The Royal Mail's tawdry issues and designs are making philately, once a hobby fit for a king, into a slightly seedy investment business.
By Simon Heffer - Daily telegraph of London
Published: 3:53PM GMT 02 Jan 2010
A press release arrived just before Christmas – by email rather than in the post – to announce the glad news that 2010 is the year of the Festival of Stamps: "a year-long festival of exhibitions and events celebrating stamps, their design and postal heritage" promoted by the British Postal Museum and Archive. Its ambitions are quite legitimate: to "show the important role that stamps play in our lives: as a key part of the nation's heritage they form the world's biggest public art gallery"
Why this year? Not least, it seems, because 2010 is the centenary of the accession to the throne of the most famous stamp collector in our history, George V, who collected stamps from childhood. In 1840 the first stamp in the world – the penny black – was created with his grandmother's head on it. During the next 61 years of her reign many different denominations, series and varieties of stamps gave collectors such as her grandson a field day: and collectors today still wallow in the joys of philatelic Victoriana.
The hobby's great impetus in the 19th and early 20th centuries was not given only by British stamps, though. As the British Empire turned much of the map red, the new territories began to issue their own stamps.
These had a magnetic attraction to collectors, too, and provided a geography lesson to millions of small boys.
The royal collection, now housed at St James's Palace, was begun by one of Queen Victoria's sons, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. George V greatly expanded it and spent much of his own money on it, pursuing rarities from around the Empire. It is almost certainly the best collection in the world, and, although the King died nearly 75 years ago, that it is so is largely down to the standards he set. That he deserves this commemoration for his feat is beyond question.
Yet stamp collecting today is in a bad way. I do not mean as a form of investment – those who bought rare stamps a decade or two ago have seen returns on their outlay far superior to those the stock market or a pension fund has been able to provide.
small boys may no longer be interested in the pursuit – computer games appear to have seen to that – but stamp dealers continue to make a healthy living with the support of adult collectors who are putting together serious assets. However, to say that stamps today lack the romance and interest of those a half-century or century ago would be an understatement. This is not because we have lost an empire and have yet to find a new philatelic role with which to replace it: it is because the very philosophy of stamps has changed. Stamps are now, it seems, produced largely for collectors and only incidentally for postage: and the whole business has become, morally, a little seedy.
For the sake of contrast, let us go back to George V. During his reign there were various different designs and printings of definitive stamps: not to give collectors something to collect, but because of technological changes in the printing processes. As with the stamp issues of the King's predecessors, there were inevitable variations of shade and watermark. Some rarities from stamp books had the watermarks inverted, sideways or reversed, and occasionally missing altogether. Shades were a trickier business. Especially during the Great War, there were problems with inks, many of which had fugitive colours, and these make the definitive stamps of the first half of George V's reign among the most interesting and exciting for collectors today. The simple penny red had 16 different shades, the halfpenny 18, but the ne plus ultra is the twopenny-halfpenny blue with its 19 shades, including such poetic ones as Prussian blue, powder blue and (the most delicate of all) pale milky blue.
One could argue that the rot set in during this reign, with the invention in 1924 of the commemorative stamp, to mark the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. However, over the ensuing 12 years before the King's death there were only three other commemorative sets, one of them (in 1925) an exact repeat of the 1924 issue, with the date changed. The other two marked the Universal Postal Union Congress of 1929 and the Silver Jubilee of 1935. The UPU included a £1 stamp – its face value equivalent to a week's wages at the time for an under-housemaid – which is probably the most beautiful stamp ever issued in this country, a somewhat reactionary (though with a tinge of art deco), black-and-white representation of St George slaying the dragon. In perfect condition, the UPU £1 is now worth more than £1,000.
By contrast, our own stamps today are rather tawdry. Perhaps this, like our toytown coinage, reflects our decline as a power: or perhaps it is just a lack of imagination on the part of the Royal Mail, coupled with their greedy desire to exploit collectors for money they are losing elsewhere. The lack of imagination comes in our definitive stamps, unchanged in design for 42 years now. The minimalist representation of the Queen by Arnold Machin has many admirers, not least the Royal Mail itself, which talks up this bland and outdated design at every opportunity. To me it smells of the worst of the Sixties and, like the temporary tower blocks that also distinguished that decade, should be consigned to memory. The Queen's diamond jubilee, just two years away, would seem to be an appropriate juncture for the Royal Mail to break out a new design, and perhaps one that is less bland and Wilsonian, and more in spirit with the elegant design by Dorothy Wilding that was on the first stamps of this reign.
The 2010 stamp programme contains 16 commemorative issues, the same number as issued between 1924 and 1960. The trouble with issuing commemorative stamps sparingly is that the scope for the Royal Mail to make money out of them shrinks. I can see why the Royal Mail is releasing a set on May 6 to celebrate the centenary of George V's accession, for that seems like a genuine event to commemorate. But what is the point of next Thursday's issue commemorating "classic album covers", for heaven's sake? Or August 19's breathlessly long-awaited "stage musicals"? Less might just mean more, in terms of philatelic standards, though not on Royal Mail's balance sheets.
If they can't bear to stop exploiting collectors for profit, then at least let them try more sophisticated ways – reintroducing watermarks, for example – to cheer everybody up, and ensure there were amusing varieties of them. Pumping out stamps to mark all sorts of pointless things and events is what banana republics do: and we must try to cling to the belief that we are not quite there yet.
