Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues: How Britain Got Stuck on Stamps Timeshift

When I was a boy there was much talk of hobbies.

You were supposed to have a hobby,

just as you would need a career in later life.

And the default hobby, the one that almost every child,

including me, dabbled in, was stamp collecting.

Well, this is great. A philatelic grotto.

You don't see many places like this any more.

A hobby was something to do on a rainy day,

and stamp collecting was perfect for that because it brought colour and

life into the drabness of an English living room on a damp Sunday.

The stamp album itself was like a little portable picture gallery,

or maybe a travel brochure.

You could imagine yourself living in the places

where the stamps came from,

or at least pretend that you knew someone who lived there

and liked you enough to send you a letter

bearing a stamp from his exotic home.

There was a patriotic element to it in that Britain had invented stamps,

but there was also an un-patriotic element -

it had to be admitted that so many of the foreign stamps

were much more exciting than our own.

Why couldn't we have a pale yellow triangular stamp

with a vulture on it, like Mauritania?

Stamps ensnared us all in a social and commercial web,

but there's always been more to them than that.

They've been symbols of our national identity.

It's an image of royalty, of monarchy,

and, indeed, of the country.

And each stamp is an aesthetic event, a work of minuscule art.

Are they going to be symbolic or pictorial?

These are all complicated things to fit together into a tiny space.

Stamps provided not just a popular pastime,

but a rite of passage for millions of children.

You know, the world when you're eight or nine is a chaotic place,

but if you can somehow bring it down to scale in an album...

And stamps have always had a knack of transcending their face value.

What fascinated me was such a little thing having such a huge value.

7,900,000.

These little sticky price tags not only revolutionised communication,

they became objects of desire in their own right.

This bureaucratic expedient, the stamp,

became imbued with the most profound romance.

Hidden away in a private London vault

lie the remnants of a revolution.

Imagine the postal world of early Victorian Britain -

no stamps, no envelopes,

letters were bundles of sheets.

The charge for sending was based on the number of sheets,

and it was always expensive,

because postage was a form of tax.

The system was slow, corrupt, a mess.

But in 1835 one man sought to reform the postal service.

His name was Rowland Hill.

The population's increased by almost one third in the last 30 years,

and yet there are no more letters sent through the post

than when I was a boy.

I tell you, sir, as a commercial undertaking,

the Post Office is a failure...

This is Hill's journal.

It's packed with engagements and activity,

it's exhausting even to look at it.

Hill ticked all the boxes for a Victorian do-gooder -

workaholic, strong Christian,

dabbled in both railways and education reform.

He was into connectivity.

It's natural that such a man should turn a sceptical eye

on a postal system that was completely inadequate for the times.

Firstly, it was expensive. It cost a shilling,

that's about £5 in today's money,

to send a letter from Scotland to London.

The second problem, it was inefficient.

It was inefficient mainly because the recipient of the letter

had to pay, and not the sender.

It might be a case of the postman knocking on your door and saying,

"Can I interest you in having this letter that someone's sent you?"

A shilling for the letter, indeed!

You can tell the post office to take it back to London

and I hope it costs THEM a shilling!

In 1837 Rowland Hill laid out his proposals in a pamphlet entitled

Post Office Reform: Its Importance And Practicability.

And his solution was a simple one - prepayment at a fixed cost.

A cost that would be low and uniform,

a cost that ought, as he put it,

to neutralise all pecuniary objection.

The sum he had in mind,

one penny.

Now, my plan is to sell to the public some kind of a mark

which they could put on the letters themselves

to show that they've been paid for -

a printed cover,

a small sticky label,

in fact, a kind of a stamp.

But what image to use on this adhesive label or stamp?

Hill wanted to be as refined and aesthetically pleasing as possible,

because that would be hard to forge.

On one of his correspondences he said,

"It ought to be the image of a beautiful young woman."

Where to find such a person?

