Week #2007.26 on SébPhilatélie

Monday 26 June 2017: Jersey adds King George VI to the "Radiowave War" topic.
If you read French historians Alain Croix and Didier Guyvarc'h's research on stamps and the two world wars (here is a summary published on this blog), you know that some topics are philatelically more popular than others.

Concerning the role of media in these wars, they were surprised that the radio broadcasts were very rarely pictured, but for Charles de Gaulle and his Appeal of 18 June 1940.

The £2 minisheet that completes the 6 Jersey stamp series on King George VI, mostly an issue about the King of War.

That's why I consider noteworthy a recent issue of Jersey:  one stamp and the minisheet remind the role of radio broadcast during the reign of King George VI.

The movie The King's Speech popularised the story of the duke who became king against his will and speech handicap, but succeeded to dominate it. One proof was the speech the King gave on September 3rd when Britain entered in the war, whose official picture is reproduced on the minisheet.

La Guerre des ondes - the radiowave war - is the French expression for the propaganda conflict through the radio broadcast. Mainly the BBC-supported shows performed by many governments in exile facing the Nazi German allies' radio. For the French listeners it was between La France aux Français in London versus Radio Paris. A 2014 telefilm by Laurent Jaoui for France 3 told the violent words exchanged by Free French humorist Pierre Dac and Vichy Minister of Information Philippe Henriot.

Wednesday 28 June 2017: commercial designers Pieter Huveneers passed away at 92.
Born in the Netherlands in 1925, living in Australia since the sixties until he died 14 June 2017, Pieter Huveneers was important on postal matters, having worked for the British Post Office promotional campaigns in the fifties.

Internal campaign of 1952, encouraging British postmen to urgently deliver telegrams (British Postal Museum & Archive blog, archive POST 110/1611, IRP 056).

Although his posters are renowned, Huveneers thought campaigns as a whole process, encouraging the companies to send one of their employees at his studio, so that the spirit of the campaign be continued after the end of his task.

In Australia he designed the logotype of Australia Post in 1975, still in use today.

Saturday 1 July: Luxembourg forgot its identity between wish to please superpowers.
On Thurday 29 June German monthly Deutsche Briefmarken-Zeitung announced that Post Luxembourg was taking out of sale the Europa two stamps issued on 9 May.

The castle of Dommeldange, seat of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Luxembourg (Post Luxembourg).

The cause: the name of the issuing country was forgotten between designer Ben Carter, an Englishman living in the Grand-Duchy, and the Belgian Post printing plant in Malines, without the Luxembourgian philatelic service noticing...

New stamp design in the age of low mail writing...

The castle of Beggen, seat of the Embassy of the Federation of Russia in Luxembourg, rented in 1956, bought in 1973 (Post Luxembourg).

In the article in French I made fun of the wish of the fiscal paradise made in the European Union to become a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China or a subject of the Federation of Russia.

It could make sense in the world policy context of our days and that the only signs of sovereignty on the stamps were the Chinese communist and the Russian flags.