The stamp was listed in ebay and ended on 2 Jan 2011. There are 10 bids placed on the stamp and apparently managed to push the price to a whooping end price of US$856.22! The catalogue price for the stamp in S. Gibbons is GBP750 and in Scotts is $450. Seems so far everything is benign until you click at the bids for top bidders of the item:

This is a very old black and white film of various scenes throughout North Borneo, filmed in 1907 by Charles Urban Trading Ltd, and sponsored by the British North Borneo Company. The original film has no audio (silent throughout) and I didn't bother to put any music on it. So here's the clip in its originality.

The clips starts with a train journey and views from the train as it passes through a village and crosses a bridge. Note that the locomotive train is the one depicted in the first North Borneo pictorial stamps as opposed to the one we still have in Sabah today. Next, the film shows rapids, most likely to be in Padas river. It also films locals on a raft and members of the expedition fording the stream. This is then followed by scenes of the local industries. Locals quarry for manganese ore, gather rubber from a tree (watched by Europeans) and pick and sort tobacco leaves from the fields.

Further scenes reveal locals at a trading post and performing for the camera. Next, Chinese convicts collect their food, before a sequence showing a European supervising two locals as they chop a sago palm tree. Once felled, the trunk is sawed off and buffaloes (ridden by locals) haul the logs off screen. Local boys take part in a swimming race - diving off a gangway, watched by a European figure rowing alongside - before the film concludes with further shots of the buffaloes, driven into, and crossing, the water.

I think that it is a very informative film, showing how North Borneo looked like about 100 years ago. This is the time which, if given some supernatural power, we would go back and collect all the North Borneo stamps, revenue documents, the coins and banknotes etc and would travel to remote areas such as Silam, Mempakul, Gayah etc to post our letters franked with the rare North Borneo stamps as we know today...:)

There is not much going on in ebay recently - much the same kind of items except for a few notable and unusual postmarks. The CNY celebration in Ireland as well as other stuffs mean that I spent less time on the internet in the past few weeks, explaining the lack of entry. :) Nevertheless, I'll share with you the most recent cover I acquired - a registered Labuan cover addressed to Mr. Fred Parker. The cover is franked with Labuan stamps of 1904 issue from 4c on 5c. to 4c. on $1 (Complete set of 9). The cover bears the violet Labuan boxed registration mark numbered 2216 and is strucked with a black single ring Labuan cds dated 2 OCT 1905. The stamps are cancelled with the 9 bars obliterator in black. At the back shows London arrival registration mark dated 8 Nov 1905.

The cover is definetely philatelic in nature and quite obviously contrived with the printed address and the "Registered" capital on top left corner. In Stanley Gibbons' catalogue, there is a brief note mentioning this -  "The barred cancels can be found used on 'Philatelic' covers of this issue". I guess the note must be referring to this example. The cover itself is not unusually rare as such, and I certainly have seen at least one other example of similar cover (also franked with the 1904 complete set stamps) also addressed to Mr. Parker. In North Borneo philatelic circle, the Parker covers are quite well-known possibly because they are among the few philatelic covers from North Borneo and Labuan. Some early German dealers concentrated on the earlier postcards (eg. Kiederlen, Adolf Bauer etc) as well as the early North Borneo and Labuan covers. Nonetheless, I find the cover above particularly attractive not only because it is borne to be attractive and collected but also because I don't have many early covers from Labuan.

On a lighter note, I have started casual collection on other philatelic items outside the British Borneo and Malaya states. Some people collect China because of anticipation of increasing prices in the future, I certainly could not afford any of the Chinese stamps, so I'll collect Ireland and Great Britain as well as the works of the master engraver from Sweden, Cz. Slania (deceased). The most recent auction of an inverted overprint on China stamp by Spink reached an amazing realization of GBP 95,000 whereas the inverted India stamp reached GBP 80,000...which means I shouldn't venture on those areas at all, at least not for the time being...:)

I posted this in my blog sometime ago and received some interesting comments that it could very likely to be fake. The cover first appeared in ebay around December 2010 and was listed by a French seller. Around that time I had some correspondence with the SSS committee including the then president, Mr. Peter Cockburn, the Labuan specialist Mr. Jeremy Dickson, the current president and librarian of the society Mr. Simon Martin-Redman and the Vice President, Mr. Chan Kee Tex. From the collective correspondence, there are several interesting views that have surfaced, and I thought it is worthwhile to share them here.

This was the primary question regarding the stampless cover as pictured above - is it genuine or fake? Jeremy Dickson has provided a wealth of information on whether the cover is genuine or not. We know that so far, only six known covers that bear the earliest Labuan postmark  as illustrated in Proud's book. This Harvey cover is dated "Feb 24, 1858" which means that if it's genuine, it predates all the other six known covers. In Proud's, there's a reference on a cenceller sent by the Colonial Office in London to Labuan on 15 September 1851, so the date on the Harvey cover is not at all impossible.