Diplomatically, Hill looked no further

than the young Queen Victoria.

The portrait used was from this commemorative medal.

It was copied onto this die, from which the printing plates

were created that made...

..these.

The Penny Black, as the first-ever stamp was christened,

proved an immediate success.

68 million were printed.

They were unperforated, so post office clerks

had to shear off the sheets with long scissors, like so many tailors.

These are the only remaining complete sheets of Penny Blacks

in the world. And their value is beyond measure.

This set the template for stamps around the world.

The size became more or less standard.

It's beautiful. Why?

Because of its elegance, its simplicity,

and there's a becoming sombre quality because of the blackness.

It's basically the Queen, at night.

Hill's postal reform swept the country.

Within a year of its issue the Penny Black had caused

the number of letters being sent to double.

This mass communication compressed Britain and then the world,

in terms of space and time,

and it boosted literacy too.

But for some, stamps were not to be so casually dispatched.

On the morning of May 1st, 1840,

the day of the Penny Black's first issue,

a zoologist called Dr John Edward Gray stepped out of

his office here at the British Museum and walked around the corner

to the main post office at Saint Martin's Le Grand.

He bought a block of four Penny Blacks.

But he didn't put them on an envelope, he put them in his pocket.

Dr Gray was the first stamp collector.

And he didn't have to wait long to expand his collection.

Just a week after the Penny Black came the Two Penny Blue,

to cover heavier postage,

and a year later the Penny Black gave way to the Penny Red,

on which a black cancellation mark would show up more easily.

From the early 1850s stamps took off around the world,

and these laggard countries all wrote their names on their stamps -

something the originator, Britain,

didn't think, and still hasn't thought, necessary.

As stamps proliferated, their collectors emerged from the shadows,

or were sometimes discovered in the shadows.

In February 1863 the opening pages of a new London monthly,

Stamp Collector's Magazine, gave a vivid account of illicit meetings

that had begun to take place in the alleyways

leading off Birchin Lane in the City of London.

The article was called Postal Chit Chat.

It recorded rowdy gatherings every evening

of up to 50 people of all ranks of society,

from office boys to one of Her Majesty's ministers.

These people carried under their arms what the author calls

small books studded with dark patches.

Stamp albums.

These people were hell-bent on swapping, buying, or selling stamps.

-Have you a yellow Saxon?

-I want some Russian!

Will you exchange a Russian for a Black English?

I wouldn't give a Russian for 20 English.

I'll give a Red Prussian for a blue/bronze wicker.

Prices fluctuated dramatically.

A stamp with a street value of a penny one night

might struggle to fetch a ha'penny the next.

The police were soon involved,

threatening prosecutions for unlicensed trading.

And a popular rhyme was soon to be heard

echoing through these backstreets.

When sudden a gruff voice is heard,

That all the thronging bevy stirred,

I turned, and fix'd my eyes upon,

A bobby, crying, "Stamps, move on!"

Apparently similar things were going on in Paris

in the Tuileries Gardens.

The scene there was a bit more civilised -

evidently people sat under the trees with the albums on their laps.

But still there was a certain intensity.

And a new word was coined to describe the mind-set -

timbromanie - stamp mania.

But one French collector, Georges Herpin,

took exception to this term, timbromanie,

and decided to coin a more elegant one.

Whether he succeeded is open to debate.

The rather lumbering Greek hybrid he proposed

means "a love of the exemption from tax" -

philately.

And philatelists soon found they no longer needed to gather

in London's backstreets. Stamps were now a high street affair.

Perhaps the biggest concentration of stamp dealers in the world

is grouped along both sides of a 50-yard stretch

of the Strand in London.

Dealers here hold stocks worth hundreds of thousands of pounds,

and cater for collectors of every age and stage.

I grew up in the North, but I often came to London as a boy.

When I walked along the Strand and saw that the famous theatres and

hotels shared the streets with so many shops selling

cancelled postage, it changed my whole idea about London.

