pre-cancels
Precancels are another wide field of Belgian Philately. The practice whereby bulk mailing was accepted over the post office counter at a reduced rate started in 1894 and ended in 1996. The mail had to be franked with a pre-cancelled stamp by the sender before delivery to the counter. The first precancels were manually applied to sheets of stamps using an inked roller but subsequently the precancel was printed typographically. The manual precancels can be found on many stamp issues but principally the definitive issues. After the Allegories or Cérès & Mercure issue of 1932 the lion of state issues overprinted typographically predominate up to the "Buzin" birds issue which was the last one to be used. Up to the second war town names and the year of validity were included as part of the precancel but by the late 1930's most stamps were centrally overprinted and a six month validity period was introduced, this subsequently reverted to a year long validity period. Possibly as a result of rapidly rising postage rates the practice of including the year was discontinued.
The standard reference work is the "Catalogue Officiel des Timbres Préoblitérés de Belgique" published in 1997 by the “Chambre Professionnelle Belge des Negociants en Timbre-Poste”.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Stamps surcharged and pre-cancelled fall into the definitive stamp category. |
The postal history of precancels can be a little uninspiring as typically there are no postal markings. The journals, periodicals and advertising envelopes do however provide an interesting insight into the Belgian way of life.
