It was a stamp, the only one of its type in existence - the 1856 British Guiana 1-Cent Magenta. And it’s iconic not just for its value and rarity, but also for its checkered history. Its sale follows the death of its most recent owner, American multi-millionaire John Du Pont, who died in a secure mental hospital in Pennsylvania, while serving a life sentence for the murder of his closest friend, Dave Schultz, an Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler.

The History

The stamp’s story began with its discovery by Louis Vaughn, a 12-year-old Scottish boy who sold it for a few shillings in 1873, before its first major sale five years later, by which time it had been recognised as a unique specimen.

The buyer of 1-Cent Magenta was Phillipp Von Ferrary, the illegitimate son of an Austrian count living in Paris. He inherited a fortune in his youth, and used it to build the greatest stamp collection the world has ever seen. His two most valuable stamps were 1-Cent Magenta, and an 1881 Hawaii Missionary 2-Cent – a stamp whose previous owner had been sensationally murdered by a rival collector during an attempt to steal it.

As an Austrian, Ferrary was forced to flee Paris at the outbreak of the First World War. Leaving his stamps in the supposed safety of the Austrian Embassy, he escaped to Switzerland. But the entire collection was seized by the French government, who sold it after the armistice, claiming the proceeds as war reparations from Austria. Ferrary died in 1917 before he could see his stolen collection split up and sold.

1-Cent Magenta was bought for $34,198 by Arthur Hind, an English textile dealer living in New York, who outbid King George V for the stamp. A story runs that Hind was telephoned, in about 1925, by a man who told him that he, too, owned a 1-Cent Magenta. Hind instantly made the man a huge offer, and travelled to meet him. On arrival he handed over a cheque, examined the stamp, and set fire to it with the tip of his cigar. “Now,” he is supposed to have said once the stamp had burned away, “there is only one again!” We will examine whether there is any truth to this story.

Hind’s will stipulated that the 1-Cent Magenta be sold for the benefit of his estate. His embittered widow protested that he had, in fact, promised the stamp to her during his lifetime. A judge awarded it to her, noting that she was only claiming one stamp from a large collection. (Only one, perhaps, but the most valuable one in the entire world).

The stamp did not always enjoy the good life. In 1965, it took pride of place at Stanley Gibbons’ Centenary Exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall. Yet just hours before the start, to the astonishment of the curator, a man showed up at the venue, out of breath from running, and pulled the stamp roughly out of his wallet.

1-Cent Magenta passed through several hands before it was bought by John Du Pont for $935,000 in 1980. Du Pont was primarily, but not exclusively, a collector of stamps. He also built the Delaware Museum of Natural History to house his collection of over a million seashells, and he owned an internationally important collection of porcelain. He was also a lover of freestyle wrestling – a passion which led him to build a wrestling village on his Pennsylvania estate where dozens of professional wrestlers lived and trained. This was, in effect, another collection, and it gave rise to his friendship with Dave Schultz. But Du Pont also collected guns, and it was this collection which brought the friendship to a tragic end.

As we examine so many tales of unhappiness and bitterness, it seems unsurprising that claims of a curse have come to surround 1-Cent Magenta. But perhaps we should just put its accumulated misery down to the irresponsibility, greed, and jealousy which often accompany great wealth and privilege.

Potential buyers of the stamp

Potential buyers at the auction included Irwin Weinberg who owned 1-Cent Magenta between 1970 and 1980, Joseph Hackmey, an Israeli insurance magnate, and Bill Gross, an American investment fund owner. Another possible buyer was an unnamed Russian oligarch who was singlehandedly rejuvenating the world of stamp collecting. Initially investing in stamps for purely financial reasons, he had taken a genuine interest, and was amassing an important collection. And then there was Stuart Weitzman, a boyhood collector and now shoe designer to the stars, responsible for a pair of diamond and platinum sandals worn to the Oscars. These men, in the spirit of Arthur Hind and John Du Pont, were being driven by a love of stamps, the need to possess and collect, and a sense of the stamp as themselves. To own one-of-a-kind was to be one of a kind.

The Auction

In the end, One Cent Magenta sold to Weitzmann for $9.48 million dollars reaffirming its status as the most expensive stamp – but also becoming the most valuable item for its weight in the history of the world.

