Queen's 95th birthday pane 21 April 2021 - re-written and updated.

Royal Mail have produced, in conjunction with the Royal Mint, a commemorative £5 coin cover marking the 95th Birthday of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.  The cover was launched on 1 April, and is dated 21 April 2021.  The cover costs £19.99.

The cover has a pane of stamps which, based on previous form, appears to be from a prestige stamp book pane but it is not.  There is no prestige book.

A limited edition Coin Cover featuring the new £5 coin released by The Royal Mint, plus a unique pane of eight Definitive and Country Definitive stamps.

Pane of 4 x 1st class Machin definitive and 1st class country definitives from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all with revised font.

For Royal Mail, there are no new stamps, so this is not being made available mint for distribution to collectors with any sort of standing order.  A spokesman for Royal Mail said that they were mindful of complaints by both collectors and cover producers that there were too many stamps to collect/produce FDCs for and this cover is aimed squarely at the 'Royal memorabilia' market rather than the philatelic market.

As usual, dealers were able to buy these ahead of the 21 April issue date and GONJ provided these pictures which show that these gummed stamps are coded M21L and MAIL.  

At this stage no detailed information had been provided to registered dealers through normal philatelic channels.  When details were published, it became clear that although they would not be sold to collectors, nor to dealers for mint resale, they would be made available for dealers to put on covers and have cancelled.

Royal Mail also announced in their publicity, on the filler card, and in information sent to dealers, that the pane would be printed in two processes, with the Machin definitives printed in gravure and the country definitives [and the label, we believe] printed in litho.  This is odd, because the last certain information we have on printing by International Security Printers is that the Cartor factory in France only has the capability of printing in litho, while the British factory near Wolverhampton can only print in gravure.

We don't know the printing process for the phosphor bands, but all copies seen so far have the phosphor shifted upwards as noted in the pictures above, and seen even more clearly in this pictures provided by CH (to whom many thanks):

Photograph of Queen 95 pane under ultra-violet light, showing upward shift of phopshor (the lighter areas) producing short bands at the foot on the England and Northern Ireland and 2 x Machin definitives at the foot, and partly inset bands at the foot of the Scotland and Wales stamps and partly wide bands on the other 2 x Machin definitives (at the top). 
(The horizontal line across the label is from the plastic on the carrier.)

 

Update 9 August 2021:  MD sent this picture of the 1st class stamp with "the speckled Queen’s face, like a snowy effect caused by a printing error".  Not something I've seen on this pane or any other.

'Speckled face' on 1st class from this pane.

UPDATE 16 August.  Thanks to AJ for this picture of the whole pane with this fault, from the cover.  

This stamp is not on sale through normal channels so it is unlikely to have a full listing in any Gibbons catalogue, but it should be worth a footnote.  We will list it in the Norvic Checklist (number 3702.21) as available used only, as we did for the Sunday Times MA10 2nd class coil.

As this is a unique stamp which some collectors will want despite unavailability of mint copies, we shall provide it used either as a pane or a single stamp.

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