The Controversy Surrounding the 5-Hole OHMS Official Stamps of Canada

The 5-Hole OHMS stamps have only recently, in the past 30 years been listed in the Unitrade catalogues. I can well remember a time in the 1980's, when only the overprinted official stamps were listed. Then, sometime in the 1990's listings were added for the 5-hole and 4-hole OHMS perforated stamps. 

Part of the reason for this is that until then most collectors regarded perfins as defective stamps, and so demand for them was quite low. Roy Wrigley in his 1970's book dealing with the official stamps of Canada makes this observation many times. Roy chose to specialize in this field in the 1940's or 1950's, not too long after these stamps were produced, and prior to this he had a long philatelic history, having been born when the Large Queens were still in use. He comments many times throughout his work that the 5-hole stamps are particularly rare, as so few were produced. It was his work on these stamps that did much to fuel collector demand for them. 

It seems reasonable to suppose then, that prior to the 1990's there would have been very little incentive for forgers to fake these stamps. There was a very large forgery ring that was busted in Vancouver during the 1950's, that was forging 4-hole OHMS perfins, with mint sheets being perforated. But I do not recall whether this included 5-hole stamps. It seems to me that if demand for them was limited, that there would have been less reason to forge them. But, on the other hand, even with low demand, a fake 5-hole perfin, would, usually be worth much more than a common used stamp. For this reason, I do think that the cheaper regular definitives that catalogue only pennies without the perfin would be the most suspect. But better commemoratives and higher values that have a decent catalogue value without the perfin should, all other things being equal stand a higher chance of being genuine - at least prior to the 1990's, when the catalogues began to list and price them. 

For nearly 30 years the listings in Unitrade stood, and many stamps were bought and sold by auction houses and reputable dealers. Several specialists built enviable collections of this material, investing considerable sums of money in the process. And then, in 2021 the bomb was dropped by the catalogue editors: that in the next edition of the catalogue several listings would be deleted. Why? Because the BNAPS study group had recommended that the listings be dropped because their members were not convinced that they could possibly be genuine. Now, I am assuming that these were stamps that they could not dismiss as fake because of hole patterns that did not match certified genuine stamps. After all, one would think that the very first test of authenticity would be overlaying the stamp on a template of a known genuine perfin to see if the holes line up. The reasoning of course is that it would be very difficult for a faker to perforate a stamp and obtain a hole pattern that exactly matches a genuine stamp. 

The 4-hole stamps could be easily faked, because the forgers could perforate entire sheets and could manufacture a perforating die to accomplish this. But, because the 5-hole stamps are not generally available mint (there is but one single in the auction this week), such stamps would have to be perforated individually and one stamp is just too small to put into a perforating machine. Thus, it would have to be done by hand, and therefore, it would be very difficult, if not impossible to exactly replicate the hole pattern. 

So the stamps that the study group must have examined would have appeared, in all respects genuine to them. But there was something about them that made the members doubt their authenticity. I believe, and this is just a guess, that it may have been that they had never seen the stamp on a proper cover. That may be why they ultimately decided that it could not be genuine. Or, they were looking at official records kept by the Department of Finance where the 5-hole stamps were produced and used. 

What makes the 5-hole stamps so different from the 4-hole stamps is the circumstances of their production and use. The 4-hole stamps were sold at post offices and were available to the public. The 5-hole stamps, in contrast, were not. They were produced in the government offices, from a hole punch, on an as needed basis only. Anyone who has ever worked in any kind of office environment knows that official procedures are not always followed. Indeed, there are many stories of instances where a specialist collector obtained their stamps from a relative who worked at the department, and the stamps in question are some of those now declared to have never been produced. So clearly, the findings of the study group cannot be 100% correct, if what the owners of these stamps says is true. 

I suspect that it is one of these philatelic mysteries that will never really be conclusively solved, because unless you were there at the Department of Finance between 1923 and 1938, you wouldn't really know for sure what was and what was not punched. Conceivably any current mint stamp bought from the post office could have been so punched. There is really no way of knowing for certain. Yes, official records help, but may not be complete, and while existence of covers does provide evidence of authenticity, the lack of a genuine cover does not prove that a stamp is not authentic. There are plenty of stamps that are practically impossible to find on cover, and the extreme scarcity of these stamps, and the fact that the majority of stamps from this time were cut out from covers means that it is not only possible, but highly probable that many will not exist on cover. 

So, my advice to all of you when collecting this area is to study the hole patterns very, very carefully, especially on any badly centered or heavily cancelled stamp, as these are the most likely to be faked, in an attempt to create value out of an essentially worthless stamp. But assuming that a stamp checks out next to a certified copy, then I don't think you should hesitate to add it to your collection as a genuine stamp. 

I have produced a short video below which shows the technique that I used to gain some comfort over the authenticity of specific examples by comparing the specific hole pattern with those of another stamp - ideally a certified genuine example.