Weitzman drew his initials and a small sketch of a stiletto shoe on the stamp – ensuring that, whoever owned the stamp in future, his claim on uniqueness could never be denied or erased. And it has been sold again, this time to (perhaps) a less covetous owner, Stanley Gibbons, the London stamp dealer, which has offered ‘fractional ownership’. This scheme allows numerous individuals to take their own share in the stamp.

Nobody, for now, can draw on the stamp or claim it for war reparations. Instead, shares can be bought by the spiritual heirs of Louis Vaughn. Until, of course, the inevitable reappearance of The Curse.

When I was in Northern Ireland, a few years ago, I met a man who told me of an encounter with McGuinness, way back in 1971. It ought to be repeated. This is what he said:

“I was listening to the ten o’clock news one evening, and I realised I’d run out of cigarettes. I got in the car, and I went to Guildhall Square. But the cigarette machine had been vandalised, so I went to Fiorentini’s café. There were two girls sitting in the café, and they asked me if I could give them a lift home. I thought to myself, ‘Well now, two young girls, my wife’s away. What about it?’ So I said yes, and asked where they lived. They said in a very subdued whisper, ‘The Creggan’. I thought about it – my God! This really is an opportunity. The Creggan was a no-go area, I could say that I’ve been there, and nobody else has. So I said OK, and I finished my cup of coffee, and Mr Fiorentini gave me two packets of cigarettes. We got in the car, and went up into the Lecky Road, and there were armed IRA men all over the place. The girls said some password to them, and we were let through. Then we were let through a second one by Free Derry Corner. Just after that, there was a third one – and all hell broke loose. The car was surrounded. I was pulled out and forced onto the ground, and the girls were taken away.”

“Now, I looked and sounded like a British officer; I was about thirty, and spoke the Queen’s English, so somebody must have assumed that I was a British officer, or that I was trying to spy on the IRA. My car was taken away, and I was bundled into the back of another car, and I was sat on by about five heavy young men - which was a most horrid thing. I was given a few kicks – not in the balls – but around the back and arms, and I was manhandled across a bit of green in front of the modern Catholic Cathedral, into a place where I was sat in a chair, with a light bulb above me, just like interrogations in films. A couple of fellows were behind me with old-fashioned Sterling machine guns, pointing at the back of my head, and then the most extraordinary sight. A crocodile of about a dozen men entered, all in balaclavas, a pretty shambolic-looking lot. Then an extraordinary character came in, who had the air of a deserter from the army. He was clean, fair-haired and much younger than me.”

“This man took position behind my head, drew a pistol from his belt, and asked me various questions – which were pretty banal. Since I wasn’t in the army, and I wasn’t in the Ulster Defence Regiment, he couldn’t get any information out of me. He said, ‘Your car’s been seen going out of Ebrington Barracks on many occasions, so you must be a spy!’ I said to him, ‘My dear fellow, you’re completely and absolutely crazy! These are my friends. These people were at school with me. Of course I’m going to go and see them and have them to my house. Do you think they’re going to tell me secrets about you? You’d have to be joking – they just don’t do that sort of thing!’ Eventually, he got fed up talking to me, and I stayed with these fellows guarding me for several hours. There was absolutely no brutality whatsoever, no question.”

“Eventually, somebody else came in, and said, ‘OK, you. We’ll give you back your car’ and I was led outside, and there was the car, engine running. The man who had been interrogating me was in an absolute fury. His eyes were just full of fury. He drew his pistol, cocked it, put it beside my head, and this other fellow said, ‘Oh no! Don’t kill him! We’ve checked him out with the boys in Ardmore, and he and his family have always been decent to people like us. He’s OK.’ I remember those words very well; one tends to listen if you think you’re about to be killed. The man was absolutely livid. He put his pistol back in his belt and said, ‘Fuck off!’ So I got in the car and drove away. But I had to ask, ‘Could you please show me the way out? I’ve never been here before.’ And they did – they got into another car and they drove in front of me! They also pinched my cigarettes, which I really objected to. I still didn’t have any cigarettes after the whole bloody night.”

No cigarettes, perhaps, but he still had his life. He had survived his encounter with a fair-haired, young, and absolutely furious Martin McGuinness.

If you’d like to read more of accounts detailing modern Irish history, my book Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace is available to purchase.

