A Short Introduction To The Philately Of Palestine

Less than a year after the first London overprints were issued ("London I"), the Palestinian postal authorities changed suppliers for stamps: Since 1918 all stamps had been printed by the Stamping Department of the Board Of Inland Revenue, at Somerset House, London). Via Crown Agents the entire contract is placed with commercial printers Waterlow & Sons, Ltd. in London.

Waterlow created new clichées for print (T3 c) and overprint (T8), based on designs supplied by Somerset House. The new plates consist of clichés in the uniform design size of 18x21.5mm instead of the two sizes previously used (T3 a and b). The overprint cliché changes only minimally and two types can be discerned (T8 A and B):

Some values change colour and new values are added. Waterlow uses paper regular to Crown Agents stamps: with watermark W9 (Multiple Script CA). Apparently some batches of paper varied in thickness.

Perforation shows uniformly as K14, though some higher values were perforated K15:14. The height of the stamps is 24mm. The arrangement of the printing sheet remains unchanged: two panes of 120 stamps (12x10 fields) with a horizonal row of Intersecting Gutters in new type B. There are now double Jubilee Lines: in the colour of the stamp plus the colour of the overprint. Early prints show plate numbers ("Plate No. 1") in the margin; later prints have only a numerator.

Picture postcard with SG no. 74. Cancelled with JERUSALEM / A / 17 SP / 23 (Sacher B25); destined for London and forwarded to Cambridge.

The expert philatelist recognises four plate arrangements, some appear only with some values, which lead to 21 discernable types. For the overprint, two plates (A, B) were used, the latter appears clearer and has thinner type in the second line.

Numerous (new) varieties can be found on the Waterlow stamps:

1. inverted watermark;
2. numerous plate varieties, incl. E.F.F. instead of E.E.F. (10p);
3. various perforation errors (1m);
4. perforation variety in the 6th row (upper pane) and 5th row (lower pane) leading to stamps of 25mm height (5p--20p);
5. numerous overprint varieties; D-error (Hebrew 'd' instead of 'h', plate B);
6. inverted or horizontally misplaced overprint, double overprint.

The specific characteristic of this issue (especially to delimitate it from the Somerset stamps London II) is -- apart from changes to colour, watermark and perforation -- the short and blurred inverted commas (dashes) in the third, Hebrew line.

The stamps were issued, according to demand, between August (some sources list September) and November 1922. Definitive first days are therefore not known. The circulation figures (print-runs) are taken from Bale.