Chichester stamp collectors urge others to discover the joy of philately during the lockdown

The Chichester & District Philatelic Society is one whose members collect stamps and envelopes (covers).

Often, members specialise in one or more areas.

Some enjoy studying the stamps from say King George V, Penny Blacks, USA, Western Samoa, while others collect thematically.

These might collect parrots, cricket items, or ships on stamps and covers, for instance.

We have another members who enjoy collecting Cinderellas, stamps that resemble postage stamps but were not issued as such.

One has never seen so many cigarette band stamps, train labels, tax duty stamps, and more!

Finally, there are the more modern Horizon labels that are issued from post office machines.

These also have a vast array of glitches, errors, oddities and more on them!

On May 1, 1840, over 2,000 stamp design ideas were submitted to Mr Rowland Hill.

His was the difficult choice in opting for one design.

In the end, however, he opted for his own design!

The 1d Black, The Penny Black, was chosen.

It is such a national icon that pubs were named after it, and British passports have designs of it on the pages of passports.

There was a deep dark blue 2d, or Penny Blue, stamp issued also.

However, it was obvious that the black,or red, inks used to create cancellations weren’t being seen very well on these stamps.

So in 1841 the Penny Red was printed.

Over 21 billion Penny Reds were used over decades.

The Penny blacks, blues and reds were all imperforated. This means they didn’t have perforations like we seen on regular stamp issues today. Perforations evolved in 1854.

The imperforate stamps were printed in sheets , many on a Jacob Perkins’ press, which was run by hand!

The sheets of stamps had to be cut out with scissors.

Stamps can be seen with margin/no margin, and the ones with four clean margins can command high prices when auctioned!

For the Penny Black a print run of 286,700 sheets containing 68,808,000 stamps was produced.

Hopefully this is the first of a few articles I’ll write on stamp collecting.

During these days when many of us are indoors why not locate that old family album, or the one you had when you were a child?

Maybe some of the stamps mentioned are in them?

Philately affords the opportunity to learn new things, history, geography, languages, politics, sports, and more.

This is what we do at club level internationally, nationally and at local level!

What a joy to share our passion of stamp collecting with others.

Martha Brown, president of Chichester and District Philatelic Society

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