Unofficial Issues: Sand Dunes and Finbar Kenny

There were thousands of stamps printed with names of emirates like Ajman and Sharjah and Umm al Qiwain between 1964 and 1974.  These were jokingly known as the "sand dunes" or just "dunes" and the stamps were dismissed by serious collectors as "wallpaper".  The British had pulled out of the area and the United Arab Emirates was still just an idea.  

There is still a lot of debate about whether they can be counted as postage stamps or whether they were just labels.  Were they valid for postage?  Maybe they were used on mail a few times?  I have never seen a cover that didn't look contrived, or even a postmark that looked valid.  They were almost always cancelled to order.  I used to have Minkus and Michel catalogs that list them, and the very few mint sets I find almost always sell at about $5 per set.  The cancelled sets and souvenir sheets are still common, and I have seen entire shoeboxes full of those.  Do any of them have a real value, or are we just kidding ourselves?  

It feels like they started out as actual stamp issues but spiraled out of control as the years went on.

Yes, Wikipedia has a brief article about the Dunes. 

Of course I looked them up on the maps that were available at the time.  That's one part of the fascination of stamps: finding out about places we've never heard of before.  But how could these small settlements of 8,000 and 15,000 people have produced or needed these millions of stamps?

I was always curious about seeing "and its Dependencies" on some of these stamps.  How did they have dependencies?  Sure enough, later issues came out for Manama (a dependency of Ajman), which apparently had only a few actual buildings at the time, and Khor Fakkan (a dependency of Sharjah).

Before the Internet it felt like nobody knew where these stamps came from, who designed or printed them.  I remember reading occasional grumblings about them in Linns or Scott's Monthly, but Google searches now turn up all kinds of stories about what was going on.  It turns out that we can thank one man, Finbar Kenny, for flooding the market with these little labels.  He was a former president of the Macys Department Store stamp department, and somehow got valid postal contracts to print and market the stamps for a variety of places, starting with Ajman and Fujeira in 1964.  Here is the wikipedia page about him.   It is short, and other articles add little bits of character to the man.  I am still looking for a real, detailed biography or history of Mr. Kenny and his printing operations.

Perhaps he just had a hard time finding colorful stamps to appeal to young collectors, so a wider endeavour of printing new "stamps" for his own packet department came up.  When the United Arab Emirates was officially formed in 1971, Kenny's emirate stamp contracts were cancelled or taken over by other companies as the competition ramped up, but more issues came onto the market after that.  Kenny later went on to get the postal contract for the Cook Islands and was caught in a bribery scandal that gave him the dubious honor of being the first American convicted under the new Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  Two links to that story: One and  Two.

The debate about what to do with these stamps still rages.  You are free to collect them or ignore them, as you like. Just don't spend a ton of money on them or convince yourself they are more than what they are.  There is an article on the quality of the printing, compared to other stamps of the time, from ArtOnStamps.org.  I would love to hear from some of the artists involved in these.  Clearly a huge amount of effort went into making these.  It does sound like some revenue was sent back to the issuing areas during the original postal contract.

Gulf News has an article on how a collector living in the UAE includes these stamps in his own local history.   He ties them to the towns they represent, the people, the British period, attempts to create a stable currency between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and it all ties together nicely.

The United Arab Emirates formed from the union of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, Fujeira, Ras al Khaima, Sharjah and Umm al Qiwain.  The Scott catalog lists the early issues from the last five, but has nothing at all for Manama or Khor Fakkan.  Abu Dhabi and Dubai had their own issues, though some unofficial issues from Dubai may also have been Kenny's work.  There are a few other Middle Eastern areas which got grouped in with the dunes but I will discuss those later. 

For an idea of the scale of this operation, the Colnect database lists over 8,800 different stamps released by Ajman alone.  There are thousands of listings for these on HipStamp and eBay, even on Etsy.  They have their place in philatelic (or not so philatelic) history and are here to stay.

 

 

I wanted to focus more on the stamps themselves, but I think that taking time to profile the men who brought all these things to market is also valid.  As I said, I have never seen good clear information on what was happening behind the scenes, so as I discover it for myself, I will share what I can.