FDC. To illustrate their general lack of knowledge:
• I once took some used, uncancelled Canadian stamps to a postal outlet to get them cancelled and thus make them "collectible". The clerk refused, saying it was illegal to cancel them.
• I once asked if I could hand cancel stamps on a letter I was sending. The clerk refused. Another time, when I asked the same thing, the clerk immediately handed me the hand-cancellation device they were using for the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
• I once volunteered to mail out my stamp club's newsletters, before we started publishing the newsletter in electronic form, and we had almost 100 newsletters to mail. Previously, we had been paying the standard 1st class rate, but on one occasion, the clerk at a substation told me the postage cost would be double what we had been paying. I went to another substation, and mailed them at the rate we'd been paying all along. It's possible that the scale at the first substation was inaccurate, but I was not impressed!
Anyway, back to FDCs: An individual clerk or post office employee might accept an FDC as sold, or might not. You takes your chances, as with so much in life these days!
Bob
P.S. On July 19, I ordered, on-line, a recent Canadian FDC from Canada Post. According to an email, the cover was posted to me on July 23, presumably from Ottawa. As of yesterday, I had not received it. An order of a cover from Great Britain arrived a couple of weeks ago; transit time was two days!
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Bob:
I went to an RPO (Retail Postal Outlet... what you're calling a sub-station) and used semi-postals from the 76 Olympics. Looking at the 15 + 5 denomination asked me "That's 20-cents, eh?"
Stupid is as stupid does!
David
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Hi: For what it is worth, I have received several shipments from Australia in a FDC with additional postage added. If memory serves me right Snowy12 had the same experience and he lives in Australia.
Hi Bryne! Is it legal in Australia to use old FDCs and add additional postage. I was under the assumption that once the FDC is cancelled it was no longer postage. These FDCs were issued back in the 90s.
My guess was that the Post Office just missed the items. I no longer buy from those sellers.
Always an angle!
Cheers
Lyall
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there is nothing wrong with using an old FDC; it's an inert thing. The stamps no longer have franking power.
David
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I agree with you David, but the cancelled stamps were used as the bulk of the mailing costs.
I took the time to check the 'Feedback Status' on both my sellers who used FDCs as postage. One had eight(8) negative feedbacks all for the same reason, items not received. One negative feed back stated, 'still using FDCs to mail items'. Not one feedback was for any other reason.
One feedback stated, item received with postage due. I wonder how many mailings ended up being returned to the seller. Does the Post Office still pursue postage due charges?
As far as I am concerned they are cheaters. They charge the buyer s/h and use postage off of old FDCs to mail the items. I want nothing to do with those sellers.
Cheers
Lyall
P.S. A thousand pardons, Brian, I spelt your first name incorrectly.
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"Hi Bryne! Is it legal in Australia to use old FDCs and add additional postage. I was under the assumption that once the FDC is cancelled it was no longer postage. These FDCs were issued back in the 90s.
"
It is not legal to use older cancelled First day covers,as far as I know.even though some eBay sellers still do it .I even had a couple of covers were the sender had used CTO stamps on the cover???
Brian
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02:08:47pm
".... As far as I am concerned they are cheaters. They charge the buyer s/h and use postage off of old FDCs to mail the items. I want nothing to do with those sellers. ...."
As far as I am concerned the whole FDC concoction is a scam.
Except for stamps actually used to carry mail and canceled on the actual first day of use.
It has been known and admitted for a long time that many stamps and blocks that bear an FDC were cancelled before, or after, the sacred day of issue, often at a completely different venue, so I do not understand what in the world they are supposed to represent.
They are simply contrived souvenirs, like the cheap pot metal Statue of Liberty souvenirs sold in downtown Manhattan that were made in Japan after WW II, the gold plated stamp bars or some of those genuine souvenir plates sold on late night TV.
