The Worthing Philatelic Society's private booket 1985

From an article of SébPhilatélie, Saturday October 24th 2015.


Coincidences animate life. I stayed in Worthing for a week during Summer 2014. In May 2015, a side visit to The Stamp Centre during London Europhilex was being very quite browsing the boxes... until Worthing appeared.

A private booklet cover created by the Worthing Philatelic Society for its fiftieth anniversary in 1985.

Here was a page of album accumulating a ten stamp block stuck on its cover and two other unused covers (no trace of gum) to permit the presentation of its four pages.

The album page as it was sold at The Stamp Center, 79 The Strand, London.

On a white thick white paper ten stamps of the Machin series, 12 pence emerald-green whose description can be found on the Machin database of The Machin Nut.

The four pane cover announced the anniversary, the list of the past presidents of the society and its officers in 1985-1986.

The open booklet with the stamps issued October 1985, just in time.

The stamps were issued on October 29th 1985. One of the six that can exist with a symbol printed on the gum when sell with a discount... but not these ten.

Postal rates tables by Stephen Fletcher shows the national postcard rate was 13 pence. It was lower to 12 p. on November 4th 1985, hence this emerald-green twelve pence. A successor of 1980 yellowish green 12 pence stamp.


Worthing concentrates a lot of philately in a city inhabited by one hundred thousands people. The West Sussex seaside resort, next to Brighton, is home of a stamp dealer who organizes a handful of auctions yearly from his shop near the main station.

And of five associations federated to the Association of Sussex Philatelic Societies whose newsletter can be found with the good keywords on web search engines.

The Worthing Philatelic Society, eighty years last year, have meetings in Durrington, area in the north-west of Worthing. In the same community center you can find the Goring Stamp & Postcard Club.

Closer to the city center (the town hall, post office, pier, and invetably the franchise shop street) gathered the East Worthing Stamp Club, the Worthing Society of Postal Historians, the Sussex Postal History Society and a regional section of the British Airmail Society.

Much associations that can explain the long list of meetings, exhibits and sales listed every month in British monthly magazines, Stamp Magazine and Gibbons Stamp Monthly.