ZENOBIA HMS ASC CENTENARY OF CIVILIAN RULE

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Ascension Island was discovered by the Portuguese seafarer João da Nova in 1501 and was initially named Conception, before being rediscovered two years later in 1503 on Ascension Day by Alphonse d’Albuquerque, who gave the island its lasting name. Being dry and barren it was of little use to the East Indies fleets and went unsettled.

It remained uninhabited until Emperor Napoleon I was incarcerated on St Helena in 1815 when a small British naval garrison was stationed on Ascension to deny it to the French. The island was designated HMS ASCENSION, a “Stone Sloop of War of the Smaller Class”.
By Napoleon’s death in 1821 Ascension had become a victualling station and sanatorium for West Africa Squadron ships engaged in the suppression of the slave trade around the West African coast. In 1823 the island was taken over by the Royal Marines and remained under the supervision of the British Board of Admiralty until 1922.
It ceased to be a military-only island in 1899 when the Eastern Telegraph Company arrived and established a mid-Atlantic communications hub connecting the UK with South Africa by installing the first submarine communications cable from the island.

In 1922, Royal Letters Patent made Ascension a dependency of Saint Helena, with control being officially handed over to the Eastern Telegraph Company from the Admiralty on 20 October 1922. The island was managed by the head of the Eastern Telegraph Company on the island until 1964 when the British Government appointed an Administrator to represent the Governor of Saint Helena in Ascension.


50p HMS ZENOBIA: ZENOBIA: Together with her sister ship PERUVIAN, ZENOBIA had been part of the flotilla under Rear Admiral George Cockburn that had taken Napoleon into his final exile at St Helena. Cockburn was concerned that the French might use Ascension Island, uninhabited at the time, to stage a rescue mission. He, therefore, dispatched ZENOBIA and PERUVIAN to claim and garrison the island. viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5591

55p Robert Francis Peel: The great-grandson of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel served in both the Second Boer War and the First World War before becoming a Member of Parliament. In 1920 he resigned his seat to become Governor and Commander-in-Chief of St Helena, thereby becoming the first Governor of Ascension Island in 1922. He continued to serve as Governor until his death in 1924.

65p King George V: Reigning from 1910 to 1936 George V was King at the time of the change to Civilian Rule.

£1.60 Ascension Islands Flag: The island’s flag, adopted on 11 May 2013, is shown flying over the Island.

Ascension 2022 50/£1.60 sg?, Scott1255
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