It made me think it must be a less hard-headed,

and more whimsical place than I'd thought.

Almost all of those stamp shops have now gone,

but one remains, the most famous, Stanley Gibbons.

Edward Stanley Gibbons was born in 1840,

the same year as the Penny Black.

As a boy he was obsessed with stamps,

and he was shrewd enough to know it was a common affliction.

He started out by running a stamp desk from the corner of

his father's chemists in Plymouth,

before moving to London to develop his business

and eventually opening a premises here on the Strand.

Stanley Gibbons owed his success to two kinds of books.

Firstly, there were his catalogues, which listed all

the available stamps which people could buy from Gibbons,

and then they were his albums,

which had reserved spaces for particular stamps,

which, again, people could buy from Gibbons.

And so the stamp collector was lured in.

At Gibbons I met the philatelist Hugh Jefferies,

who's been working in the shop since 1975.

This is a copy book from Stanley Gibbons in 1864.

He was a very hard-working man,

and he is said to have sent 160 letters to his clients and customers

every day. He would dictate them to his secretary,

and once she'd written them all out,

she would then copy them into this book.

So this is a few days' correspondence from Stanley Gibbons,

offering stamps to customers all over the world.

Here is the Stanley Gibbons catalogue for May 1869.

British, colonial and foreign postage stamps -

that would seem to cover everything.

Was this his very first catalogue?

No, it wasn't. He produced his first catalogue, which he did monthly,

in November 1865.

It was very much of this style and pattern,

and a lot of the prices are the same.

Stanley Gibbons produced a price list, and, of course,

people loved it because they could then assess the value

of their own collections by looking at how much

Stanley Gibbons was going to charge them for their same thing.

Interestingly, he had a price for unused, and a price for used,

and a price for a dozen.

-Is it every stamp in the world here?

-Yes, it was.

1869. It was possible to list every stamp in the world

in a kind of pamphlet?

Well, we do still list all the stamps in the world.

And how many stamps are in there?

-I don't know. Millions.

-Many millions.

-And how many stamps are in here?

-A few thousand, I would guess.

Stanley Gibbons sold his business in 1890.

As the in-house magazine, Stanley Gibbons' Stamp Monthly, admitted,

he then dedicated himself to having a rollicking good time!

He went around the world three times.

He liked to visit the places that had been depicted

on the stamps in his albums.

He was particularly keen on the tropics.

He also got married.

Five times.

He died just over the road in the Savoy Hotel,

in the arms, it is said,

of his last mistress.

During his lifetime Stanley Gibbons had catered

for a booming collectors' market.

His customers ranged from schoolboys,

keen to fill a Gibbons album,

to bigger players, with agendas of their own.

One of the biggest spenders at Stanley Gibbons

was a mysterious little man in a Breton cap, who resembled a tramp.

Both his exact name and his nationality are open to question,

but let's say he was a European multi-millionaire,

generally referred to as Count Philipp von Ferrary.

Ferrary was the illegitimate son of a Genoese duchess.

She raised him in her Parisian palace,

and the two remained very close.

Probably realising that her introverted son needed a refuge

from the world, the Duchess commended stamp collecting to him.

But the hobby became a mania

and Ferrary restlessly roved the world in search of rarities,

for which he paid on the spot with gold coins.

Ferrary stored recent purchases in

the multi-pockets of a specially adapted long, black coat,

so he was like a kind of walking stamp album.

And he was a completist.

Ferrary aspired to own a copy of every stamp ever made,

and he had the money to do it.

Stamps have been described as emblems of social order,

but there is an iconoclastic element to stamp collecting.

Ferrary and others were attracted to the postal pratfalls,

the misprinted or miscoloured stamps -

the errors - some of which have gone down in history.

In 1847 the British colony of Mauritius

issued One Penny Red and Two Penny Blue stamps.

