Pietersburg

In mid-1900 the occupation of Pretoria by the British army became inevitable and the government of the Republic moved east and north to Pietersburg. The postal service in the unoccupied parts of the Republic continued to operate but stocks of stamps quickly became exhausted. Improvised stamps were therefore authorised and printed using the presses of the Pietersburg newspaper De Zoutpansberg Wachter.

The stamps were printed in black on coloured paper, and initialled by the Controller, J. T. de v. Smit (who must have had quite a time, since some 40,000 stamps were printed!). Most are initialled in black, but some are in red.

Six different values were printed:

• ½d green
• 1d rose
• 2d orange
• 4d blue
• 6d green
• 1s yellow

Since these were a hastily contrived temporary issue, it is easy to plate most examples. Robson Lowe (in The Encyclopedia of British Empire Stamps, Vol 2. Part 1) states that the stamps were printed in sheets of 20 (four rows of five stamps) and defines three "types":

• type 1: has the 'P' of POSTZEGEL larger than the remaining letters, and large figures in the date '1901'. This type formed rows 1 and 2 of the sheet.
• type 2: has the large 'P' but small figures in the date. This type formed row 3 of the sheet.
• type 3: the 'P' is the same size as the other letters and has small figures in the date. This type forms row 4 of the sheet.

I have however seen sheets of the ½d and 1d comprised of ten rows of six stamps (it's possible that these were forgeries, of course; they looked genuine, but I was not able to examine them in detail. Alternatively, they could have been proof sheets of some kind).

According to Robson Lowe and subsequently repeated (e.g. in the SACC), the 1d value went on sale in March 1901 and the remainder in April 1901. The issue was a fleeting one as the British captured Pietersburg on April 9th 1901, so mint copies are relatively common but genuinely used ones are very rare. The stamp below appears however to be genuine. It bears most of a NYLSTROOM CDS dated 31 MRT 01 (MRT = Maart, which is Dutch for March). If genuine, this stamp indicates that 2d stamps at least were being used before the supposed release date.

This is a typical mint example of the same stamp: