I used to be rather a slave to pre-printed albums which for all their benefits do of course come with a number of limitations (but have now discovered album page creation software which has allowed me to customise to suit). For these islands I bought a pre-printed album from the Channel Island Stamp Co to work through. I believe at some point they held large stocks of these issues (and possibly were behind some of the issues) so this was clearly a good way to drum up interest!
I know these are local carriage labels / local labels rather than officially approved stamps, used for either parcel delivery (which were outside the Government licence) or for transferring letters and postcards over to St Peter Port where they then went into the (at the time) GPO service. The Commodore Shipping Company held the contract for deliveries between Sark & Guernsey and Alderney & Guernsey with Herm making their own arrangements.
Growing up I spent many holidays in Jersey and took the opportunity to visit Guernsey and Herm, so I'm rather attracted to them regardless. The early issues were interesting but they rather lost their way in the mid 1960s when they along with many others got swept up in the thematic craze with lots of clearly philatelic issues to mark Europa, Kennedy, Churchill and so on.
These came to an end for all three islands in 1969 when Guernsey Post Office was established.
I do have rather a soft spot for these. Before our favourite online auction site came along they were tough to find with just a few specialist dealers, nowadays there are many of the more common ones online but there are still some tough ones to track down.
