Douglas Myall
Douglas Myall (17 December 1922 – 30 January 2019) was a British civil servant and philatelist. He is known for his exhaustive study of the Machin stamps, the British definitive series in use since 1967. His catalogue, "The Complete Deegam Machin Handbook", is one of the main reference books about this series. Life. Myall was born in Essex on 17 December 1922. A civil servant, he finished his career at the trademark registry of the Patent Office. He became interested in stamps while working at the office of the Inspector of Foreign Dividends, where he kept stamps from the  incoming mail. In the 1950s and 1960s, he collected the Wilding stamps, the first definitives of Queen Elizabeth II's reign. At the same time, he was working at the Inland Revenue and studied security printing that had been helping him in his philatelic activities. His first articles had been published in philatelic press. From their commencement, in 1967, Myall collected Machins and was a founding member of two specialised clubs; the Great Britain Decimal Stamp Book Study Circle (GB DSB SC) and the British Decimal Stamps Study Circle (BDSSC), being the founding president of the BDSSC, a position he  held for 18 years. The two study circles merged to form the Modern British Philatelic Circle (MBPC) in 2006. He was not content with the way BDSSC and the Stanley Gibbons catalogue were handling the potential criteria to study Machin stamps. He therefore decided to write his own catalogue, with an aspiration to be as exhaustive and precise as possible. "The Complete Deegam Machin Handbook" was first published in 1993. This was followed by a second and a third edition, the latter being published in July 2003. A CD-ROM version of the third edition was introduced in 2005, and  a fourth edition available on CD-ROM only was published in April 2010. It was regularly updated by the "Deegam Reports" sent by e-mail to book owners and printed for their members by some philatelic associations. Aside from the Machins, Douglas Myall collected British perfins on covers and practised macro photography of insects. Myall's wife, Kathleen, died in 2014. They had two daughters, Delia and Fiona. Douglas Myall died on 30 January 2019. Pursuant to arrangements made by Myall before his death, two experienced philatelists are continuing work on "The Complete Deegam Machin Handbook" and maintaining the web  site. The fifth edition of the Handbook was released in November 2020. The "Deegam Reports" continue to provide periodic updates.