One of my cousins has a collection of the latter on shelves that line more than one wall of her house commemorating the lives or deaths of people she never met, places she never visited and anniversaries she can't explain.
I especially enjoy soaking the stamps off souvenir FDC covers, separating the stamps and mixing them in with stamps for kids. My secret perverse pleasure, please do not tell anyone ho collects those contrived assaults on collectors pocketbooks..
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I agree completely with everything you said, cdj1122, and yet I still collect (or more correctly, select) FDCs and other covers that have one or more of the following characteristics:
1) a cachet that in some way complements or enhances the beauty of a particular stamp, like a foil to a set stone
2) a cachet or other cover artwork that holds exceptional artistic merit for me: subject, technique, originality, and cleverness of execution (which, for me, excludes 99% of all FDCs)
3) a cover that holds some personal interest for me (issued in my home town, etc.)
4) a cover that exemplifies some aspect of postal history in which I am interested (although I am not a serious postal historian)
Obviously, none of these criteria are related to actual first days of issue, which are indeed on the whole philatelically contrived and, therefore, postally bogus.
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The reason i posted the thread was...i had sent $25.00 for stamps i was very much looking forward to receiving...i did receive the stamps in the FDC envelope..no additional franking..but i felt the seller took a heck of a chance posting them the way he did .
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i am looking at a 1953 Netherlands FDC...the contrived one..without address catalogs 300 euros(no one pays anywhere near that figure) Yet the same first day cover that went through the mail stream to a collectors address only "catalogs" 65 euros. I am past the first day cover experience but its still weird.
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06:51:32am
The important thing, Douglas, is that you gain enjoyment from whatever you collect.
At one time in the distant past people searched for stamps on a cover or at least with a clear date stamp that demonstrated the Earliest Known Usage (EKU) because stamp agencies simply did not announce such information either in advance or later.
Nor did they announce the change of a printing plate. Collectors often found differences between seemingly identical stamps. The question they wanted to answer was if a second or third plate had replaced the original and when those events occurred. To do that they studied thousand of strips, multiple overlapping blocks and plate blocks to find minor characteristics so they could reconstruct the entire plate and identify the column and row a given stamp was at the time of its printing. One example that comes to mind is the work of Dr. Caroll Chase completely plating the three plates used to print the 3¢ Us stamp of the 1850s. ( If my memory hasn't failed me.)
To such specialists a proven FDC or EKU was invaluable.
That led to an interest in FDCs that bore decorative artwork that interested many collectors.
I agree that many decorative covers carry attractive cachets that may appeal to a collector or add something of interest to a stamp collection.
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In addition to cdj1111's comments, there is this: FDCs and other philatelic covers may represent the only or almost the only use of particular stamps. I'm currently working with covers from Occupied Jersey and Guernsey. Very few postally used covers from that period are available, so philatelic items at least have the advantage of proving that the stamps, which were designed and printed locally, were valid for postage. (The fdc's are not official, but created by collectors.) And there are thousands of philatelic covers from the Channel Islands available, usually for very little money. Collectively, they give evidence that there were a lot of postal history collectors who had a lot of time on their hands!
One type of Channel Islands cover exhibits evidence of wartime shortages in Guernsey. Postal workers didn't have a slug to represent the second numeral "1" in 1941, so they filed a "0" slug to make a sort-of one. Below is an image of a cover in my collection, and a hi-res image of the cancellation. (Note that the cover is franked with a KGV bisect, which was legal for a time because post offices were running out of British stamps and the occupation stamps had not yet become available, and perhaps hadn't even been designed or printed. More evidence of wartime shortages in the Channel Islands.)
I occasionally buy first day covers because they just look so nice! My most recent one (actually a letter card) shows an artistic rendition of the 25 Pounder field gun, which is one of my minor collecting interests. British and Canadian practice allowed a foreword artillery observer to call in combined fire on a target from a dozen or more 25 Pounders, enough to destroy a German tank although each shell alone was insufficient for the job. One of Canada's War Issue stamps, the Munitions issue, shows the gun in a munitions factory. My new FDC, I think, will make an attractive l addition to a web page or exhibit sheet. I could not care less that it's purely a philatelic emission.
