Now that's price inflation!

The Telegraph reports that the first postal money order sold at the Lombard Street post office in London, England, in 1881 - face value, one shilling, or five pence in today's British currency - has just been sold to a collector for £4,485 [just over US $7,000].

The perfectly-preserved payment, which has the serial number 000001, was the first of millions produced by the Post Office in Lombard Street, London, in 1881.

It sold for £4,485, smashing the guide price of £2,500.




Auctioneer Richard Beale, of Warwick and Warwick Auctioneers, said: “This was a very unique item and as such went for a lot more than predicted. There were lots of bids from enthusiasts. It’s been in the same family for over 130 years so the opportunity to own something as rare as this doesn’t come up very often. Collectors were always going to have to dig into their pockets to own this and clearly they did.”

Only five other 1881 postal orders bearing the same 000001 number are known to have survived but this is the first one ever produced by the main Lombard Street post office.

Postal orders were invented by the Victorians as a safe and secure method of sending money through the post.

Even the first ones contained the watermark 'POSTAL ORDER / ONE SHILLING' as a counter forgery device.

The first one was bought by Arthur Bull on January 1, 1881, after he queued for three hours outside the Lombard Street post office.

It was signed by the clerk A.G. Emery but Arthur never cashed it, predicting that it would one day be a collector's item.

He kept it in a leather case and locked it in his family's safe before passing it down to his son, also named Arthur Bull.

When Arthur Bull junior died in 1953 the postal order passed to his son Brian Galpin, who kept it safe in his home in Surrey.

After he passed away in 2005 aged 72 the postal order passed to his widow Audrey, 75, who has agreed to auction it.

There's more at the link.

That's quite a price . . . 89,700 times the postal order's original face value, to be precise! Did anyone say 'price inflation'? However, the article's wrong in one respect. The 'Victorians' didn't invent post office money orders - other countries used them before they were introduced in England. For example, according to its Web site, the US Post Office introduced postal money orders in 1864, seventeen years before England did so, and offered international money orders in 1869.

Peter