A Brief Glimpse of Burmese Days

The town of Bishop’s Castle, whose name always sounds like a sly move in chess, is somewhat out on a limb in the western reaches of Shropshire. Its one main street is a steep hill with unusual, offbeat shops and pubs on each side, and at the top is a Market Hall, a ‘house on stilts’ and a square (which is more trapezoidal).

Here is also Yarborough House, which sells a small but discerning selection of second-hand books and a large stock of classical music albums, and is thus a regular resort when in these parts. Its accompanying café also offers coffee and cakes, fortification which the toiler up the sharp slope might well welcome. It was well known for some years for a wild-whiskered guest cat, called The Professor. The old inn also at the top is noted for once many years ago offering winter quarters in its stables to a showground elephant, fed with buns by the eager local children. 

It was on a recent visit that my friend and colleague Mr Howard and I noticed a newly opened curio shop, which naturally warranted investigation. Now it must be confessed that books, though a paramount and abiding interest, are not our only regions of collecting. Mr H, for example, has been known to riffle through old maps and jingle through tins of coins, but both of us are also drawn to what is known as “postal history”, that is to say complete, or almost complete, stamped envelopes, and old postcards. These often offer brief stories in themselves; who were the correspondents? What do those labels, franks and endorsements signify? Some are to or from booksellers, others from more recondite trades.

A few boxes and piles of such ephemera were discovered here, and from these we each selected some tatty 1940s envelopes from Burma with interesting postal markings and wartime censorship labels. Burma was a latecomer to postage stamps, for Indian stamps were at first used: dedicated issues for Burma itself did not appear until 1938, and these envelopes date from not too long after it began as a postal authority. To fill this gap, incidentally, the eminent philatelic fantasist Gerald M. King designed a whole series of imaginary earlier Burmese issues, which look very handsome and are now quite rare themselves. He also created fanciful labels for the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. I was myself also responsible for a Burma fantasy, a 2006 souvenir stamp issue for the (genuine) 1938 canoe expedition up the Irrawaddy from its source to Mandalay by Major Rowland Raven-Hart.

The empty envelopes were addressed to a Master Clyne R.B. Stewart in Aberdeen, from a sender also called Stewart, of 375, Ahlone Road, Rangoon. One was addressed to this Mrs Stewart in Burma, sent from Nyasaland (a first day cover of the 1937 coronation omnibus issue for Nyasaland). A few were Burma first day covers, no doubt selected especially for Master Stewart, perhaps a budding philatelist.

Clyne struck me as an unusual name, and some delving has revealed a Colonel Clyne Stewart, who became Chief of Police in Burma. He had previously been in charge of a police training unit there. George Orwell served as a young man in the police force in Burma from 1922-27, an episode he detested, and it seems possible Orwell had trained under him or with him. According to Imperial War Museum sources, he knew (and seems to have disliked) Clyne Stewart, and depicted him drily, if obliquely, in his rather grim novel Burmese Days (1934).

The sender of the envelopes seems quite likely to be the wife of Colonel Stewart, presumably writing to their son. A person with the same names and initials as the boy recipient is traceable in Shrewsbury, to the NE of Bishop’s Castle, up to a few years ago. I find something intriguing about these residues of a milieu that Orwell knew. This sort of unexpected glimpse, in this case with a literary flavour, is part of the pleasure of seeking out such chance postal survivals.

(Mark Valentine)