The British Guiana One Cent Magenta: so who, then, was E.D.W.?

Update: This blog post was originally posted back in June 2014, after the last Sotheby's auction. This year, in June 2021, after a heated auction the stamp was won by Stanley Gibbons. It is now in the UK and will be on public display at a future date. The Stanley Gibbons website has more about the stamp's history, here. In the meantime, this is what I wrote back then.
 

Back in 1856, my great-great-grandfather, a postal clerk named Edmund Dalziel Wight, signed his initials to a cheap little postage stamp in British Guiana, South America, a measure taken to ensure its authenticity. Last Tuesday, over 150 years later, that tiny scrap of paper with the innocuous “EDW” squiggle went under the hammer at Sotheby’s, raising £5.6 million for its previous owner.

 

 Which, unfortunately, is not me. E.D.Wight turned out to have a Midas touch, albeit unwittingly and posthumously. That postage stamp, known as the British Guiana One Cent Black on Magenta (BoM), went on to become the Holy Grail of postage stamps, to become not only the most expensive stamp in the world but also, by weight, the most expensive object ever made.     

But for philatelists the value of the British Guiana One Cent Magenta is of a spiritual nature: it really is one-of-a-kind, a freak, unlike any other stamp in any other collection. And it’s quite literally the human touch, those initials, that creates this uniqueness and breathes life into it. The story of E.D.Wight’s role in the creation of the British Guiana One Cent Black on Magenta is a family legend. it fueled my imagination and inspired me to write a novel around the most exclusive stamp in the world.

So who, then, was the man whose innocent initials, over a century later, upgraded the little stamp now worth a small fortune?

Mary Elizabeth Wight with her son Carl

Unfortunately, even we, his descendants, know very little about him, and no photo survives. According to the research of one of my far-flung cousins, Philip Wight, he was white, of Scottish ancestry; he married twice, and with and his second wife, Gertrude, had ten children. One of these was Edward Mar Wight, who married Mary Elizabeth, who was half Amerindian; we do have a photo of her.

Edward and Mary Elizabeth had ten children: nine sons and one daughter,  Miriam, known as Mirri. Mirri was my grandmother, the mother of my mother, Eileen Cox, who became a legend in her own right in Guyana, more famous even than the great-grandfather known to the world as E.D.W., the signatory of the BG BoM.

Edward's other descendants spread out over the world; they live in Australia and Scotland, England, Germany and the USA, and one or two even remain in Guyana. For all of us, the story of the BG BoM lifts E.D.W. out of the anonymity of shadowy ancestry. He's our family legend. Even more far-flung are the descendants of Edmund, the originator of the Black on Magenta. Remember, Edward was just one of ten children! And just maybe this little scrap of paper worth so very much will bring some of us together.

Very often as a child my mother told me the story of her great-grandfather signing the stamp that was to become the most famous in the world. He was Chief Clerk at the Georgetown Post Office, and, apparently, later ran our local branch at the corner of Lamaha and

Lamaha and Carmichael St Post Office

Carmichael Streets—we lived just a block away in Lamaha St, and Mum would point out the building. Was it here that the stamp was signed? We don't know, and she can't remember.

The story of the innocent signing of a stamp that would go on to earn a fortune has always fueled my imagination. What if another one of those stamps survived within the family, I asked myself; what if great-grandad Edmund had kept one as a souvenir, and it turned up in one of those drawers packed with old junk I used to burrow through as a child? Hardly likely. The following extract from Sotheby's website paints a picture of a man heartily indifferent to the stamp he made famous:

Wight had little tolerance for the philatelic celebrity achieved by British Guiana’s early stamps. In 1889, Edward Denny Bacon, one of the first philatelists to write about the stamps of the colony, reported that E. C. Luard had told him that “Mr. Wight is still alive and living in the colony but he is in his dotage and either cannot or will not remember anything about these old stamps except that he initialed them. He has been so pestered on the subject that the mention of old stamps to him is like a red rag to a bull.

The Georgetown Main Post Office in EDW's day

This makes him sound like my sort sort of man; down-to-earth and modest and not given to the kind of publicity-seeking attention-hunger we see so much of today. He saw no need to be famous just for the mundane act of signing an ordinary postage-stamp, and he wasn't interested in five minutes of fame, or, as history would have it, centuries of the same. He did not try to capitalise on the kerfuffle being made of that "old stamp"; in fact, it annoyed him. He probably wasn't impressed with the huge amounts on money spent on a little scrap of paper (think of the starving children those millions could feed!) 

And very likely he wasn't "in his dotage" at all; after all, he had married his second wife Gertrude just five years previously, so it was probably more a case of "will not" remember rather than "cannot remember".

Postman in British Guiana

But the “what if” never left me. There's a wonderful story in there somewhere. And so, after the publication of two of my first three novels, it became the inspiration for a story in which just such a stamp turns up: a family heirloom worth millions. What if someone's cantankerous grandmother was in possession of such a stamp? What if...? So many what ifs followed. Greed, possessiveness, sentimentality: the stuff of human interaction. The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q was the result. 

When I first wrote it in 2008 it did not find a  publisher, but early this year I pulled it out, dusted it off, repaired and polished it, and prepared it for late summer publication with my present publisher, Bookouture. It seems my timing was perfect; the original stamp is now hot news, my novel timely.

I hope that E.D.W. would approve; he might not have saved us a stamp, but he has given me a story.

