2015-11-06 Fri

The Niger delta at the Gulf of Guinea on the Atlantic Ocean is sometimes called as the Oil Rivers as it was a major producer of palm oil. The Delta also was a short lived entity of the British Empire in the late 1800s. The Oil River Protectorate, as a part of the Colonial British Empire, was established in 1885 in the Delta region which is now a part of Nigeria. The other part of the Delta was controlled by a British Government mercantile business charter “Royal Niger Company”.

Earlier the communication was mainly carried out through the missionaries and by the Royal Niger Company and the regular British stamps on 1887 were in use “under some arrangement with the British Post Office” as mentioned by P.L. Pemberton in the Mekeels’s Weekly Stamp News of September 9, 1911.

The archives of Thomas De La Rue & Co.(a stationer and printer) situated in London has a letter from the General Post Office that ask M. Thomas De La Rue “for a supply of a stock of British postage Stamps adapted for the use in the Oil River Protectorate by overprinting them with the words ‘British Protectorate Oil Rivers’”

The overprinted stamps were requested in 6 lots, one for each of the vice consulates in the Oil Rivers, each with a specific denomination. Five had the Great Britain Queen Victoria Jubilee issue of 1887-92 and one, a 1-penny definitive stamp depicting the queen (88) of 1881 issue.

All of the overprints are in black ink, in three lines of capital, except the letters: “BRITISH/PROTECTORATE/OIL RIVERS.”

The ½d stamp is vermilion; 1d, lilac; 2d, green and carmine; 2½d, violet; 5d, lilac and blue; and 1-shilling, green.

In the letter sent to M. De La Rue had specific instructions, “as the climate of the Oil Rivers district is exceedingly damp, the sheets of stamps should be separated by sheets of blotting paper, and each lot should be enclosed in a tin-lined case and sent as freight to the Vice-Consul for whom it is intended.”

These stamps are found in the Scott Classic Specialised Catalogue of Stamps and Covers 1840-1940.