News: BTA meeting at Stampex October 2026

  01/11/2026 @ 1:32pm

Birthe King, who has worked and campaigned for many years on behalf of Open Philately, opened the meeting by giving us a brief overview of its current situation within the competition classes of the FIP. Starting in Singapore in 2004 as an experimental class, it became a ‘Discipline’ at Jakarta in 2012. In 2022 an Open Philately FIP Commission was appointed and finally at Macao this year it was formally accepted as an FIP full class. Full details can be found at its website https://openphilately.f-i-p.ch/. Birthe is to be congratulated on the huge contribution she has made in getting Open Philately properly recognised.
Following this, Chris and Birthe moved on to the ‘main event’: a joint PowerPoint presentation of their international five-frame postcard exhibit My Dearest Mama: travels with my aunt. To call this unusual is somewhat understating it. Chris explained that its genesis was the large number of turn of the twentieth century postcards of Denmark in their possession which they decided to turn into a story. But not just any story. They created an entire fictional family: the Hansen family. We were given a full family tree going back several generations. One branch of the family became important ship owners, one branch emigrated to the USA, while one member of the family married an English bride and settled in London. And here the story starts: they had one daughter Alice, and living with them was an unmarried family member Heloise who helped to raise Alice. Alice was highly educated but did not know her many Danish relatives. So in summer 1904 Alice and Heloise sailed from Harwich to Esbjerg on the start of an epic journey through Denmark to Schleswig. On the way they met many of their Danish relatives, and Alice (who already spoke Danish and German) became acquainted not only with her extended family but learnt a lot about Danish history and the region of Schleswig, disputed between Denmark and Germany. As a dutiful daughter, Alice wrote home regularly to “My dearest Mama”’
So far, so fictional. The journey however was meticulously planned by Chris and Birthe, very much based on a 1904 copy of a Baedeker guide to Denmark. The travellers were fictional but the routes taken were real - by road, rail and ship (no bridges between the islands had been built at this date). Travel times were accurately calculated, both rail and shipping contemporary timetables were adhered to, and contemporary hotels were stayed in. This whole story was told through picture postcards, including some highly attractive Gruss Aus and some rare L. Levinson cards. Chris gave us a travelogue, Birthe read out some of the ‘correspondence’ and the presentation was accompanied by an eight-page booklet given to every attendee. The exhibit itself was ready in the frames to view after the talk. Those present were blown away by the mixture of research and inventiveness which delivered such an entertaining story. 

 

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