As Royal Mail are no longer producing coils of 500 or 1000 we had some debate on the original post about which Post Office branches still have vending machines (see comments on the original article).
Now there may be another explanation. We recently received a mailshot from WCRF-UK (World Cancer Research Fund), with this stamp on:
The vertical sides are cut, suggesting that it comes from a coil, and the top and bottom are cut slightly on the slant, indicating it was applied by a machine which cut each stamp from the coil. There are no security features, and it is pre-Pricing in Proportion, ie pre-2006. As it happens, looking through a box of odds and ends I found another from the same charity, and it was exactly the same - but that was in with some covers I put away in 2004!
So a direct mailing house, or the charity if they have a stamp-fixing machine, are still using the stamps from a very similar source to that used 8 years ago! Difficult to believe that they are still using the same roll, so they must have bought a considerable number back then.
Either that or Royal Mail, when they were scraping the bottom of the barrel to get stamps out to customers before the April price rise, found some of these and sold them instead of modern security versions.
Whatever the reason, it pays to keep looking at your post and kiloware, because some odd security versions may pop up yet!
