November slogan postmarks - and other interesting postal markings

November starts (as October ended) with the default British Heart Foundation slogan (for which we don't have any examples yet).

However, thanks to LT, we have examples of the first two special slogans as shown.  I didn't make any suggestions in October for this month but obviously the Armistice Day slogan is a regular at this time.  This example is from Sheffield Mail Centre 10/11/12025.

Lest We Forget Armistice Day slogan at Sheffield Mail Centre 10/11/2025

 

This was followed immediately by the publicity slogan for the BBC charity telethon, Children in Need. 

The last record I have for this event was in 2015, so it is a welcome return to Pudsey Bear.  Again this is from Sheffield Mail Centre 11/11/2025.

BBC Children in Need slogan used at Sheffield Mail Centre 11/11/2025

  

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Other postmarks and postal markings, etc

 

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Remember, slogan postmarks appearing in November will be added to this post, so check here before you spend time scanning and emailing.

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More one-off errors and quirky things for the collector - week 46.

As I work through my accumulations looking for what I really want to keep, and therefore finding things that I don't, there will be more one-offs that will be offered to blog readers first.

Such was the speedy success of the Football Legends book, that I've decided to make one post a week, but probably with additions during the week.  So when you first look there may be something that you don't want but if you look at the same post later, then there may be additions.  At least that's the way I shall try to do it.

In all cases if you want the item, please leave a comment with your name or first name and initial, and then send an email with your name and address to my usual address - see top right.  And indicate which item you want (A, B, etc) in case more than one is available.  Please check the existing comments before you write.   If you already have my bank details send the money and I'll post as soon as I can.

Buyers outside the UK email and I'll provide postage cost and payment options. 

Each new item on offer will be sub-headed, thus:

A. 97p Counter Sheet date block mis-perf. - SOLD

I can't find this shown on the blog when it was discovered back in 2014.   It's the counter sheet of 97p Machins printed 18/09/14, with the die-cut perforations shift left, into the design, and down.

 

 

 

Although not clear on the image (click on it to enlarge) the selvedge extends to the full height of the row above.   Price is £25 including UK postage.   

SOLD - thanks to several people who asked.  Sorry Bill S - too late.

B. Postal Union Congress £1 reproduction pack £14 plus £1 UK postage (2 available)

In 2010 at the London Festival of Stamps Royal Mail issued a wide range of products associated with two new stamp issues.  They also issued extra unrelated products for the international audience that attended the show, one of which was a high-quality reproduction of the PUC £1 stamp in a block of 4. Individual stamps from the block are being bought on eBay for up to £6.50.  

 

I have two of these.  Remember - check the comments before putting your name down to make sure they are still available.  I will process requests in the order they are received but not always immediately - I am not checking every five minutes!   If two other people have already asked, by all means put your name down, but if those are successful your comment will not be published, nor answered as there is no way of doing so.

Postage internationally depends on destination. 

C. 1948 Olympic Games reproduction pack £7 plus £1 UK postage

A Facsimile pack, written by Douglas Muir, includes details of the selection process and unadopted designs from the 20 artists and printers who were invited to submit designs for consideration by the Stamps Advisory Committee of the time. The pack includes a non-postally valid Facsimile Sheet of the four stamps printed in gravure as a block of four.

Postage internationally depends on destination.

Other offers will be added here as they are found - thanks for looking.

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Another one-off error for a collector of the unusual - Football Legends 1996.

When Royal Mail issued the Euro 96 set of five stamps in 1996 they came with all the usual associated products - presentation pack, PHQ cards etc.

But there was an extra product, a souvenir postcard book entitled Football Legends.  The normal book is widely available from dealers and on eBay. 

This contained not only the PHQ cards, bound in, but also photocards of oher legends of the game - Billy Meredith, Joe Mercer, Frank Swift, Alex James, and Pete Doherty.   These were all monochrome so no room for error.  But the PHQ-type cards have black borders and colour for the queen's head, as the stamps.  The book I'm offering has a startling mis-print.

Just one available and yours for £7.50 plus Large Letter postage £1.50 inland - payment by bank transfer on cheque.   (International postage will be at discounted rate.)

If you would like this please leave a comment and email as usual - check the comments before putting your request in.  

RESERVED

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The Royal Mail 2026 Stamp Issue Programme - your ideas!

As regular readers will know, Royal Mail will not announce the programme of stamp issues for 2026 until at least Christmas, and probably not in detail until shortly before the first issue in January.

I've had a quick glance at Wikipedia for British events in 1926, although it is not always centenaries (or multiples of 25/50 years) which are marked nowadays.