This problem can be seen very clearly between the world wars, not long before Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt came together to fashion their near-legendary Special Relationship. In the late 1920s, trade and maritime rivalry between the nations had grown so fierce that Churchill was forced to admit, in a government policy paper, that an Anglo-American war was a real possibility. And even as Churchill was writing his paper, the United States was formulating a plan for just such a war with Britain. The plan was approved in 1930 and updated again in 1935.

Though a war was not imminently expected by many, War Plan Red was a great deal more than just a training exercise for army strategists. Carefully thought through and far more costly to deliver than similar plans aimed at other likely enemies, its focus was a full-scale invasion of Canada. Two separate ground attacks were to be made towards Montreal and Winnipeg, while a large body of men moved forward to protect an area comprising Detroit, Niagara and Buffalo. The United States Navy, meanwhile, would stifle British trade across the globe, stopping the supply of oil, blocking the Panama Canal and capturing British possessions throughout the Caribbean and north to the Bahamas and Bermuda. This plan, it should be stressed, was not merely hypothetical. Money was spent on air bases, posing as civilian airfields, along the Canadian border. These measures taken together, the planners believed, would bring Britain to her knees.

As startling as it sounds, then, it is only relatively recently that fierce Anglo-American rivalry and United States designs on Canada have come to seem unthinkable. Yet these realities have gone hand-in-hand ever since the British captured Canada from the French in the 18^th Century, helped by colonial militiamen such as George Washington.

Two decades later, American victory in the Revolutionary War – inspired by the same George Washington – saw tens of thousands of loyalists fleeing north to British Canada. In 1814, with animosity towards the British remaining at fever-pitch, the Americans mounted an invasion of Canada whose conquest, according to former president, Thomas Jefferson, would be ‘a mere matter of marching’. He was proved wrong however. Not only did American forces fail to capture their northern neighbour, but the British struck at the very heart of the United States, seizing Washington D.C. and burning down both the White House and the Capitol Building. The war eventually came to an inconclusive end, allowing both nations to claim victory.

Then during the United States Civil War, a furious argument between the northern states and the British, arising from the transportation of southern diplomats on a British ship, led to the stationing of huge numbers of British troops in Canada, and - very nearly – to the outbreak of yet another war. And shortly after the Union had defeated the Confederacy, the American purchase of Alaska seemed a step towards a pincer movement to eject Britain from the continent and expand the United States by almost four million square miles.

Anglo-American quarrels continued to erupt. In 1895, a meaningless South American border disagreement escalated into a violent dispute during which a sizeable section of Congress and the American public began calling for yet another war with Britain. Winston Churchill, then a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant in the 4^th Hussars, expected to find himself taking up arms against the United States. For a few days, he wrote, war ‘seemed possible and even imminent.’ Fortunately, the temperature fell and the issue was settled by arbitration.

Given this background, it hardly seems surprising that the First World War – which saw Britain and the United States fighting together but never as official allies – gave way to another period of political mistrust. Emerging from the war as the world’s greatest powers, the nations’ mistrust came to be reflected in the top secret – and seriously intended – War Plan Red.

Yet even as the nations vied politically, they never entirely lost sight of their bonds. Unique among great powers in sharing a language, they also shared heritage, culture, a system of law, and, crucially, concepts of liberty. Churchill and Roosevelt’s relationship arose out of pragmatism, and did not easily transfer to a wider audience – but it was rooted in fertile ground. It took hold.

For some years, it has seemed to some, mainly in Britain, that the Anglo-American Special Relationship describes a connection so fundamental that it reflects the natural order of things. Clearly, that is not the case, and in staking some kind of a claim on Canada, Donald Trump is mining a deep historical seam. He is reminding us that international relations are transactional and that we cannot afford to ignore the past – even when it seems dead and gone.

This quiet revolution led to the National Health Service with its offer of free healthcare to all. Alongside it came greatly increased access to free education, the expansion of affordable housing, a national insurance scheme and financial assistance for those who fell through the remaining cracks. These were the progressive building blocks of modern Britain.

