"Never mind Passive Smoking"
"Never mind YOUR LUNGS!"
"Look what you have done to my cylinder block!!"
before somebody made so bold,
as to tear you off, without a qualm,
"But Sir, I didn't mean no 'arm!"
and they'd fit nicely on my page,
but what a shame about the ink,
the whole things ruined don't you think?
(They might as well have put a sword through it anyway!)
Trying to stop the collector seeing,
How the stamp would fit a 'topic',
Before the cancel — CATastrophic!
defacing the cover in such a way?,
It couldn't be the work of Postman Pat,
'Cos he'd not do a thing like that!
Except that they were in the wars,
These stamps were taken from a letter
Which may have let me know them better.
Now this was done with the best intent;
A friend not knowing what we meant,
hoping to add to our selection,
tore off these stamps for our collection!
Aaaaaagggghhhh!
The first phase of the war was from October 1899 to January 1900 and though the postmark is before those dates, the letter may well have contained background information to events that led up to the war or the social conditions of the time.
So not all crimes are committed with malice aforethought — this was done as a kindness, the person knowing that we collected stamps thought he was doing the right thing by taking them off the envelope so we would not have unnecessary paper junk around. Unfortunately the 'crime' was compounded by the method of removal. They were simply torn off and in the batch given to us a fair number of stamps were damaged. A simple case of lack of knowledge of the subject.
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(© Ears Leisurewrite)
An article based on this was published in Stamp News, the Australian monthly stamp magazine.