Ronnie Spafford
British soldier and philatelist
Major Ronald Norman Spafford (29 July 1928 – 6 October 2014), known as Ronnie Spafford, was a British army officer and philatelist who was an expert in the stamps and postal history of the Falkland Islands and developed a deep interest in those islands.
Early life
Spafford was born in Bristol, but due to bombing during the Second World War the family moved to nearby Weston-super-Mare, where Spafford had his home for the rest of his life. Spafford was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset and originally intended to become an artist, which horrified his parents. Instead he was called up to do his National Service in the Army which equally horrified Ronnie. He graduated from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, found that he enjoyed the military life and decided to become a career soldier, serving in the Royal Artillery and rising to the rank of Major.
Philately
Spafford had collected stamps as a child and decided to rekindle his interest while he was in the Army when he saw a colleague arranging his collection. He selected the Falkland Islands because it was possible to complete a collection of the basic stamps of the islands. When he had done that he moved on to more specialised philately. He was vice-president and co-founder of the Falkland Islands Philatelic Study Group and in 1980 he was an adviser to the BBC television series In the Post, made in Bristol. In 2009, The London Philatelist erroneously reported Spafford's death, causing a correction to be published in the next issue.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ronnie Spafford” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.