People And Their Hob

One of the most unusual hobbies which we have come across is that of Shirley Beale, a 20-year-old typist. Shirley collects New Zealand postmarks and she is well on the way towards collecting the 1700 different marks from the postal offices in the Dominion. She has 297 already, collected in 18 months. These are mainly from the bestknown post offices. Some she has obtained by sending stamped and addressed envelopes to the post offices, but this is a fairly expensive way of obtaining postmarks. Some of the most unusual postmarks in her collection include Deep Cove, Princess Margaret Hospital, Buried Village, Rotorua. But she is very keen to get some of those out-of-the-way offices. Any helpers?

Shirley's father, Mr Gilbert Beale, is an experienced and keen philatelist, although of late he's been more interested in collecting first day covers. He has a tremendous collection of covers - more than 800 of them, all filed and catalogued. One of them, an extremely valuable one, goes back to May 28, 1836. At right is Mr Beale with some of his first day covers.

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Shirley displays part of her collection and at top right gets on with the job of keeping up to date with envelopes.

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