Sir John Wilson, 2nd Baronet

Sir John Mitchell Harvey Wilson, 2nd Baronet KCVO (10 October 1898 – 6 February 1975) was a British philatelist and Keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection from 1938 to 1969. He introduced the division of the collection by reign and, after World War II, loans from the collection to international exhibitions.

John Wilson was the second Baronet in his family, the title having been received by his father for his contribution to Scottish agriculture. John inherited an estate near Glasgow.

While serving in the Coldstream Guards during the last months of Great War, he was hospitalised in Stirling, Scotland where he first became interested in stamp collecting after his father brought his own collection to help his son pass the time. After the war he was a barrister but retired in the early 1930s to manage his philatelic collection and estate full-time. Generally, he specialised in small countries or in short philatelic periods of a country, studied it, then sold the collection to begin another one.

Wilson was President of the Royal Philatelic Society London (RPSL) from 1934. In October 1936 he accepted the offer to succeed Edward Bacon, the Curator of the Royal Philatelic Collection. Wilson knew the collection well: he visited it regularly with the RPSL Expert Committee of which he was Chairman from 1937 to his death. He became "Keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection" on 20 June 1938, shortly after Bacon died.

Because King George VI was less enthusiastic than his father, King George V, and had less time available for the Royal Collection, Wilson's first task was to move it upstairs in Buckingham Palace. After a study of the red albums, he established that Bacon had mounted and commented almost all acquisitions and issues up to the Edward VIIIreign. In December 1938 George VI agreed that stamps of his reign be stored in blue albums. As previously, all stamp projects and issues came from the British General Post Office and from its Dominions and colonies.

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