Bob
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beautiful cover, Bob. It's the sort of cover I'd love to have for my militaria collection, although it's far less specialized than yours.
question about the 25 pounder? British Fireflies (uparmed Sherman M4s) were armed with 17 pounders and were considered tank destroyers. It was probably equivalent to German 88 or US 90 mm. So, isn't a 25 pounder a pretty big gun?
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Beautiful cover, alright, and for a number of reasons. Love it!
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Disclaimer: I ain't no artillery export! 
I think the answer to David's question might have to do with different types of shells (armour piercing vs. general purpose high-explosive, for example) or velocity.
Everything I know about the 25-pounder came from the Canadian trilogy, Where the Hell are the Guns?, The Guns of Normandy, and The Guns of Victory, which I read so long ago that I definitely need to read them again. Herte's the cover of the first volume:
Hands down, these books are the finest example of combat journalism I have ever read. The author, George C. Blackburn, was a journalist in Ontario who became a forward artillery observer in the Royal Canadian Army. The books trace his military experiences from early training in Ontario, when they had no guns, much less shells, and learned about trajectories by throwing rocks into a pond, through the D-Day landings, and the end of the war in Germany.
Note to David (and other military buffs): If you die before reading these books, don't blame me. You may go to heaven, but you'll always wonder why you didn't follow Bob's advice. I'll make it easy for you — to go to this ABE.com page and order them! Do it now!
A few years ago here in Vancouver, just a few blocks from my apartment, I was privileged to attend the funeral procession of Smokey Smith, Canada's last living recipient of the Victoria Cross, the British equivalent of the Medal of Honor. In Italy, he single-handedly took out a German tank and killed a bunch of German soldiers, saving the day (that day, at least) for Canadian troops. His coffin was carried on a 25-pounder pulled by a gun tractor. Here's one of my photos:
And another:
Bob
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I did a quick google (is google really a verb), and came up with the following wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_QF_25-pounder. Probably not as good a read as Bob's suggested reading it is still interesting.
The '25' in 25 pounder simply refers to the weight of the shell that was used with the gun.
As an aside, I work with the CO of the regiment being celebrated on Bob's FDC.
Alyn
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Bob,
I have never read one of your recommendations where I didn't think it exquisite
probably right about velocity. The stamp pictures what I think to be a howitzer, where velocity is less important.
thanks, and thanks for the extra personal touch that often accompanies your answers. It pays to ask dumb stuff to get such stunning answers.
David
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Hey I think I bought something from the same ebay seller! Mine came with the address in bold marker, too. LOL I wonder if we've been bidding against each other?
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Hmmm, I think mine was a buy it now, too. This was actually the second cover I've gotten from him/her that was an FDC. However, the first one had extra postage affixed. Did you also receive a few freebies?
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Here are the two covers I received; the top one had added postage
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
The current fancy cancels from Canada Post (... and just about every city has one) look like the old FD postmarks. My guess is that the Post Office is assuming they were cancelled for a collector, using the current fancy cancels, and are not reading the date.
David
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07:39:44pm
re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
"My guess is that the Post Office is assuming they were cancelled for a collector, using the current fancy cancels, and are not reading the date."
Another possibility is that some post office has lots of old, unsold, first day covers which are bound for the trash can. This seller buys them at the post office, maybe at a discount, adds additional postage as required, and mails it then and there. Is that even possible?
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Ravi, yes, that is possible. The entire first class, or airmail, or whatever service must be paid at time of mailing, regardless of amount of face already on the envelope, as that mail has already been cancelled and is no longer valid for moving the mail.
Because Canada Poste is the primary supplier of official FDCs, your scenario makes sense. Whether that's what happened....
