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©2025 FEPA. All Rights Reserved.
UK & Relevant International Laws Apply.
Main Pages:
Magazine & News:
Events:
Other Resources
©2025 FEPA. All Rights Reserved.
UK & Relevant International Laws Apply.
TRELLEBORG 2023 is coming up in September
The Bilateral Swedish-German Exhibition, TRELLEBORG 2023, is a National and Regional Philatelic and Postcard Exhibition organised by the Swedish Philatelic Federation, cooperating with clubs within the Federation. The Exhibition will take place under FEPA Recognition between 15–17 September 2023 in Söderslättshallen, Klörupsvägen 48, Trelleborg.
Details for visitors, exhibitors and dealers and much more are found on a tri-lingual website (Swedish, German and English): https://trelleborg2023.se
The organisers have already circulated two Bulletins:
Bulletin 1: https://fepanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/trelleborg_2023_bul_1.pdf
Bulletin 2: https://fepanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/trelleborg_2023_bul_2.pdf
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RPSL: The Devonshire Bowl and Plate
On 6 July 2023, the Royal Philatelic Society London ran the 3rd Devonshire Bowl One Frame competition at 15 Abchurch Lane. All members were able to participate as it was an “open” event enabling all subjects and classes recognised under existing ABPS categories to compete and enjoy the competition.
The same rules applied as in 2018 and 2022. All those attending the Royal on the day were given a voting slip (one slip per member), allowing each member to make three choices in order of their preference. A simple 3, 2, 1 point scoring was then applied. Both First and Runner Up were awarded either the “Devonshire Bowl” or “Devonshire Plate”, which will be engraved and held on display at the Royal.
The winner of the Devonshire Bowl was Chris Symonds exhibiting “GB – The Victorian 5 Shilling Postage Stamps 1867 – 1901”.
The Runner Up, who won the Devonshire Plate, was Jiří Kraus exhibiting “Dr Vaclav Vojtech – The First Czech in Antarctica”.
The winners were also presented with a bottle of Lanson Black Label Brut champagne by Alan Holyoake RDP FRPSL.
Photo: Chris Symonds (left), Alan Holyoake, Jiří Kraus, Michael J Y Roberts
[photo credit: RPSL FB account]
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Long-Lost Letters Bring Word, at Last
From The New York Times, 9 March 2023. Bryn Stole reported from London, Berlin and Oldenburg, Germany.
In a love letter from 1745 decorated with a doodle of a heart shot through with arrows, María Clara de Aialde wrote to her husband, Sebastian, a Spanish sailor working in the colonial trade with Venezuela, that she could “no longer wait” to be with him.
Later that same year, an amorous French seaman who signed his name M. Lefevre wrote from a French warship to a certain Marie-Anne Hoteé back in Brest: “Like a gunner sets fire to his cannon, I want to set fire to your powder.”
Fifty years later, a missionary in Suriname named Lene Wied, in a lonely letter back to Germany, complained that war on the high seas had choked off any news from home: “Two ships which have been taken by the French probably carried letters addressed to me.”
None of those lines ever reached their intended recipients. British warships instead snatched those letters, and scores more, from aboard merchant ships during wars from the 1650s to the early 19th century.
While the ships’ cargoes — sugar from the Caribbean, tobacco from Virginia, ivory from Guinea, enslaved people bound for the Americas — became war plunder, the papers were bundled off to so called “prize courts” in London as potential legal proof that the seizures were legitimate spoils of war.
For centuries since, the bulging boxes of those undelivered letters, seized from around 35,000 ships, sat neglected in British government storage, a kind of half-forgotten dead letter office for intercepted mail.
Poorly sorted and only vaguely cataloged, the Prize Papers, as they became known, have now begun revealing lost treasures. Archivists at Britain’s National Archives and a research team at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany are working on a joint project to sort, catalog and digitize the collection, which gives a nuanced portrait of private lives, international commerce and state power in an age of rising empires.
The project, expected to last two decades, aims to make the collection of more than 160,000 letters and hundreds of thousands of other documents, written in at least 19 languages, freely available and easily searchable online.
Read the rest of the story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/arts/prize-papers.html
[photo credit: Tom Jamieson for The New York Times]
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