The engraver was short-sighted,

and he wrote "post office" instead of "post paid".

Only a dozen or so of the particularly famous Blue Mauritius

are thought to have survived.

Few enough for each to be worth a fortune,

but not so rare to preclude one turning up unexpectedly,

especially in fiction.

What do you want with us?

I think you know, so if you just hand them over I'll turn you loose,

and you've nothing further to worry about.

If you mean the stamps, we haven't got them.

Seven of them passed through Count Ferrary's hands,

but they have achieved a mythic life beyond philately.

Look here, my boy. Someone's offered us a Mauritius Penny.

What are you doing?

No. You're mad.

Good shot!

PHONE RINGS

Perhaps the most famous error is the 1855 Swedish Treskilling,

or three shilling yellow, which should have been green.

Only one is known to exist, and it was discovered

by a Swedish boy in his grandmother's attic in 1886.

Ferrary acquired it eight years later.

There was the equally singular One Cent Magenta,

printed in British Guyana as part of an emergency issue in 1856,

and again, unearthed by a schoolboy, and later purchased by Ferrary.

It features a ghostly drawing of a ship,

contributed spontaneously by the printer

and not authorised by the postmaster.

I will start the bidding at 4,500,000.

At 6,500,000.

In 2014 the One Cent Magenta sold at auction for a record figure.

On the telephone then at 7,900,000.

7,900,000.

APPLAUSE

Thank all you very much.

With the premium, the stamp has just sold

for approximately 9.5 million.

The buyer has requested to be anonymous.

Count Ferrary paid what were

outrageous sums at the time for these rarities.

And even though he was a shambling maverick in person,

his money helped elevate the social status of stamp collecting.

At the start of the 20th century

there were 34 philatelic societies in Britain, all very pukka.

But the oldest and most distinguished

was the Royal Philatelic Society.

Its most famous member, and its royal patron, was George V,

whose official biographer remarked, unofficially,

that for much of his early life George did little more than

"shoot game and stick stamps in albums."

The King's collection filled 328 red leather albums.

In 1904 he paid £1,400 for one of the fabled Blue Mauritius stamps.

A few days later one of his secretaries asked, had he heard?

Some damned fool had paid £1,400 for a single stamp.

"Yes," the King replied,

"I was that damned fool!"

The King devoted three afternoons a week to his hobby, which was,

perhaps, his way of keeping a beady eye on his Empire.

But in 1924 the King was invited to approve a new kind of stamp,

a special stamp that would be sold for a limited time only -

a commemorative stamp.

The King was wary of the whole notion of commemorative stamps.

He thought they were vulgar,

the kind of thing that foreigners went in for.

Indeed, the first commemorative stamp had been produced in Peru,

in 1871, celebrating 20 years since the building

of the first Peruvian railway.

The new and unprecedented British commemorative stamp

had been mooted by the General Post Office to mark the opening of

the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in April 1924.

Given the soaring national debt,

and signs of agitation amongst the peoples of the Empire,

it was vital that the exhibition was a success,

so the King was persuaded to accept the idea of a philatelic promotion,

but he insisted it had to be done properly.

Artists were invited to submit designs,

and the GPO picked a modernist one

by the influential sculptor and typographer Eric Gill.

But, again, the King took fright.

The King was no aesthete -

he'd once burst out laughing at an exhibition of French Impressionism -

and he was probably wary of Gill.

Some time before, Gill had produced a design for

the Great Seal Of The Realm. It showed the king astride a horse,

but the design was rejected when somebody pointed out

that the horse appeared to be urinating.

Gill was given the royal brush-off for a second time,

and the King chose a more traditional image by Harold Nelson,

featuring a roaring lion.

A British lion, of course.

It was a bit like buying the T-shirt.

By acquiring the stamp you proved you'd been to the Exhibition,

because the stamp was only available on the Exhibition site,

either from vending machines or from Wembley Post Office

where, on June 30th, in a formal ceremony,

the Prince of Wales bought the five millionth one.

