Looking at these Victorian/Edwardian Christmas and New Year greetings cards makes you realise that even if cards are now sent in envelopes instead of as postcards, today's card manufacturers - with their fluffy bears, dogs, cats, Minions, etc - are not so different to those of days gone by. The Christmas card above has a gnome - ok, maybe an elf - surrounded by lucky four-leaf clovers, flowers, fungi and a ladybird and an acorn! No Santa, and not a hint of the religious element! And neither card has any snow, or any suggestion that this is winter! Just a thought.
Anyway, the year-end is upon us almost before we realise it, and we can look back on another year of surprises and frustrations, innovations and disappointments, and look forward to changes of direction.
Machin definitives
As usual, the first (
Windsor Castle) prestige stamp book of the year contained stamps coded for the previous year, but the accompanying retail booklet had a 2017 code.
Royal Mail kept the
£5 Accession stamp secret for far too long, and when they did give it maximum publicity in the mainstream media, collectors found that only a few Post Office branches were selling it.
Apart from that the year progressed much as expected, with the
counter sheet stamps at last appearing on backing paper with security printing - but not until
the new tariff values had also been printed on plain paper. Although a big fuss had been made over rebranding and the new darker corporate red for the 1st class stamps in booklets and business sheets, Royal Mail overlooked the opportunity to make the similar counter sheet stamps a 'visible change' and so there was no first day of issue for those as there had been for the other sources. The
1st class red with M17L code appeared in April, but the same stamp with M16L code didn't appear until October, and supplies are very difficult to find.
The
Machin 50th Anniversary was commemorated with an unprecedented number of Machin stamps - a few or many depending on your degree of specialisation. Royal Mail had a problem with one PSB pane, and we will never know whether they sent the wrong artwork to the printer or to the publicity department. The year ended with another
Star Wars PSB which has the 1st class stamp in the original colour instead of the darker one!
This year's
Country Definitives have the values for all countries in the same font, which makes some sense even if you still can't read them easily, especially those for Northern Ireland.
The big surprise on Machins was the appearance of the unvalued trial printings by
Courvoisier which, after much debate by the owner, were eventually
placed on sale.
As usual there was a packed programme of
special stamps which we largely steered clear of. As usual, most collectors and the general public saw few of the special stamps on their letters and parcels, although we did report
early use of one of one David Bowie and one Christmas stamp.
The 1st and 2nd class (and Large)
Christmas stamps were issued in two designs which were printed in one sheet for each value, although a special
single-design printing of the 1st class was produced for the stamps given to Royal Mail staff.
A new initiative by Royal Mail's marketing department for
'local' handstamps for new issues (starting with Ancient Britain), announced only to the local press in each area, was roundly condemned by first day cover collectors. Special arrangements were made for the
Mills issue in June, but FDCs were not returned to collectors until October, and the announced handstamps for the Landmark Buildings were quietly abandoned.
Post and Go
For collectors with big bank balances it was another bumper year, although those who wanted examples of every possible design/inscription/stamp/date combination would have found it very expensive, and probably quite difficult to track down. The
Isle of Man PO joined the club (albeit using Irish PO machines rather than Royal Mail Post and Go) at Spring Stampex. A limited access Post and Go machine was installed at the
Ministry of Defence offices in Bristol, and a further one at Royal Mail HQ.
The
Mail by Rail digital version was the subject of an unannounced launch at the Postal Museum (only), and unprecedented errors concerning the
Scottish Congress at Perth meant that two different inscriptions were used, while those sold not at the event but by Tallents House included a pre-release of the Machin Anniversary stamps.
The last new location for a machine (other than at a Post Office or Royal Mail facility) was at the
East Anglian Railway Museum which had machine A005 transferred from the Royal Marines Museum where it was sited for just over two years. In the autumn a 2017 printing of the Poppy made a widespread appearance, followed by a reprint of the
Winter Greenery 1st and 2nd class stamps with a 17 year code.
Royal Mail communication
Following the retirement of Royal Mail's Martyn Fry, official Post and Go information has been intermittent and often wrong, so much so that Royal Mail's official Post and Go webpage has now been abandoned. On the positive side the
Postmark Bulletin is not only free it is now online, with special handstamps being added to another webpage between editions. However this doesn't give us any more information than before about slogan postmarks of which there have been a wide and interesting variety, especially for thematic collectors, that were usually 'discovered' rather than announced.
The
Philatelic Bulletin likewise has continued to provide late, misleading or even incorrect information whilst providing a lot of information about the background to stamp issues which is not the prime interest of collectors. We have urged Royal Mail to concentrate on getting right the technical information that they provide to collectors and to the trade: after all, we can get it to you from the actual stamps (when we are allowed to).
As for the year to come, the big news about the first issue will be announced before January, and we will report it here with images when we can. The rest of the
2018 programme contains some quite good topics, even if some of the designs we have seen so far leave something to be desired.
We know that there will be no more
Business Customised wallpaper after the spring, though doubtless some customers will ramp up the orders for events taking place later in the year and in subsequent years. We expect major changes to Post and Go next year which will reduce the number of variants digging into collectors' pockets. For a start, there will be no Post and Go machines at Spring Stampex or the Scottish Congress in Perth, and in the absence of a miniature sheet associated with the Votes for Women (Stampex) issue, there will be no numbered limited edition collectable at Stampex either.
I'm hoping for more policy changes, one of which may reduce the amount of mail cancelled by biro or bingo-marker, enabling more collectors to actually find stamps which are at least used, and maybe even fine used.
We close the year - having added two pieces of new information to the blog while this summary was in its draft stages - by bringing out the picture we prepared a couple of years ago. We've already had reasonable frost and some snow this year, and other parts of the country have had a lot more than we had, some of which prevented us going on a weekend excursion to the Welsh borders a couple of weeks ago. We'll be back in the office on January 3rd.
So once again thank you to all our readers and contributors without whom the blog would be smaller and far less useful to collectors around the world.
We hope you all have a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.
