Mauritius "Post Office" stamps

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00:00World Stamps

00:10Mauritius Post Office Stamps

00:14The Mauritius Post Office Stamps

00:16were issued by the British colony Mauritius

00:19in September 1847 in two denominations

00:23an orange-red one penny

00:26and a deep-blue two pence.

00:29Their name comes from the wording on the stamps reading Post Office

00:33which was soon changed in the next issue to Post Paid.

00:37They are among the rarest postage stamps in the world.

00:40They were engraved by Joseph Osmond Bernard,

00:44born in England in 1816.

00:48The designs were based on the then-current issue

00:51of Great Britain Stamps, first released in 1841.

00:56Bearing the profile head of Queen Victoria

00:59and issued in two denominations in similar colours,

01:02one penny-red-brown and two pence-blue.

01:06In 1928, Georges Brunel published

01:10Le Timbre Post de Il Maurice,

01:13in which he stated that the use of the words

01:16Post Office on the 1847 issue had been an error.

01:20Over the years, the story was embellished.

01:23One version was that the man who produced the stamps,

01:27Joseph Bernard, was a half-blind watchmaker

01:31and an old man who absentmindedly forgot what he was supposed to print on the stamps.

01:37On his way from his shop to visit the postmaster, a Mr. Brownrigg,

01:42he passed a Post Office with a sign hanging above it.

01:45This provided the necessary jog to his memory

01:48and he returned to his work and finished engraving the plates for the stamps,

01:52substituting Post Office for Post Paid.

01:56The Mauritius Post Office stamps were unknown to the philatelic world until 1864

02:02when Madame Brochard, the wife of a Bordeaux merchant,

02:06found copies of the one and two pence stamps in her husband's correspondence.

02:11Bordeaux cover with Mauritius 1D Red and 2D Deep Blue Post Office

02:17auctioned for CHF $5,750,000 in 1993.

02:24The next day, reportedly one of his secretaries commented that

02:28some damned fool had paid a huge amount of money for one postage stamp,

02:33to which George replied,

02:35I am that damned fool.

02:37By 2002, the Mauritius Blue was estimated to be worth 2 million euros.

02:56World Stamps