David
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Philatelia, Wow, i see what you mean..could be the same dude...i buy quite a bit from him at the Orapex show every year..but i do not care for taking a chance through the mails !!!
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
David's response is right on the mark. I called Brian Grand Duff (owner of All Nations Stamps & Coins in Vancouver) to ask what his understanding of the "legality" of posting official Canadian FDC's. He's been in the stamp trade all of his life (I'm not sure of his age, but he's at least 50), but with all of that experience he's uncertain if Canada Post has any regulations concerning the use of FDCs.
One of the problems is that the bulk of Canada Post's business is carried out in postal substations, which are commercial sales outlets franchised by Canada Post, staffed by the employees of stores where they are located or operated as independent franchises. (At least I think that "defines" the meaning of "postal substation" in Canada.) The people who staff the substations work at arm's length from Canada Post, are poorly trained, and normally have zero knowledge of or interest in philately. I suspect that if you bought an FDC from a substation and wanted to mail it, the clerk might refuse to accept it, or might agree, or might ask you to pay regular postage on top of the cost of the FDC. To illustrate their general lack of knowledge:
• I once took some used, uncancelled Canadian stamps to a postal outlet to get them cancelled and thus make them "collectible". The clerk refused, saying it was illegal to cancel them.
• I once asked if I could hand cancel stamps on a letter I was sending. The clerk refused. Another time, when I asked the same thing, the clerk immediately handed me the hand-cancellation device they were using for the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
• I once volunteered to mail out my stamp club's newsletters, before we started publishing the newsletter in electronic form, and we had almost 100 newsletters to mail. Previously, we had been paying the standard 1st class rate, but on one occasion, the clerk at a substation told me the postage cost would be double what we had been paying. I went to another substation, and mailed them at the rate we'd been paying all along. It's possible that the scale at the first substation was inaccurate, but I was not impressed!
Anyway, back to FDCs: An individual clerk or post office employee might accept an FDC as sold, or might not. You takes your chances, as with so much in life these days!
Bob
P.S. On July 19, I ordered, on-line, a recent Canadian FDC from Canada Post. According to an email, the cover was posted to me on July 23, presumably from Ottawa. As of yesterday, I had not received it. An order of a cover from Great Britain arrived a couple of weeks ago; transit time was two days!
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Bob:
I went to an RPO (Retail Postal Outlet... what you're calling a sub-station) and used semi-postals from the 76 Olympics. Looking at the 15 + 5 denomination asked me "That's 20-cents, eh?"
Stupid is as stupid does!
David
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06:33:27pm
re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Hi: For what it is worth, I have received several shipments from Australia in a FDC with additional postage added. If memory serves me right Snowy12 had the same experience and he lives in Australia.
Hi Bryne! Is it legal in Australia to use old FDCs and add additional postage. I was under the assumption that once the FDC is cancelled it was no longer postage. These FDCs were issued back in the 90s.
My guess was that the Post Office just missed the items. I no longer buy from those sellers.
Always an angle!
Cheers
Lyall
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
there is nothing wrong with using an old FDC; it's an inert thing. The stamps no longer have franking power.
David
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08:39:32pm
re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
I agree with you David, but the cancelled stamps were used as the bulk of the mailing costs.
I took the time to check the 'Feedback Status' on both my sellers who used FDCs as postage. One had eight(8) negative feedbacks all for the same reason, items not received. One negative feed back stated, 'still using FDCs to mail items'. Not one feedback was for any other reason.
One feedback stated, item received with postage due. I wonder how many mailings ended up being returned to the seller. Does the Post Office still pursue postage due charges?
As far as I am concerned they are cheaters. They charge the buyer s/h and use postage off of old FDCs to mail the items. I want nothing to do with those sellers.
Cheers
Lyall
P.S. A thousand pardons, Brian, I spelt your first name incorrectly.
