South African War Trains, Cavalcades and Victory Fairs.
Over the years South Africa was to become a major producer of war materials this started with the needs of World War II. During the war years she produced anything from Brown Boots (Fancy going to a funeral in Brahn Boots....{if you don't understand - look it up - Stanley Holloway}) to armoured cars progressing in later years to tanks, long range artillery and aircraft. (I remember the mortar and Marmon Herrington armoured car that stood outside the Moth Hall in Vereeniging and the wonderful badges and photographs on the walls inside - what happened to them?)
Always a bit of a 'show' off, these war products were put on show together with the men who used them; not just at the forefront of military actions but also to the public at home especially when recruiting. Some of these events were blessed with postal facilities which gives a collecting opportunity for philatelists, albeit a small one.
I show here three pages from my collection can anyone add covers and/or photographs. Can we put an exhibit together as we did with Korea?
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Jamie
This is a great idea. Here are three pages that I have. They are part of the TPO section of my collection and ex-Naylor, who saw it fit to add them as TPOs since they had a Post Office on board.
I wrote them in old fashion style, sometimes late 90s, when imprisoning text within frames was in vogue! Also at the time I was badly influenced by talks of brevity when you write a display.
Now that the old ladies that used to to tell us stories have passed away, I want to do exactly the opposite and write everything possible that can fit on a page, so when I go one day, at least the pages can tell the stories.
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Now we are talking - exactly what I was hoping for. I particularly like the 'Director of Recruiting' cachet, I have not seen before. Regarding the spelling mistakes, with my problem I wouldn't have noticed if it wasn't written up.
I am also attaching a 1947 Royal Tour Cover, which is tangential to your original post.
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I am a Pinelands Boy, born and bred in the Pinelands Methodist Church, Pinelands Blue School, Pinelands High School... and my university, the Pinewood Bioscope. Pinelands was South Africa's first Garden City. Its foundation stone was laid in 1923 by General Jan Smuts, four years after work on the suburb began. The first houses were thatched. The design was olde English, a mix of deco and arts and crafts. You can just see the quaint English rustic houses in the postcard. When I saw this card I had to buy it. It shows Forest Drive from the top, oldest part of Pinelands. Curiously, at about the same time I found this postcard I bought 'I'll Be Seeing You', Tonie and Valmai Holt's book of postcards of WW2. My postcard is the only South African postcard included in it. The 'Pinelands 18th Century Fair' was a relatively early attempt in December 1940 to raise money in SA for the WW2 Victory effort. It is included on the same page as the 'War Train' reference in Hasso Reisener's 'Special and Commemorative Postmarks....'. Also attached is a unused card from WW1, 'The Silver Lining, 1914 - 1917, Railway Push', about which I know nothing. I wonder if the 'Railway Push' was a precursor of WW2's War Train? At the risk of digressing, can anyone shed any light on this? (Again, incidentally, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 -1919 was known in SA as 'the Railway Sickness' That was how it spread.)
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