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Auction: 9037 - The "Pierron" Collection of British Commonwealth Missing Colours
Lot: 1624

Northern Rhodesia 1963 (10 Dec.) Arms Issue 3d. lower right corner block of twelve (4x3) with plate numbers, each with orange (eagle) omitted, fine. Pierron NR156MCb, £14,400; S.G. 78d, £14,400. Photo Estimate £ 8,000-10,000 Note: Prior to the early 1990s, when a batch of 1963 definitive panes were consigned to a London auction house by a former Northern Rhodesia postal worker, just one used example off piece with a January 1964 cancel was known with the error. A mint half pane comprising 60 stamps with the eagle missing was among the material sold by Harmers in their May 1996 sale. As the design centring of the known used example and examples from the half pane are very different, it was hypothesised at the time that the other half of the mint pane had been lost or shared with another postal employee. Certainly two panes must have been affected. It was only in mid 2006 – when a relative of the former Northern Rhodesia postal worker sold the other half of the pane to Stanley Gibbons – that the complete story unfolded. It transpires that once news of the missing colour errors reached postal workers in Northern Rhodesia, every sheet was scrutinised before reaching any counter for sale to the public. Most senior Post Office staff were expatriates working for the Northern Rhodesia government and would eventually lose their jobs in an independent Zambia. Some decided to augment their pensions. Two orange ink plates were used for the printing of the stamps; the second from left plate number relating to the eagle. The error is known in a plate block (normally 1B–1B–1B–1B–1B) missing 1B referencing the orange used in the eagle. The block came from the half pane sold to Stanley Gibbons quantity: circa 100 mint, 1 used

Sold for
£7,000