I can't see the General Strike featuring and not the birth anniversaries of Kenneth Williams and Ernie Wise.  

 

The Imperial Conference was held in 1926 which led to the Balfour Declaration which "accepted the growing political and diplomatic independence of the Dominions in the years after World War I ... determining that they were autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations" - and hence the formal use of the term Commonwealth. 

If we do see any stamps for the foundation of The Commonwealth, I can see the Commonwealth Stamps Opinion blog will be very busy!

Alas we are more likely to see more stamps for Winnie The Pooh, it being the centenary of the book's first publication.  

Other notable events from that year were the foundation of what became the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, and the establishment of the first air (and hence airmail) route to South Africa by Alan Cobham.    Both very worthy of commemoration - which is probably why they won't be included.

Suggestions by email only please to ian@norphil.co.uk, only one per person unless I prompt you for clarification or expansion.

Results and comparison with the actual programme in due course.  The exercise ends when the programme is announced - please don't leak it if you see the calendar in a post office, it won't be published here.

NOTE: just for context, the following countries have already announced their part of the annual, preliminary programmes for 2026.  In no particular order:

Slovakia (in June), Belarus, Germany, Poland, Russia, Latvia, Moldova, Bosnia Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Guernsey, USA, Jordan, Montenegro, Hong Kong, Croatia, Åland, 

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Revenue protection - is this one of ours?

A consequence of issuing entertainment media-related stamps around the world is that one seems very much like another.  But I wonder if any British stamps have been successfully used in other countries because of this?

In fact many of the thematic stamps issued by Royal Mail - wildlife, comic-book heroes, film and tv franchises - are mirrored in other countries.

I've added the latest example of confusion - a non-UK Star Trek stamp used here - to the Postal History blog along with other examples.  

To demonstrate here are three very similar stamps.

IS it any surprise that one might be used in a different country?

UPDATE 7 November - also added to the Postal History blog, news about a surcharge label I haven't seen before.

 Please comment on the other blog; comments are switched off for this post.

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Victory for the little man and the people on Royal Mail's postbox conversions

Royal Mail's postbox conversion programme took a hit in Berkshire, according to a report in NewburyToday.

Bradfield Southend postbox 29 October 2025 (Newburytoday)

 

Residents in Bradfield Southend when the traditional red postbox outside the village post office was taped up by Royal Mail in favour of a new automatic system, and started a petition for it changed back.

Most annoyed was Kate Brealey, postmaster at Bradfield Village Store and Post Office – as the new automated parcel box to receive parcels would have sat right outside the building.

The petition reached 800 signatures.  In a statement from Royal Mail, a spokesperson said: “Following discussions with the council, Bradfield Southend’s postbox will remain a standard one.” 

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Alan Wilson dealer list - free if you are interested!

Modern collectors of Machins may not recall Alan Wilson, and I admit I had forgotten about him until I found his price list in one of my boxes.

NO LONGER AVAILABLE - three people emailed, but none put their request in the comments section, which would have avoided the later two from doing so. 

Wilson was 'a leading dealer' and his catalogue was advertised in the January 1990 edition of the British Philatelic Bulletin.  

This is not a work for the faint-hearted, it is very detailed indeed - ideal for those who take their Machin collection to great depths - shades, phosphor screens, different perforator and head types, value positions,
variations in phosphor coated paper, etc,

But all was not what it seemed, as this report from The Independent shows.

In 1995, the cloistered world of philately was shaken by the confession by a leading dealer that he had been forging rare stamps for more than a decade. Alan Wilson, a bookish 36-year-old bachelor who lives with his mother in Luton, walked into his local police station and told officers he had tampered with ordinary stamps to make them appear rarer and more valuable.

The sophisticated fraud brought him about £100,000, but his sense of guilt eventually led him to confess. He was given an 18-month suspended sentence and fined £30,000. Ironically, the fakes he manufactured were of such a high standard they have since become sought after by collectors.
 

So if anyone would like this price list - it has a few notes and highlights - please let me know in the comments and then email your address if I don't already have it.

Please check the comments before emailing in case it has already been claimed.

NO LONGER AVAILABLE - three people emailed, but none put their request in the comments section, which would have avoided the later two from doing so.

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Jane Austen Commemorative Sheet rumoured for December.

Fifty years ago Royal Mail marked the 200th anniversary of the Birth of Jane Austen with a set of four stamps and a slogan postmark.

 

1975 Jane Austen stamp set issued in October rather than just before Christmas.

The 250th anniversary was ignored for the current year's stamp programme - too many trite and banal subjects to use, rather than mark any cultural anniversary.

Or so it seemed.

