Delivering a healthy sum

A POSTAL wrapper sent from New Zealand to the Capital sold for £6500 at an auction in London this week.

The wrapper - simply addressed to William Campbell Esq, 6 Rutland Gardens, Edinburgh, Scotland - should feature a sixpenny stamp. But on January 25, 1859, the post office in Otago, New Zealand, ran out of sixpenny stamps, so the resourceful postal clerk simply cut a one shilling green stamp in half - now known as a "bisect" - and stuck that on the wrapper instead, as one shilling was worth twelve old pennies.

The Edinburgh wrapper was part of an extraordinary British Empire stamp collection assembled by one of Ireland's most distinguished physicians, Dr Robert Towers, which was sold for 453,020 at Spink in Bloomsbury, on Wednesday.