Yet with living memory now turning to history, it is becoming far too easy to ignore – or rewrite – the past. In 2023, MP Daniel Kawczynski described the National Health Service as a ‘socialist model’ that leads to ‘inefficiency, poor value for money and corruption.’ Nigel Farage, meanwhile, would rather see his money ‘return value’ through ‘the marketplace of an insurance company’ than through the free-at-source NHS. Yet Lord Halifax, that highest of wartime Tories, wrote in 1941 that ‘human values’ must no longer be ‘smothered by old-fashioned financial purity.’ Alfred ‘Duff’ Cooper, 1^st Viscount Norwich, replied that ‘the minds of a great many people whom you would not expect to agree are moving in the same direction.’ Even at the highest levels, wartime Britain was becoming a more empathetic nation.

But how to explain the change? A good place to start is with the story of Ida Rodway, a sixty-one-year-old Hackney housewife with an older husband, Joseph, who was blind and suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. In September 1940, Ida and Joseph were bombed out of their house. With no money, possessions or hope, they began sleeping on a relative’s floor. Ida considered killing herself but decided she couldn’t leave her husband alone. One morning, she went to fetch his morning tea but returned with a knife. She slit his throat before running outside to find a policeman.

Ida was charged with murder and placed on trial at the Old Bailey. Her conviction and execution seemed inevitable – until the court doctor secured a different outcome. She was eventually found ‘guilty but insane’, spared the gallows, and sent to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. But hers was no act of insanity. It was a hopeless, despairing expression of love.

Ida’s story stands for what became known as the ‘Crisis of London’. With heavy bombing expected, the authorities had prepared for catastrophic loss of life. But when the Blitz arrived, the chief result was not death but homelessness on an unimagined scale. Victims like the Rodways were little more than beggars. But to the government’s credit, it did not stand by. Henry Willink, a Conservative MP (and future Minister of Health), was placed in charge of the response and he acted quickly. Repairs were carried out and replacement housing made available. Centres were opened where victims received what they needed without moral judgment. Social workers were provided, information centres constituted, and a system of benefits introduced. Before its formal creation, the welfare state was up and running.

Its emergence, in truth, was almost inevitable. The government needed its people as never before. They were serving in the armed forces and working in war factories. They were volunteering as firemen, air raid wardens, policemen, Home Guard members. They were civilians on the front line. Without them the war could not be won. Wages rose and protections increased as politicians of all parties – like Halifax and Cooper – began acknowledging the need for a fairer post-war world.

Expectations were rising too. After the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Coventry’s city centre, a local housewife told the BBC that she expected a replacement house that was easy to keep clean, with a washing machine, a refrigerator and plenty of sockets. ‘Why should we put up with brass taps and dark corners that collect the dust?’ she asked. Even fighting men with more immediate concerns kept an eye on the horizon. As George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, wrote of his fellow soldiers in Burma, they ‘were fighting for jobs, and security, and a better future for their children than they had.’

Given the background, it hardly seems surprising that the British people voted Winston Churchill out of office at the 1945 General Election. The result was not a personal rejection of the Prime Minister who was considered then (as now), a great wartime leader. It was a referendum, rather, on the future of the nation and on a set of initiatives as relevant today as they were eighty years ago.

Our modern politicians were born long after these events and this, perhaps, is why the benefits of the period are being allowed to erode. It would be very sad if the true legacies of 1945 were lost – because we fail to remember just how hard they were won.

For others, however, the Blitz was a time of possibilities. Shocked out of their rhythms by fear and necessity, ordinary people pulled together and helped strangers. They spoke to each other for the first time. They found common ground amidst the chaos where none had existed before. And at the same time, they broke rules and exploited each other. They were selfish in ways they could barely have imagined. People behaved very well - and they behaved very badly.

The Blitz, after all, was a time of extremes. Extremes of experience, extremes of behaviour, extremes of reaction. In every possible direction. Take the case of Ida Rodway. Ida was an ordinary law-abiding woman in her late sixties from east London. In early October 1940, she went to fetch her blind husband, Joseph, his morning cup of tea. But as the water boiled, Ida changed her mind. She picked up an axe and a carving knife instead. Returning to her husband, she attacked him with the axe. It quickly broke. So she slit his throat with the knife.

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Ida was a devoted wife. Joseph’s brother never remembered the couple sharing a harsh word. But they were as truly victims of the Blitz as anybody killed by an aerial mine or a high-explosive bomb. In September, they had been bombed out of their Hackney home, and after several days in hospital had begun sleeping on Ida’s sister’s floor. Joseph’s mental state was deteriorating and he rarely knew where he was. They were about to lose their labour money and Ida had no idea how or where they were going to live, or what to do about the bombed house that still contained all their possessions. Hopeless, helpless and overwhelmed, she did what she considered to be the kindest thing for her husband. Charged with murder, she was found unfit to plead at the Old Bailey, and committed to Broadmoor where she died a few years later.