I have today heard a rumour that a Commemorative Sheet will be issued on the actual anniversary date, December 16th.  

This is odd on so many counts.  The last Commemorative Sheet was United for Wildlife in 2018, and Royal Mail discontinued them.  Also abandoned were Business Customised Sheets (BCS) (in 2017) followed by Smilers Sheets in 2018. 

So if this is a change in direction, what more might we see in the future?  I thought Commemorative  and BCS were abandoned due to falling sales - certainly demand had gone through the floor about five years earlier so it was really no surprise.  

Royal Mail have been contacted!

UPDATE 14 November 2025.  I have had no response yet from Royal Mail but an Anonymous comment reveals that one of theses sheets is already listed on auction site eBay.

250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen Collector Sheet with King Charles II Union Flag stamp.

The private seller is offering this at £52.70 - the same price for which they have already 'sold' a Queen Victoria Collectors Sheet (which I haven't mentioned and can't show) on 6 November - it is due for issue on 27 November!  [The Royal Mail price for that sheet which I can't tell you about is £18.20]

 

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Has anyone seen a new NHS barcoded letter yet?

In the wake of further criticism on delays to ordinary mail Royal Mail announced in April a new solution for the more important letters from the National Health Service. 

The solution design provides an option for NHS providers to add a unique NHS identifier into the Mailmark barcode. Where our internal reporting shows that we are not meeting expected quality of service standards regularly, at either a local or a national level, the new NHS barcode will allow us to identify NHS mail and automate its extraction from Royal Mail sorting machines. Thereafter we will discretely handle the mail through to delivery. This will ensure NHS providers get the service they require, and patients receive their letters in a timely manner.

Customers choosing to use the NHS class identifier will need to add it to the class field in the Mailmark barcode and eManifest. This is not a new or separate service. Instead, the NHS barcode would be eligible to be printed on NHS letters using Access Priority (D+2) or Standard (D+3) Mailmark Business Mail services. The option is suitable for patient communications including appointment letters and test results.

I haven't seen any such letters yet, or had any reported, but it is now apparent that these will be handled in the same way as Special Delivery mail, according to this graphic from the Royal Mail website.

Note the original meaning of discreet - "Discrete means separate or divided. A discrete unit is a separate part of something larger."

 

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Christmas 2025 - five stamps, MS, smaller collector sheet - issued 4 November 2025

Some readers may have seen the designs for this years 2nd class and 2nd class Large stamp designs which Royal Mail have made available to direct mailing houses for their Christmas campaigns.  Inexplicably this was done on the (publicly viewable) Royal Mail Wholesale webpage in September with the exhortation that the mailers "must treat the image as confidential until 4 November and it should not be included on any of your promotional material or website."  (They can be seen on the Commonwealth Blogspot now.)

All the usual details will be shown here - the set, the miniature sheet, and the usual collector sheet - when the Royal Mail publicity machine kicks into action on 28th October.

Royal Mail is uncharacteristically brief in its enthusing about these designs:

Royal Mail is celebrating Christmas 2025 with a set of 5 stamps illustrated by British artist Paula Doherty. These illustrations focus on key characters within the nativity such as Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, the angel and baby Jesus.  

 

 

Set of 5 stamps and miniature sheet issued 4 November 2025 

Technical Details

The 39 x 30 mm stamps were designed by Hat-trick using illustrations by Paula Doherty and printed in gravure by Cartor Security Printers on self-adhesive paper in sheets of 50.  The miniature sheet is 179 x 74 mm.    

Booklets

Now we come to the interesting part - the information provided to the Stamp Trade, and on the order form, shows only booklets of 8.

But Royal Mail's web shop, today, also shows booklets of 4 of each value.

Royal Mail have been approached for more details. 

Digital Stamps used by Royal Mail Direct Mail customers preprinted on seasonal mailshots. 

Collector(s) Sheet 

From 2025 the traditional Christmas Collectors Sheet will be reduced to 10 stamps, from 20, in the following formats: 2 x 1st class, 2 x 2nd class, 2 x 1st Class Large Letter, 2 x 2nd Class Large Letter, 2 x £3.40.
The Sheet will be printed in self adhesive and litho, which is different from the main set which is printed in self adhesive and photogravure.  The labels here are particularly uninspiring - taking them singly they will mean nothing to anyone.  Price is £22.54

Products available 

Set of stamps, Miniature Sheet, Collectors Sheet, Retail booklets (apparently 4), Stamp Cards (6), Presentation Pack, First Day Covers (2).

UPDATE 28 October: I've had a report that the sheet stamps were on sale and were used in Ripon yesterday.  

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