New South Wales - Colonial period: 1857 -1900.
1/- black stamped transmission form: NC-TO-9
.

 
General characteristics:

Heading and notes: Stock number St 627 on front and St 816 on reverse.
TRANSMITTED FORM above NEW SOUTH WALES POST AND TELEGRAPH in curved gothic script.
COLONIAL AND INTERCOLONIAL LINES.
Message area: 35 boxes on the front of the form numbered at the right in seven rows of five boxes.
Reverse side: An additional 75 boxes on the reverse side in 15 rows.
Colours (text & form): Black on cream.
Size of form overall: 226 × 188 mm.
Distinctive characteristics of this form:

 

The basic form.

The details of the announcement of these stamped telegram transmission forms and of the development of the stamp images and the usage of the forms are presented elsewhere.

The design of the basic form is similar to the previous non-stamped transmission form (NC-TO-7) having numbers to 35 on the front at right and up to 110 on the reverse side.

Used examples of the 1/- form are unknown.

TO-9AUnused transmission form.

Specimen.

The Specimen overprints were made in August 1894. The Government Printer overprinted 850 forms of each denomination.

The overprint is in upper and lower case serif letters in red (on the 1/- form) and is 14 mm long. The style of overprint was Bell Type 21a, which is distinguished from Type 21 by the addition of a full stop.  This is the only item of NSW postal stationery for which a red Specimen was used.

Dingle Smith (in a personal communication) notes that "The requisition note to the Government Printer for the specimen overprints was dated 31 July 1894 and it is clear that the major reason was to supply items of postal stationery to the UPU in Berne for distribution to member nations and their colonies. The number required for this purpose at that time was 730 copies and the presence of the specimen overprinted telegram forms in national post office archives confirms that the forms were distributed. The remaining 120 forms were used for various presentation purposes and there are no records indicating that any were sold to the public".

The forms overprinted SPECIMEN are however reasonably common - indicating a reasonable number of the UPU forms may have found their way back onto the market.

Spec

 

Printing error.

Only one form is known with a printing error - a missing comma after the word Station.

Error
The pencil annotation in the top left corner is 27.2.94 - the date of issue of the pre-paid forms.


Details of use and rarity.

Form
sub-number
Schedule number Earliest recorded date Rarity rating
TO-9 St 627 (front) Unlikely to be found used. NC unused.
TO-9 (Spec) St 627 (front) Not applicable. NC.