Note 159 — Chapter VI

Dr Birkbeck Hill, on one occasion, told me that in the article on my father which he was asked to write for the D.N.B. he said of the adhesive stamp that its invention had been “wrongfully attributed to Mr James Chalmers”—words which nowhere appear in the article as it now stands. “The proprietors of the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,'” wrote my brother in “The Origin of Postage Stamps,” pp. 14, 15 (note), “did not avail themselves of the offer I had made to place them in communication with those from whom official information could be best obtained—indeed, they appear to have made no application to the Post Office for information of any kind.... Meanwhile, as it afterwards turned out, they were abundantly supplied with Mr P. Chalmers' ex parte, and, to say the least, singularly inaccurate statements. With the editor of the 'Dictionary of National Biography' I had no communication whatever.” Is it after this careless fashion that much of our “island story” is compiled? If so, what wonder that long before the present day wise men should have declared that all history needed to be rewritten?