Over six months more than 17 million people visited the Exhibition,

where, like the King, they could tour a Mughal Palace,

an African fort, and a Buddhist temple,

or take a ride on a miniature train.

All highly exotic and diverse, yet basically British.

And if you hadn't caught sight of the real Prince of Wales,

you could pop along to the Canadian Pavilion

and see his effigy carved in butter.

Looking around here now there's hardly anything left

of the whole jamboree. The last remnants of the old Empire Stadium,

the Twin Towers, went in 2003.

And that was the Palace Of Industry.

But I've heard that one item was salvaged from the debris,

by way of a memorial.

And it's this, a lion's head corbel.

It's all that remains of the British Empire Exhibition,

except for the stamp, of course,

and one in pristine condition will set you back about a tenner today.

The Empire Exhibition has long faded into history,

but its commemorative stamp left an enduring legacy.

It had sold very well, with 13 million snapped up.

And the success of the Exhibition suggested that stamps

could function very well as miniature billboards.

So why not issue another?

In 1935 the General Post Office called on the services

of Barnett Freedman, an eminent artist and lithographer of the day,

to produce a stamp for George V's Silver Jubilee.

Now, are there any particular conditions

in the designing of the stamp?

Yes, you must keep to the head of the King

which appears on present stamps.

-Otherwise I have a free hand?

-Absolutely.

A documentary, scored by Benjamin Britten,

followed Freedman as he worked up his design,

using a method called photogravure,

which gave an almost three-dimensional texture.

This one goes to the printers.

This machine is producing over half a million Jubilee stamps an hour.

Freedman's Jubilee stamp was stylish and modern, but subtly so,

which is, perhaps, why it got past the King.

In the post-war years there seemed to be a great deal to commemorate,

but the young stamp collector might not have been looking forward

to the Olympic Games, the Festival of Britain,

or even the coronation of a new Queen

so much as the accompanying stamps.

Commemorative issues now provided regular treats -

bigger and more colourful stamps to enliven monotonous albums.

By the early 1960s commemoratives had become a fixture.

More than 20 had been issued since the Wembley Exhibition,

but the chosen subjects had become increasingly uninspiring.

With all due respect to the European Postal And Telecommunications

Conference at Torquay, I doubt it set pulses racing,

even among the attendees.

And as for another commemorated event,

the ninth World Scout Jubilee Jamboree,

held over 12 days at Sutton Park, Birmingham,

that was...

well, a wash-out.

Even the stamp designers themselves were sceptical

about some of the commissions.

I first got into it by...

through an invitation

for a rather depressing subject,

it was called National Productivity Year,

which I felt was a bit Stalinist.

I think that was one of the things that were wrong with stamps

at the time, that they had to be about a passing event,

they couldn't be simply about something

because it was interesting.

You designed a very stylish stamp for it, even so.

I'd done a few stamps already and found out that it's extremely

difficult, on the tiny amount of space you've got on a stamp,

to fit in several elements that fight each other,

and so the Queen's head, particularly in those days

when it was a three-quarter view photograph,

it was extremely difficult to make it sit well alongside another image.

In January 1965 David Gentleman wrote to the new Postmaster General,

Tony Benn, proposing, if not treason,

then philatelic regicide.

"I'm convinced that the main single drawback to the realisation

"of unified modern designs is the monarch's head.

"Not merely the unsatisfactory angle of the present photograph,

"but the traditional inclusion of the head at all."

I thought I'd said too much,

and then I had a phone call from him saying,

"Come and meet me at Post Office headquarters."

Wednesday, March 10th, 1965.

This is the day I'm seeing the Queen about the new stamps.

David Gentleman came to breakfast again this morning at my request.

He brought along the most beautiful designs

for Battle of Britain stamps made out of silhouettes

of RAF and Luftwaffe planes in combat.