Recent Articles on the Sotheby's Auction:

Red-letter day for most expensive stamp  Telegraph
The ‘Mona Lisa’ of Stamps to Be Auctioned at Sotheby’s New York Times
Sotheby's to auction rare stamp British Guiana One-Cent  BBC
'Holy Grail' of stamps, British Guiana 1c Magenta, to fetch Daily Mail
British Guiana stamp could fetch $20m, says Sotheby's Economic Times/India Times
Rare stamp from murderer's estate may set record at auction ... Chicago Tribune
Remarkable story of the £12m stamp owned by a millionaire murderer that is about to become one of the most expensive objects ever sold... The Independent

Lamaha and Carmichael Street Post Office photo: © Amanda Richards
Old photos of Main Post Office and Postman with thanks to Dmitri Allicock.

Eileen Cox: a Feisty Fifties Feminist

 

Eileen Cox – A Feisty Fifties Feminist

 

By Sharon Maas

 It’s quite  a responsibility, being the daughter of Eileen Cox. She remains an icon of Guyana,  always held up to me as a model; someone whose footsteps I should follow, even as she grew old and frail. This was never so clear to me as that day at the Republic Bank; she needed me, or rather, my arm. I helped her out of the taxi and, at a snail’s pace, she hobbled up to the bank entrance on Water Street, hooked onto my elbow with one hand, her walking stick in the other.

The year was 2012. She was 94, a fragile, bent old woman, physically a shadow of what she once was, but mentally still as sharp as a razor. By this time, Mum rarely left her home in Subryanville; indeed, she rarely ever left her bedroom, but sat there all day, near the bedside phone, because, then as ever, she was still President of the Guyana Consumers Association, and people still turned to her for advice. I lived far away, in Germany, and visited when I could, usually once a year to check on things. But that day, she had business at the bank.

  As is usual in the morning, the Republic Bank lobby was crowded. People milled about, having pulled a number, and waited to be seated, while those seated waited to be called to the counter.  But then a whisper went up: It’s Eileen Cox! And the crowd before us parted like the Red Sea, and we made our slow way forward, down a corridor of smiling faces, past calls of “Good morning Miss Cox!” and “Hello Miss Cox!”; past autograph books held out for her to sign --- oh wait, I got carried away there; that didn’t happen. But it really did feel like arriving with some celebrity at the Oscars, walking up the red carpet with my shuffling mother on my arm. Mum was served first, and nobody minded.

And Mum was, in her own way, a celebrity in Guyana. I’m afraid that in my younger years I never really appreciated her; I took her for granted, as young daughters often do. But whenever I returned to Guyana and people realized she was my mother, they never failed to tell me how much she meant to them. How much she helped them. How they listened out for her on the radio, or read her Consumer Advocate columns in the Stabroek News. How they loved her. “She was a phenomenon!”  “An icon!” Taxi drivers who dropped me off at her home would say, “Wait, you’re Eileen Cox’s daughter? I drove her once!” 

So yes, I am the daughter of a Guyanese celebrity: the real kind, the deserving kind, the kind who really DID something to deserve her fame and wasn’t just famous for fame's sake. Mum was internationally respected for her consumer activity, invited to Consumer seminars and conferences around the world, from Chile to India to Canada.

She lived a public life, and her accomplishments are well known: starting with her activities as women's rights activist as a young married women, advocating for the rights of women i Public Service to keep their jobs after marriage. After her divorce when I was three, she must have been one of the very first single working mothers in the colony. Later, she was active in the Public Service Union and in the Credit Union, but it was in founding the Consumers Association that she found her final calling. She remained  the GCA's President of right up to her resignation aged 93.

As a public figure she was outspoken and very direct; but she had another side to her, a private side, that others did not see. It would be true to say that though she was not a Christian in name, she very much embodied true Christian values and ideals. She has always lived a most simple life, never expecting special favours, never living beyond her means. She loved flowers, nature, the fresh air of the sea wall. Up to her very last day, when she could no longer walk, her carer Sego would carry her downstairs so that she could enjoy the evening Atlantic breeze.

Photo below: Mum with Guyana President Dr Cheddi Jagan

She never wanted more than what she had. She cared about people regardless of race, religion, political affiliation, sex. As Hansard Editor at Guyana’s Parliament she worked hard all her life, supporting not only me but other members of her extended family – the breadwinner of the family. She was without wile and without guile; a divorcee by choice, she was married to her mission, the well-being of every single person in Guyana. At times, when I was a child, I was even jealous because I thought she spent more time helping others than being with me. But in the end it was all good, because it gave me a sense of independence and adventure, of daring to seek the unconventional. I learned that selflessness, not selfishness, is the true secret to a fulfilled life.

 Which doesn't mean being a doormat.  She taught me that there is strength and dignity in humility, in putting the needs of others before your own, in caring, in serving. These are the values she truly lived  all her life. Though she was not typical for women of her generation, these are all typically female strengths, subtle strengths that tend to go unnoticed and undervalued, crushed by the typically male "strengths" of domination and aggression, which are not strengths at all as they accomplish nothing.

Yet water wears away stone, and women have at all times and all places been the very backbone of society, precisely through those quieter strengths and values. For Mum, these strengths brought results. Men adored, respected, and bowed before her.

Yes: Mum was Guyanese royalty, for it is the heart that really rules. She died in her sleep in November 2014. She lives on in the hearts of many.

 

Sharon Maas is the author of  The Far Away Girl, The Sugar Planter’s Daughter and several other novels set in Guyana, India, France, Germany and England.

 See also:  Eileen Cox: a Tribute to my Mother