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
"Hi Bryne! Is it legal in Australia to use old FDCs and add additional postage. I was under the assumption that once the FDC is cancelled it was no longer postage. These FDCs were issued back in the 90s.
"
It is not legal to use older cancelled First day covers,as far as I know.even though some eBay sellers still do it .I even had a couple of covers were the sender had used CTO stamps on the cover???
Brian
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
04 Aug 2014
02:08:47pm
re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
".... As far as I am concerned they are cheaters. They charge the buyer s/h and use postage off of old FDCs to mail the items. I want nothing to do with those sellers. ...."
As far as I am concerned the whole FDC concoction is a scam.
Except for stamps actually used to carry mail and canceled on the actual first day of use.
It has been known and admitted for a long time that many stamps and blocks that bear an FDC were cancelled before, or after, the sacred day of issue, often at a completely different venue, so I do not understand what in the world they are supposed to represent.
They are simply contrived souvenirs, like the cheap pot metal Statue of Liberty souvenirs sold in downtown Manhattan that were made in Japan after WW II, the gold plated stamp bars or some of those genuine souvenir plates sold on late night TV.
One of my cousins has a collection of the latter on shelves that line more than one wall of her house commemorating the lives or deaths of people she never met, places she never visited and anniversaries she can't explain.
I especially enjoy soaking the stamps off souvenir FDC covers, separating the stamps and mixing them in with stamps for kids. My secret perverse pleasure, please do not tell anyone ho collects those contrived assaults on collectors pocketbooks..
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
I agree completely with everything you said, cdj1122, and yet I still collect (or more correctly, select) FDCs and other covers that have one or more of the following characteristics:
1) a cachet that in some way complements or enhances the beauty of a particular stamp, like a foil to a set stone
2) a cachet or other cover artwork that holds exceptional artistic merit for me: subject, technique, originality, and cleverness of execution (which, for me, excludes 99% of all FDCs)
3) a cover that holds some personal interest for me (issued in my home town, etc.)
4) a cover that exemplifies some aspect of postal history in which I am interested (although I am not a serious postal historian)
Obviously, none of these criteria are related to actual first days of issue, which are indeed on the whole philatelically contrived and, therefore, postally bogus.
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
The reason i posted the thread was...i had sent $25.00 for stamps i was very much looking forward to receiving...i did receive the stamps in the FDC envelope..no additional franking..but i felt the seller took a heck of a chance posting them the way he did .
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
i am looking at a 1953 Netherlands FDC...the contrived one..without address catalogs 300 euros(no one pays anywhere near that figure) Yet the same first day cover that went through the mail stream to a collectors address only "catalogs" 65 euros. I am past the first day cover experience but its still weird.
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
05 Aug 2014
06:51:32am
re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
The important thing, Douglas, is that you gain enjoyment from whatever you collect.
At one time in the distant past people searched for stamps on a cover or at least with a clear date stamp that demonstrated the Earliest Known Usage (EKU) because stamp agencies simply did not announce such information either in advance or later.
Nor did they announce the change of a printing plate. Collectors often found differences between seemingly identical stamps. The question they wanted to answer was if a second or third plate had replaced the original and when those events occurred. To do that they studied thousand of strips, multiple overlapping blocks and plate blocks to find minor characteristics so they could reconstruct the entire plate and identify the column and row a given stamp was at the time of its printing. One example that comes to mind is the work of Dr. Caroll Chase completely plating the three plates used to print the 3¢ Us stamp of the 1850s. ( If my memory hasn't failed me.)
To such specialists a proven FDC or EKU was invaluable.
That led to an interest in FDCs that bore decorative artwork that interested many collectors.
I agree that many decorative covers carry attractive cachets that may appeal to a collector or add something of interest to a stamp collection.
