Great Britain Philatelic Society

Have a peculiar cover that a friend of mine gave me to add to my GB cover collection. It is one I have never seen before. I have Censor covers, that kinda look similar, but it doesn't mention censors at all.

Also it has 2 post marks, a Chelsea 5 Jan, 1944 and a South Kensington 8 Jan 1944.
Any help shedding some light on this would be great

Hi Martin,

It's an envelope that's been reused as part of the paper conservation drive -- as there was a shortage of paper due to the war, from quite early on. There was a thread about them back in the day here:

https://www.gbps.org.uk/boards/viewtopic.php?t=1388

The gist is that people were encouraged to reuse envelopes by resealing them with these "economy labels". They were supposed to cover up all the old postmarks but mostly didn't realise or didn't bother, so usually the postmark from the original use is visible, as here. Sometimes envelopes were reused multiple times.

There are quite a lot of types of these labels -- this is a standard plain type, but you could get them with patriotic slogans on, or with plugs for various organisations.

Probably the reason there's no indications of censorship is that although it's to a US APO address, the HQ AEF was based in England until enough progress had been made in the D-Day invasions to move it to France, so it was in effect an internal GB letter. (The US APO could have run it past a censor I guess, but apparently they didn't.)

Thank you for that information. Makes it a really cool cover then for me to add to my collection.