They were very simple,

flat silhouettes of Spitfires, Hurricanes,

some German planes flying about in the sky.

They really looked lovely.

Armed with Gentleman's designs and a carefully-prepared speech,

Tony Benn took off for the Palace.

The Queen beckoned me to sit down, and I started.

On commemoratives, I said, we had broadened the criteria

to many subjects that had previously been excluded.

This raised the whole question of the use of the head on the stamps.

The Queen frowned, and smiled.

She indicated that she had never had an opportunity to look at

any of these new stamps and would be interested if she could.

And he said, "I've got some here in my bag."

It's like Blue Peter, here are some I made earlier!

And so I spread out on the floor 12 huge design models

of the stamps, provided by David Gentleman,

bearing the words "Great Britain", and no royal head on them.

Benn thought that the Queen liked them.

That wasn't quite correct, was it?

He told me that she'd been interested,

but that by the time he got back to his own office

the message had come, via the Prime Minister, that the head was to stay.

-So the battle was lost.

-The battle was lost.

The Queen's had had to stay on stamps,

and here it is on The Battle Of Britains, as small as it could go.

But, with a further commission the following year,

David Gentleman challenged another of the conventions

governing commemorative stamps, namely the one decreeing

that no living person apart from a member of the Royal family

could be featured on one.

The issue of fourpenny stamps

to mark England's victory in the World Cup

brought early morning queues at post offices all over the country.

The first day's supply of about 1.5 million were going like hot cakes

very soon after opening time.

The reason is that nearly everybody believes the stamps will be

worth a lot when the collectors really get busy.

Here are some commemoratives you did for the 1966 World Cup.

I don't see Bobby Moore or Geoff Hurst.

I don't recognise these people, and that's because

you weren't allowed to depict a living person on a stamp, I think?

In those days, it might have been Stanley Matthews,

I'm sure that they wouldn't have tolerated the idea

of a known footballer.

I got a photographer to photograph two football friends

to, in my mind, epitomise the nature of the game.

-And that stamp is based on those photographs.

-It is.

So this really is the first example of a living person

specifically depicted on a stamp?

-That broke the rule, didn't it?

-It did.

But they're not personalities.

They are there as anonymous footballers.

Which is rather commendable, because a stamp is basically

a democratic medium.

I wonder if they know that they're on a stamp?

I think they found out at the time.

Well, I hope they've got a few stuck in their albums!

That would be great, wouldn't it,

-to point to a stamp and say, "That's me"?

-That's me.

The Queen's head remained an issue.

In three-quarter profile it seemed to obtrude from the stamps.

A consensus emerged amongst designers that a new image

of the Queen was needed to be used on all stamps,

primarily on the standard ones, known as definitives,

but also on commemoratives.

So Tony Benn announced a competition to design a new,

more muted royal profile.

Let's have a look at it.

And at the British Postal Museum in London I've been granted

a private audience with Her Majesty.

Well, this is the work of Arnold Machin,

and Machin was a sculptor, so the work that he did

was in the form of a plaster cast, or bas relief.

Apparently Machin spent a whole year doing nothing but working on this.

Why a whole year? What was he doing all that time?

Well, it may look a simple image, but it is, in fact, quite complex.

When he began with his sketches, most of them were rather elaborate,

so he spent the year simplifying things,

and then the Stamp Advisory Committee suggested that he change

the tiara to a diadem, as you see here.

And this diadem looks familiar to me.

That, in fact, is the diadem that is worn by Queen Victoria

as seen on the Penny Black.

There was an attempt to go back to the Penny Black,

especially with the Queen herself.

The Queen was quite hands on about how exactly the image should end up?

She was obviously interested in her own image, as it appeared on stamps,

and with the photographs that were taken,

she annotated all 60 or 70 of them.

Some of them she marked as being "good", some just "yes".

So quite restrained annotations. She didn't write "terrible"?

