Hobart "Dumb" obliterator - fake?

[John Shepherd]

From 1861 until 1870 Hobart Town GPO used three "dumb" oval obliterators. The three types are listed in the Greenbooks Vol.1 pp.86, 88:

Type 1: 15 vertical bars
Type 2. 14 vertical bars
Type 3. 16 vertical bars

The 1/- Chalon below shows a cancel of 13 horizontal bars. Besides having the wrong number of bars the canceller seems too thick. Is it agreed that this is a fake cancel? Opinions please.

[RogerKinns]

My immediate reaction is that the cancellation looks suspect, while the stamp looks remarkably clean. If it is a faked cancel, the reason for its creation would presumably have been to increase the value of a stamp that had been fiscally used. Is there any sign of a previous ink cancellation?

[RogerKinns]

John. I don't whether this will be helpful, but I checked through my own collection to see if I have anything similar to your strike. I could not find one, but I have two examples of the Jeffreys forgery of the 4d Courier. Both are shown below. One has a dumb cancel with 10 vertical bars. The other is cancelled '75'. Jeffreys does not seem to have bothered about either the date currency or detail of his cancellations, at least in these two cases. Is he known to have forged Chalons, or faked postmarks for them?

JeffreysForgery,4dCourier,Dumb10can.jpg (38.92 KiB) Viewed 1559 times

[John Shepherd]

Hi Roger, thanks for the post. The 1/- Chalon is definitely genuine. It is in likelihood a fake postmark applied over a cleaned fiscal. The 6d and 1/-'s were heavily used as revenues so are often found with pen cancellations.

The fake dumb obliterator probably isn't a Jeffrey's cancellation - the bars seem too thick and I am unaware of him applying fake cancellations to genuine stamps.

Other forged cancels I have seen on the forged Jeffrey's 4d Couriers (and offered as genuine!) are: 53 and 57.

[RogerKinns]

John. Thanks for the response. I agree that it's most likely to be a faked cancellation on a genuine stamp, by someone other than Jeffreys. I have just received the Prestige Philately catalogue for Auction 152 on 5 December 2009. I note that your picture is part of the illustration of Lot 441 (a block of 4), which appears on Page 42 and is described as postally used. This seems highly unlikely. Will you be informing the auctioneer? Lot 440 is a block of 10 of the same stamp, described correctly as fiscally used with pen cancels removed.

[John Shepherd]

The dumb obliterator is indeed not genuine and the item has been withdrawn by the auction house.

It would be useful to create a thread on forged Tasmanian postmarks as there is presently no illustrated reference. The Tasmanian Philatelic Society forgery reference collection was dispersed over 10 years ago and no photocopy of it was kept, against my advice.

There was also a number of forged second allocation numerals carved out of leather about during the 1980s.