Stamp Story No. 10 A CAROL KING

Press, Volume C, Issue 29436, 11 February 1961, Page 10

Stamp Story No. 10 A CAROL KING

\By KEN ANTHONY] [Reviewed by A.C.B.]

TN the words of perhaps the best-loved of all Christmas carols, “good King Wenceslas looked out.” He also looks out from this stamp—one of a set of five issued by Czechoslovakia in May, 1929, to mark the thousandth anniversary of his death.

Wenceslas ruled over Bohemia, a region which is part of Czechoslovakia, but which was revived during the war as a puppet German protectorate. In the tenth century it underwent a particularly blood-thirsty period and the saintly king was murdered bj’ his own ambitious brother. Apart from this portrait of Wenceslas on horseback, other stamps of the series show the king founding St. Vitus’s

Church in Prague, and also his martyrdom at the assassin’s hand. These stamps—all but the highest value are still obtainable quite cheaply—have an important place in any Christmas collection.

But “Good King Wenceslas” is not the only carol to claim a place in the stamp-album. Just a week before Christmas in 1948, Austria issued a special stamp for the one hundred and thirtieth anniversary of “Silent Night, Holy Night,” showing portraits of the author and composer. The story goes that in 1818 the church organ at Oberndorf, near Salzburg in Austria, was out of action because mice had damaged the bellows. So the Rev, Josef Mohr and his organist, Franz Gruber, worked through the night to produce a melody simple enough to be played on a violin or guitar.' The result, finished in time for the Chrismas service, has since become well-known the world over.—(Central Press Features, Ltd. All rights reserved.)