She didn't write "terrible", but she did write "no" in capital letters.

And then chose a particular colour, a dark olive sepia brown,

deliberately to imitate the Penny Black

on the first class letter rate.

And here is that colour, of the first Machin.

1967 to the present day. Why has it endured so well?

Well, the image is timeless, it's a classic.

The Queen doesn't consider that a portrait of herself,

it's an image of royalty, of monarchy,

and, indeed, of the country.

The fact that we're still using Machin's definitive

shows just how successful this rebranding was.

It, and many classy issues designed by the likes of David Gentleman,

propelled stamp collecting to a peak of popularity.

I had merely dabbled in stamps back then.

A more committed collector of the late '60s and early '70s

was the author Simon Garfield.

He suggested we meet at his old, well, stamping ground,

Stanley Gibbons.

I used to come here a lot when I was,

you know, short trousers in the '60s.

And it was a kind of...

joyful voyage on a Saturday afternoon.

I began at Trafalgar Square Post Office,

for the new issues, which you just got over the counter at face value,

and then working your way along the Strand.

But, you know, Gibbons, I suppose, was sort of

the ultimate, and the Mecca. It was bustling at that point.

Really, sort of, a kind of heaving place.

Lots of kids like me. I remember they used to call me Sir,

which, you know, I used to call my teacher Sir,

but to be called Sir when you walked into a shop, age of eight...

Well, they obviously sort of looked me up and down,

in my short trousers, and said, "Well, actually, what he's after is

"one of these," which is one of these, sort of, selection packs.

You would fill a lot of album space with this.

You would never find anything of any great worth.

What's the number one psychological explanation for stamp collecting?

I think, for me, when I was a kid,

it was trying to put some order on the world.

You know, the world when you're eight or nine is a chaotic place,

but if you can somehow bring it down to scale in an album...

And also the idea of, sort of, completing something,

collecting. The idea of a quest is kind of very good.

But also things that other people don't have, you know.

The idea of having the same collection as everybody else

in the world is just not a very interesting thing.

You want to specialise, and the things I specialised in were errors,

Great British errors.

The one I think I remember I saw first

was the Post Office Tower stamp.

Well, two new stamps have been issued, which we've put,

of course, here into our stamp album.

And they're to commemorate the opening of the Post Office Tower

in London. The threepenny is a most unusual shape

because it's vertical,

and shows the tower springing up above some old Georgian houses.

They had made, you know, 50 million of the stamps,

but 30 of them, I remember, had missing olive green,

and the olive-green was the Post Office Tower itself.

Clearly, as it was going through the printing machine,

the olive-green had run out.

Here is further evidence of the stamp collecting craze

of your boyhood, the early '70s.

Collect, "a great new stamp collecting game,

"all the excitement of the stamp collecting world."

I wouldn't hesitate to say a great new stamp collecting game...

Perhaps the only stamp collecting game, is probably

-the other way of looking at it.

-You played this?

I did, and I like to think that this was me -

very happy with wonderful stamps. This part of it is clearly a lie.

There were three girls playing

and that never happened in the history of the world.

Do you think the fact that somebody bothered

to make a board game about stamp collecting in 1972

means that that was the very peak of the hobby?

I got the feeling, though, that sort of mid '70s

it was sort of trailing away, but that was perhaps just me.

That was when I discovered, you know, punk.

In 1977 the most memorable image of the Queen wasn't on a stamp.

It was what you might call a punk definitive.

# God save the Queen

# The fascist regime

# We love our Queen... #

As emblems of order,

stamps may have been losing their appeal to the anarchic young,

but they were being marketed heavily towards older collectors.

Portfolios of rare and valuable stamps were now offered

as a hedge against the rising inflation of the late '70s.

A sort of stamp bubble ensued.

This is the last call.

Sold to Mr Irwin Weinberg at 280,000.

We consider it an exceptional buy.

-Why?

-Well, it is of course the rarest stamp in the world.

