It may have escaped your notice – indeed, it will have escaped the notice of all but the most dedicated philatelists – but 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the commemorative postage stamp. The very first issue, marking the British Empire Exhibition, appeared in April 1924. It was a slow beginning: another five years were to elapse before the next commemorative issue, celebrating the Ninth Universal Postal Union Congress of 1929, and any budding collectors would have had to wait a further six years until the silver jubilee of King George V was commemorated by four stamps issued in May of 1936.
It wasn’t until the reign of Queen Elizabeth II that the idea of commemorative stamps really started to take off. A mere seven issues had spanned the era of her father, George VI, and even the Elzabethan age took its time to produce anything of serious interest to philatelists. These early commemoratives are quite dull by comparison with the colourful designs that would follow, and were usually printed in single colours. Two-colour printing arrived with 1960’s issue commemorating the European Postal and Telecommunications Conference. The design, in green and purple, was very traditional, looking rather like a banknote, and gave no hint of the radical ideas that would follow during the next decade.
I have never, in all honesty, been a bona fide collector of stamps. I own a couple of stamp albums, certainly, but my interest in philately has never been more than casual; occasional spurts of renewed enthusiasm in between decades of indifference. Like most collectors, I began by saving any interesting stamps that arrived in the post. Which is to say, my mum began saving them. She received regular mail from relatives in the Republic of Ireland, so those were probably among the first stamps I ever collected. Others were culled from postcards hailing mostly from mainland Europe, and the occasional letter from an aunt in America.
Besides steaming them off envelopes, you could buy packets of stamps in most local newsagents. In the late 1960s, during a mania for anything to do with dinosaurs, I spotted a set of prehistoric animal stamps in the window of Dillons newsagents in Mere Green, close to where we lived. Needless to say, these were not a British issue – no prehistoric reptiles would appear on our stamps until 1991. The stamps were of a kind produced specifically to appeal to juvenile collectors, and hailed from places I’d never heard of – Fujeira and Umm Al Quwain, both members of the United Arab Emirates. They were also very large – much bigger than any British stamps – and highly coloured. Although they all bore franking marks across their corners, these were faked for the sake of supposed collectabilty. The stamps had never genuinely been posted.
Although I’d watched Blue Peter for many years and seen the programme’s own stamp album regularly updated by Val, John and Pete, I took little or no interest in British stamps at this time. In 1966, the programme had run a competition to design what would go on to be the UK’s first ever Christmas commemorative stamps. I didn’t enter. The competition was won by Tasveer Shemza and James Barry, with their designs of a Magi king and a snowman respectively. Tasveer was in fact the daughter of a Pakistani artist and poet, Anwar Shemza, which probably gave her an edge over the other entrants. Her design quickly became iconic, and its journey from a child’s painting to mass production at Harrison and Sons, printers to the GPO, provided an interesting feature on Blue Peter (reproduced in the following year’s annual). This may well have been one of the first British stamps our mum steamed off an envelope for me.
Stamp collecting remained a now and then kind of hobby, one best saved for rainy afternoons on weekends and school holidays when all other avenues of interest had been thoroughly explored. I still have my first ‘Trans World’ stamp album, into which I would add occasional items. All nations were allocated a single page, and it is a wonder to me looking through it now that the best represented country should be the former Yugoslavia, a fact for which I cannot account.
In 1975, my collecting began to step up a gear and I began to buy packets of used stamps from an Oxfam shop in Sutton Coldfield. These were comprised of British stamps, both commemorative and definitive (the name collectors assign to ‘ordinary’ postage stamps). Each packet contained a completely random sample, culled mostly from the past decade and a half. Anything of value had been carefully weeded out, so there were no chance discoveries of Penny Blacks, although some of the more common Victorian stamps turned up frequently.
Before long, I removed the stamps from the British pages of my Trans World album, and began to compile a new collection, devoted specifically to British issues. This must have been in the summer of 1975, because the first set I went out and bought from new was released on 13 August of that year, marking the 150th anniversary of the steam train. The album is testament to the mercurial nature of my interest: many sets were bought but remained unmounted, and it fizzled out altogether some time in 1980.
