WASC promotes study of the stamps and postal history of West Africa and the Atlantic Islands, including the development of the mails to, from and within West Africa up to the present day.

Main areas covered include Ascension / Tristan da Cunha, Cameroons, The Gambia, Gold Coast / Ghana, Nigeria and its constituent territories, St Helena, Sierra Leone and Togo. Other areas include: British Postal Agencies on Madeira, Tenerife. St Vincent (Cape Verde Islands) and Fernando Po.

Members' interests, displays / presentations and publications include material linked to other territories in West Africa, especially where that relates to international airmail and surface routes, military campaigns, censorship and maritime mail.

From these links, you will find brief introductions to: Ascension / Tristan da Cunha / Gough Is. Cameroons The Gambia Gold Coast / Ghana Nigeria St Helena Sierra Leone Togo

In June 2024 we added over 1000 files on Nigerian postal history from the archive of the late Ray Harris. In January 2024 we added a number of monographs relating to The Gambia, The Gold Coast, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. We have also added a page linking to hundreds of scans of early Togo material from John Mayne's collection,

Cameo is WASC's award-winning journal.

 

For information about WASC membership, officers, constitution, and data privacy visit our membership page

The 2024 Salisbury Meeting took place on 15 June 2024 (themes were: Postal Stationery (in memory of Keith Hannan) and any aspect of Nigeria (in memory of Ray Harris) ). Our autumn London meeting will take place on Saturday 2nd November 2024.

Our next on-line meetings in 2024 will take place on Saturday 7 September (19.00-20.30 hours BST)  and Saturday 30 November (19.00-20.30 hours GMT). Details of displays and instructions for joining the Zoom call will be emailed to WASC members in due course.

Issues of Cameo previous to the latest five years have been digitised. All issues from number 1 (January 1975) to number 107 (June 2019) are freely available on this website. Click the CAMEO button above.

The Cameo Index volumes 1 to 24 covers all issues up to the end of 2023. It is organised alphabetically by administration, and available as an Excel file which may be downloaded and searched by topic, country or author.

Recently added to our Meetings page is the complete set of livestream links to the sessions successfully streamed since our conference in 2021.

Also added: November 2023 updates to Paul Redhead's Cancellations of Nigeria
(see publications page)

Our "Additional Documents" page has papers under sectional headings. Under Maritime Documents is a group of Elder Dempster sailing timetables, together with maps beautifully drawn by Peter Wingent (a sample map can be seen there). Some other documents produced by members on, for example, RAF West Africa-Rabat, Civil Aviation, Nigerian postmarks, are reached by links from the "Additional Documents" page. Visit that page also for a link to a free update (October 2021) to "Ghana Postal Markings to 1957" by Ian Anderson and Philip Quirk

If you wish to contact the Study Circle for information which does not appear on the site, please use this email address (remove spaces): webmanager @ wasc. org. uk