Scout postmarks of Switzerland

In 1912 the first scout units were founded in our country, but it took until the 1st Swiss. Scout camp in Bern in 1925 before the first official postmark was used on camp mail. 

At that time, 3,000 scouts took part in this camp from 27.07. - 04.08. and, thanks to the pretty postcards, a relatively large amount of camp mail was dispatched, so that today one can still come across a cover from this first national camp from time to time. It is more difficult to find a letter or a postcard from the 2nd national camp in 1932, or from the 1st international rover camp in 1931 in Kandersteg. At the Geneva camp, the boys could already phone home from the camp, and there was certainly little writing for this reason. At the 1931 rover camp, older scouts of rover age were gathered from all over the world, and many card greetings to foreign countries must have gone into the waste paper basket.

At that time, hardly any scouts thought of collecting stamps or building up a scout collection. At that time, there were only a few isolated covers for such a collection. There were also only a few scout stamps before 1925, but already in 1939 one could count 65 scout stamps and 10 postal stationery items. Today there are over 1400 stamps and far more than 2000 special postmarks. In Switzerland, 3 postage stamps were approved for the 50th anniversary of the Scouts in 1963 and for the anniversary of the Girl Guides in 1969. Within the framework of the joint Euro-CEPT issues, Swiss Post decided to issue a value of Fr. 1 for the anniversary on 10 May 2007.

In addition, there are now 51 official Boy Scout and Girl Scout postmarks, incl. the 13 famous sub-camp postmarks at the 1966 federal camp. It is thus possible to build up a nice Boy Scout collection for our country alone.