In this week’s edition of In Search of West Indies Cricket, Roger Seymour looks at the first postage stamps issued to commemorate the game in the Caribbean.
Today, it seems as though every international cricket tournament or Test series is acknowledged by the host nation’s postal services issuing yet another first day cover and special souvenir packs of stamps, much to the delight of philatelists and serious collectors of cricket memorabilia. It wasn’t always like this. In fact, it wasn’t until 1962 that the world got its first postage stamp on the subject of cricket, issued by, of all places, Cape Verde Islands, the former Portuguese colony, located 660 kilometres off the coast of Senegal on the West Coast of Africa, where cricket was virtually unknown.
Over the next 17 years, stamps paying tribute to the game continued to trickle out at a relatively slow pace, and by the summer of 1979, only 75 stamps had been released in 38 separate issues by 24 territories, including all the (then) Test playing countries, and diverse places such as New Caledonia, a French Overseas Territory in the South Pacific, and Sharjah on the Persian Gulf (which later served as a venue for nine Pakistan Test matches [2002 – 2016] and has staged the most ODIs, 247, as of June, 2023). Surprisingly, more than half of these stamps were issued by territories in the West Indies.