One name stands pre-eminent in the world of philatetly, and it was to this fount of knowledge that I turned when I began in a semi-serious manner to collect British stamps. Stanley Gibbons is the world’s longest established dealer in rare stamps, and their check list, costing just 30p, became my guide to the world of British stamps. I still have their 12th edition, illustrating, in colour, every British stamp ever issued, from the Penny Black of 1840, right through to the County Cricket commemorative set of May 1973. Every stamp was accompanied by its current market value in used or unused condition. An unused Penny Black would have left you £125 lighter back in 1973, whereas today even a heavily cancelled example can be worth four or five times that amount, and certain desirable variants are priced in the thousands. Elsewhere, however, it’s a different story. The commemoratives that interested me in that 1973 catalogue varied in price from a few pence up to as much as £1.50 for examples with phosphor bands (an optional type that was being trialled as part of the development of mechanical sorting offices). Today, the values of most such stamps have declined in real terms, and complete year sets can easily be obtained for no more than a couple of pounds (with only the phosphor issues retaining any level of rarity and value). In the early 90s, I wandered into a stamp fair at the local civic hall, and was surprised at how values had collapsed. Stamps that cost maybe £2 each in that 1973 catalogue were now available for pennies. A dealer explained the situation to me: following the stock market crash of 1987, many collectors cashed in their stamp albums, resulting in an oversupply. This situation has persisted until the present day. Any collector starting out could now buy virtually the entire decade of 1960s British commemorative stamps for around £30.
I decided this was what I would do: start again on collecting GB commemoratives, this time in mint condition, and compiling full year sets from the 60s and 70s. Once again, however, I did not pursue my rediscovered hobby with any real level of dilgence. From the fair, I bought a few year sets containing stamps I’d never managed to collect the first time around, and bought a new album with proper cellophane mounts to keep the stamps pristine. I soon forgot all about it. Something like fifteen years went by before I looked out my ‘new’ stamp album again, and decided to try and fill some of the gaps. A flurry of ebay purchases followed before, once again, philately and I parted company.
One thing I decided long ago was to stop collecting new commemorative stamps. They just weren't the same any more. Back in the 1960s, with designs from the likes of prolific artist David Gentleman, a definite aesthetic held sway over British stamps. Many issues made use of only two or three colours, yet within these limitations some dynamic designs appeared, many of them reflecting Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ technological revolution: the Forth Bridge, the GPO Tower, nuclear reactors, the E-Type Jaguar… all of these had appeared on British stamps by the middle of the decade. Even the Queen’s image had been given a stylised makeover: David Gentleman, frustrated at having to include the monarch’s portrait in his commemorative designs, proposed a new, simplified silhouette which, through the offices of Postmaster General Tony Benn, was soon given the Royal seal of approval. That same silhouette would appear on all commemorative stamps until the end of the Elizabethan era. Meanwhile, advances in print technology saw the first full-colour designs (British Birds, 8 August 1966), and a new large format (British Paintings, 10 July 1967). Some sets were issued in continuous blocks – David Gentleman’s 1966 Battle of Hasting set imaginatively used imagery from the Bayeux Tapestry with the stamps issued ‘se-tenant’ in conjoined strips of six.
My appreciation of stamps fed into my apreciation of modern design history: comparing stamps from the early 60s with those of a decade later, I could see trends in design such as the lean towards traditionalism in the ‘Laura Ashley’ era of the late 60s and early 70s. Some years were better than others: for me, the years 1964-68 were the high watermark of commemorative stamp design, with a clean, unfussy and often minimalist approach exemplfied by the work of Gentleman and others. 1970 and 1971 by contrast, were strikingly dull, with drab and dreary colours and some dull subject matter. For me, the absolute worst set ever was 1977’s Jubilee issue, whose colour schemes strongly suggested the work of a colour blind designer. By now, a much more ornate look had come to dominate the stamp world, with many admittedly fine but perhaps over elaborate illustrations replacing the sometimes stark graphics of the mid 60s, and I began to lose interest in stamps as aesthetic objects.
The anniversaries and achievements commemorated on stamps had always been of a high order: explorers, technological innovation, historic moments, all of them good, sober, academic subjects to which any Mastermind contestant might aspire. Today, it’s a different world. Dinosaurs have finally featured on British stamps (more than once), as have X-Men, Dame Shirley Bassey, Paddington (the bear, not the railway station), Aardman Animations, The Spice Girls, Harry Potter and Peppa Pig. Alongside these (some would say) frivolous issues, there have been a few sets in the older manner, commemorating the Red Arrows, The Flying Scotsman, Windrush and, of course, Christmas.
Meantime, I still have my own album to complete. I doubt it will ever extend beyone 1980, and I’m stretching a point by including some of the ‘dull years’ that I’ve avoided until now: but all collections should have an endpoint, a moment at which they reach completeness. It’s only taken me forty-nine years...
No comments:
Post a Comment