This was truly a crime of the Blitz. Yet the extremes of the period had other, more positive, effects. They changed the attitudes and expectations of Britain’s citizens. And as expectations altered, the fight against Nazism became intertwined with the fight for a better future. Women, for example, were encouraged to step outside the home, to become independent, to contribute actively to the war effort. Yes, they were paid less than men to do their widely varying work. Yes, they were still required to run the home. And yes, when it was all over, they were expected to step aside and allow the men to replace them. But for the duration, their lives opened up in extraordinary ways.

Sexually, too, attitudes and behaviours shifted. In her diary on 7 September 1940 – the day the daytime bombing of London began – nineteen-year-old Joan Wyndham wrote ‘As the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert.’ As good as her word, she went to bed with her boyfriend. ‘If that’s really all there is to it, I’d rather have a good smoke,’ she told her diary afterwards. But disappointing or not, her experience was not unusual. Many people had love affairs they would not have had before the war. These ranged from isolated experiences to ‘wartime marriages’, liaisons intended to last for the duration before being dropped – the sexual equivalent, perhaps, of powdered egg.

Many of the freedoms and attitudes that we nowadays take for granted were forged in the Blitz’s dark crucible. The country owes a far larger debt to the period than has been acknowledged. This was the time when the vulnerable in society began to be protected, when a sense of collective responsibility began to form, when plans were first laid for a National Health Service and an Education Act offering free secondary education to all. It was the period when a War Aims Cabinet Committee, composed mainly of Conservatives, delivered a paper declaring that economic, social and educational practices would, in future, have to be overhauled in order to secure a reasonable standard of life for the entire population. The Blitz was certainly a time of misery – but it was also a time attitudes and behaviours changed. And it was a time when the sacrifices made by ordinary British people began to tilt the balance of society in their favour. For better or for worse – depending on one’s point of view - we have been living with the consequences ever since.

So I’d like to introduce you to the Democratic Unionist Party - or at least the former Democratic Unionist Minister of Health and assembly member, Jim Wells...

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Mr. Wells, the Democratic Unionist MLA, is a very interesting man. I met him a few years ago at Stormont, in his Parliamentary office. He was utterly charming, self-deprecating, and genuine. He was deeply committed to various charitable foundations, at home and abroad. He was critical of Northern Ireland’s lax planning laws, and very serious on the subject of the environment. His was not a sentimental interest – it is a rational, practical and forward-thinking concern for the state of the planet.

All of this makes his views on other matters confusing. He tells me that homosexuality is ‘an abomination’, and as he says it, his whole manner changes from boyish enthusiasm to righteous anger. He glowers and raises his voice.

I am not sure that anyone has ever used the word ‘abomination’ in front of me before, and I cannot imagine a serious English politician taking a similar stance. But then, Wells’s party, the DUP, is not like any English party. Launched in the bombed ruins of the Four Step Inn on Shankill Road, it was, at the time of the interview, the biggest political party in Northern Ireland, and the party of Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church. Jim Wells was actually a Baptist, but the majority of the party’s politicians were Free Presbyterians, and their brand of unionism was subtly different to that of the Ulster Unionist Party. Whereas an Ulster Unionist might express total fidelity to the union with Britain, a member of the Free Presbyterian church will place his Protestantism before loyalty to his country. And since the Irish Republic is an expressly Catholic country, the surest means of protecting his faith is through adherence to the union.

Such subtle difference in approach explains why, in 1971, Ian Paisley was able to tell Irish journalists that, were the Irish Republic to scrap its constitution, and change certain of its laws relating to the influence of Catholicism, then ‘the Protestant people would take a different view’ on unification. Northern Ireland’s most notorious unionist was – briefly – willing to question the union.

Northern Ireland has long been a place of contradictions, and one in which religion rarely seems far from the surface. Which brings me to my most surreal exchange with Jim Wells. As our discussion of human sexuality continues, he leant in to me and asked in a low voice, ‘Do you know how many transexuals there are in Northern Ireland?’

I shook my head.

“At least seven…”