Jeremy had compared the dimension of the genuine cancellation (30mm for the outer ring and 29mm for the inner ring) with the one in the Harvey cover above. There is no way of telling what the dimension is in the Harvey cover so he reduced the size of the picture to match the 30/29 cancellation dimension. This resulted in the cover being measured around 100mm x 60mm - a rather small cover, but not altogether impossible.

Comparison to the other known cancellations based on the numerals was not conclusive either, as there are some parts of the lettering and numerals that are not replicated on the six known examples. Furthermore, Proud's cancellation is not accurate in terms of the lettering and numerals, making such comparison a difficult one. Nevertheless, a lack of evidence does not necessarily means that the cover is fake, as Jeremy pointed.

Regarding the comments sent by anonymous, Jeremy pointed that:

1.  The red cancellation on the Stafford covers has no bearing on whether the Harvey cover is or is not genuine.  The Stafford covers were datestamped in July, September and November 1864; whereas the Harvey cover is datestamped in February 1858 - over six years previously.  All the other two ring cancellations (including - I think - the earlier De Saumarez July 1864 cover) are in black.  It is entirely possible that over the six plus year period (1858 to 1865) different coloured ink pads would have been used. The 1864 De Saumarez cover has a rectangular boxed Singapore Ship Letter handstamp.  By itself, I do not see this as any evidence that the Harvey cover is 'wrong'.  It would however be helpful to consult Singapore philatelists to gain an understanding whether the boxed handstamp was used in 1858 and, if so, whether it was applied without fail to incoming mail. 

2.  I don't think that the suggested differences in the 8's is conclusive evidence the cover is 'wrong'; indeed I don't think that any conclusion can be drawn from this observation.  Firstly, the copy I have looked at has been through the email system three times - you got it off eBay, then to Simon and then to me and each transmission would have resulted in the loss of some clarity.  Secondly, there are no other known covers with '8' as the last slug in the year date.  It is entirely possible that there would have been small differences between different slugs.

I have taken the liberty to post his comments verbatim here and I hope he wouldn't mind. :)

Mr Simon Martin-Redman added that in the Sarawak Journal vol 60 no 4 page 141  he described a pre stamp cover which appeared and was sold for £20,000 at a SPink auction after being touted by Lugdunum and Feldman Auctions.  This was first discovered in France in 2007 and is addressed to Mrs Harvey.

Last year he saw on ebay another cover previously unrecorded bearing the Sarawak Post Office cancellation and bearing East India Stamps.. This has turned out to be the second earliest cover known from Sarawak bearing adhesives.  It turned out that the cover is worth about £20,000! The interesting part was that the dealer was in France and the cover is to Mrs Harvey as well!

Although there are some good points to support that the cover could be genuine, these remain inconclusive as the only thing we have is the low resolution picture of the cover. It is obviously difficult to draw any firm conclusion based on this alone. I have recently emailed the French seller who listed the cover in ebay to give a higher resolition picture of the cover, but unfortunately he hasn't replied my message as yet. Perhaps we should just wait for the cover to re-appear again. At the meantime, I would appreciate your views and comments on this. Please let us know what you think.

I finally got the opportunity to re-visit the shop after extensive renovation last year. The first time I visited the shop was in 2005, about 5 years ago. At that time, the shop was still in its old location. In 2010, I got myself a nice assortment of low values Irish stamps and some British Commonwealth stamps. Unfortunately they didn't have any collectible stamps from British Borneo or Malaya.

Raven stamps & Coins is the only philatelic shop in Ireland's second largest city, Cork. Situated in Washington Street, it is the centre for collectors from the southern province of Ireland, largely collecting Irish stamps, GB stamps overprinted the Irish Provisional Govt, as well as GB stamps used in Ireland. My favaourite Irish stamps is the engraved seahorse overprints (2/6, 5sh, and 10sh) but these are quite expensive and difficult to acquire. Another area of interest is the pre-stamps entire and Victorian covers used in Ireland.

The owner, Padraig O' Shea and his assistant are friendly gentlemen and would warmly welcome you to their shop. There's a radio interview by RTE to Mr. O' Shea a couple of years back, and you may listen the interview here. You can get an idea about the Irish stamps in general and listen to the Cork accent. :)

In my most recent visit, I asked about book reference relating to Irish postmarks as I'm getting more interested in collecting Irish stamps, especially the postmarks. His assistant handed me two books, one by David Feldman (1976) and another newer book but without reference on the postmarks. I didn't buy them as I already have my Stanley Gibbons for Irish stamps issues and the one by David Feldman is only for the shop's reference and not for sale. Nevertheless, it is quite unfortunate that I couldn't get any stamps from British Borneo esp. North Borneo. It would be nice to see covers sent from North Borneo to a rare destination like Ireland. Perhaps I should continue the hunt in Ireland's capital, Dublin!