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
In addition to cdj1111's comments, there is this: FDCs and other philatelic covers may represent the only or almost the only use of particular stamps. I'm currently working with covers from Occupied Jersey and Guernsey. Very few postally used covers from that period are available, so philatelic items at least have the advantage of proving that the stamps, which were designed and printed locally, were valid for postage. (The fdc's are not official, but created by collectors.) And there are thousands of philatelic covers from the Channel Islands available, usually for very little money. Collectively, they give evidence that there were a lot of postal history collectors who had a lot of time on their hands!
One type of Channel Islands cover exhibits evidence of wartime shortages in Guernsey. Postal workers didn't have a slug to represent the second numeral "1" in 1941, so they filed a "0" slug to make a sort-of one. Below is an image of a cover in my collection, and a hi-res image of the cancellation. (Note that the cover is franked with a KGV bisect, which was legal for a time because post offices were running out of British stamps and the occupation stamps had not yet become available, and perhaps hadn't even been designed or printed. More evidence of wartime shortages in the Channel Islands.)
I occasionally buy first day covers because they just look so nice! My most recent one (actually a letter card) shows an artistic rendition of the 25 Pounder field gun, which is one of my minor collecting interests. British and Canadian practice allowed a foreword artillery observer to call in combined fire on a target from a dozen or more 25 Pounders, enough to destroy a German tank although each shell alone was insufficient for the job. One of Canada's War Issue stamps, the Munitions issue, shows the gun in a munitions factory. My new FDC, I think, will make an attractive l addition to a web page or exhibit sheet. I could not care less that it's purely a philatelic emission.
Bob
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
beautiful cover, Bob. It's the sort of cover I'd love to have for my militaria collection, although it's far less specialized than yours.
question about the 25 pounder? British Fireflies (uparmed Sherman M4s) were armed with 17 pounders and were considered tank destroyers. It was probably equivalent to German 88 or US 90 mm. So, isn't a 25 pounder a pretty big gun?
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Beautiful cover, alright, and for a number of reasons. Love it!
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Disclaimer: I ain't no artillery export! I think the answer to David's question might have to do with different types of shells (armour piercing vs. general purpose high-explosive, for example) or velocity.
Everything I know about the 25-pounder came from the Canadian trilogy, Where the Hell are the Guns?, The Guns of Normandy, and The Guns of Victory, which I read so long ago that I definitely need to read them again. Herte's the cover of the first volume:
Hands down, these books are the finest example of combat journalism I have ever read. The author, George C. Blackburn, was a journalist in Ontario who became a forward artillery observer in the Royal Canadian Army. The books trace his military experiences from early training in Ontario, when they had no guns, much less shells, and learned about trajectories by throwing rocks into a pond, through the D-Day landings, and the end of the war in Germany.
Note to David (and other military buffs): If you die before reading these books, don't blame me. You may go to heaven, but you'll always wonder why you didn't follow Bob's advice. I'll make it easy for you — to go to this ABE.com page and order them! Do it now!
A few years ago here in Vancouver, just a few blocks from my apartment, I was privileged to attend the funeral procession of Smokey Smith, Canada's last living recipient of the Victoria Cross, the British equivalent of the Medal of Honor. In Italy, he single-handedly took out a German tank and killed a bunch of German soldiers, saving the day (that day, at least) for Canadian troops. His coffin was carried on a 25-pounder pulled by a gun tractor. Here's one of my photos:
And another:
Bob
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
I did a quick google (is google really a verb), and came up with the following wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_QF_25-pounder. Probably not as good a read as Bob's suggested reading it is still interesting.
The '25' in 25 pounder simply refers to the weight of the shell that was used with the gun.
As an aside, I work with the CO of the regiment being celebrated on Bob's FDC.
Alyn
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re: receive order in a first day cover postmarked 1998 !
Bob,
I have never read one of your recommendations where I didn't think it exquisite
probably right about velocity. The stamp pictures what I think to be a howitzer, where velocity is less important.
thanks, and thanks for the extra personal touch that often accompanies your answers. It pays to ask dumb stuff to get such stunning answers.
David
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