Alan Roy's Stamp Collection

Many stamp collectors like to have a certain focus to their collections.
They will centre their collections around the output of a particular country, a certain timespan or special events such as the Olympics or Christmas.
Alan Roy just collected stamps. Any stamps. He tried to get his hands on as many stamps as he could without any regard as to their individual value.
His family were pressed into service removing the stamps from the envelopes that were delivered to their house by the sackload on a daily basis.
His daughter, Janette Dorrell, recalled a childhood dominated by her father’s hobby:

‘I grew up surrounded by stamps.
He used to get sacks and sacks of used envelopes delivered to the flat from various contacts around the world and we used my old baby bath to peel them off. Dad started when he was very young and it just grew and grew. It was relentless.
As soon as I got married and moved out he filled my old room up with his stamps. When I left my mother took over as the main helper but he often roped in my twin daughters to help.
You could say that I never want to see another stamp ever again.’

On average Alan Roy processed 80 stamps per day or nearly 30,000 per year.
Over a period of 70 years he managed to accumulate over 2 million stamps.
His plan was to organise the collection and sell it to fund his retirement but the huge scale of the operation and the fact that the collection had no finite aim or coherent theme made any attempts at cataloguing the stamps impossible.
Instead the stamps were stored in random bundles and when Alan Roy died in 2009 the collection was sold in vaguely themed packs based around events and countries of origin.
It was believed that, due to the scope of the collection, if it had been properly catalogued and released onto the market in an organised fashion it could have been comprehensive enough to effectively flood the market and depress the values of stamps around the world.
Alan Roy was a postman...