Rare NZ 'bisect' stamp on auction

Photo / File

A small blue envelope carried 150 years ago from New Zealand to Edinburgh is set to fetch up to $20,000 at auction - for having just half a stamp.

The envelope cost less than three pence to send at the time, but the Victorian blue wrapper has now become a valuable collectors' item, due to the rather unusual solution found by an Otago postal clerk who had run out of sixpenny stamps.

The wrapper was addressed to William Campbell Esq of 6 Rutland Gardens, Edinburgh, Scotland, and should have been given a sixpenny stamp, the accepted rate in 1859 for any item under half an ounce posted from New Zealand to Britain.

But on January 25, 1859, the post office in Otago had run out of sixpenny stamps.

Instead, the resourceful postal clerk simply cut a one-shilling green stamp in half - now known as a "bisect" - and stuck that on the wrapper instead, as one shilling, was worth 12 pence.

Auctioneers Spink describe the bisect as "very rare", so rare, in fact, that only twenty six such bisects are known.

The envelope took 76 days, or nearly 11 weeks, to make the tortuous 10,000-mile journey half way around the world by ship, train and, possibly, camel.

From Otago, it travelled via Melbourne up the Red Sea, then overland to the Mediterranean, because the Suez Canal would not open to shipping for another ten years. It then went to Southampton and by train from there, via London, to Edinburgh.

The wrapper is set to fetch between $16,000 and $20,000 at the auction in Bloomsbury, London, on June 8.

It is the most valuable item in a 687 lot collection of British Empire stamps assembled over seventy years by the late Dublin-born collector Dr Robert Towers, who died last year.

His entire collection is expected to sell for around $600,000.

- NZPA