It's the first time in 40 years it has come up.

Stamps have, in fact, over the years, performed consistently well.

People are looking for a secure home for their money

and they have many markets to choose from. Stamps, gold, diamonds...

350, dreihundertfunfzig.

375?

Any more for 375?

SHE SPEAKS GERMAN

But in just one minute, it was over.

Going at 70,000.

Well, it's the smallest and lightest form of portable security

there is in the world.

1,400.

SHE SPEAKS GERMAN

1,400. 1,500 I'm bid....

Life Magazine stated that it's undoubtedly the most valuable

object in the world by weight and size.

I can open this stamp, Lot 374,

for 325,000.

It's absolutely wonderful. Didn't think I would ever see it.

I have a bid on the right at 850,000.

Last call.

Sold.

That particular bubble burst, as they all do.

But the economic uncertainty and low interest rates

of recent years have benefited the high-end stamp market.

Phenomenal prices have been achieved.

I've come to Geneva

to visit one of the leading philatelic auction houses.

I'll be meeting a man who has masterminded many record-breaking sales.

Five, six, seven...

David Feldman is, you might say, a born dealer.

At the age of eight he set up an exchange scheme

with classmates in his hometown of Dublin, and at 11

he started a mail order business called The Shamrock Stamp Club.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

12,000. At 12,000.

Any more at 12,000?

Lot number six at 4,800.

HE REPEATS IN GERMAN

At 4,800, going, going and...

BANGS GAVEL

Almost all of my friends were collecting stamps.

I saw that there was a need perhaps for someone to exchange stamps

between them, or bring new stamps.

With the club we had little books which you called

stamps-on-approval books, which I had handmade myself.

We would send you a book and you could buy those stamps

and you would have a discount, so you could...

you yourself could even offer them to friends and make,

if you want, a commission.

So it was like pushing other people, your customers even, maybe to take,

they would take at a discount or sell to friends.

So you're like a kind of drug dealer,

making them addicted to stamps.

Well, I wouldn't want to make that comparison, but in a sense,

being able to have more money to buy better ones,

let's say more rare ones,

more expensive ones, and then show them to my friends.

That grew and then I became enveloped in that business.

I became immersed.

Lot 32 at 10,000 now.

10, 11 and 12 for me.

And 13, 14...

15. 16.

It's been explained to me that these gentlemen are postal historians.

They are interested in the use of the stamp,

the accumulating postal value of one or more stamps -

that's the franking - or perhaps in the route that a letter took.

A letter might have been diverted because of a war

and that will be denoted by the postmark.

Or they're interested in the way that the stamp is cancelled.

An eccentric cancellation might go for a lot of money.

So it's more than just the stamp, per se.

Against the net now, at 24.

In the room at 24.

HE REPEATS IN GERMAN

And...

Gone.

Where does the balance now lie for you between the appeal of the stamps

and the appeal of the money?

Well, I think if you're in the business, you have to be...

Basically, presumably you have to be a businessman.

What fascinated me was the item, the value, the adventure,

the excitement and the continually changing by buying and selling.

Since Count Ferrary acquired the Treskilling Yellow

for £400 in 1894, the legendary stamp changed hands

ten times before David Feldman put it up for auction

just over a century later.

The most valuable stamp in the world has been sold at auction

in Switzerland for £1,364,000.

The Swedish dealer who bought the Treskilling Yellow

for an unnamed private client said it was a bargain.

The stamp, issued in Sweden 140 years ago,

is a unique misprint which should've been green

but was coloured yellow by mistake.

Now, I've always said if you want to really make a good investment

in stamps, if you're thinking of it in that way,

the only sensible way is you should invest in what others collect

because then there is the real collecting market and interest.

So the only real way to know that is that you either

have the knowledge yourself of the collector,

or you go and get the advice of a professional

who has a collecting clientele and can tell you that this is

very interesting for collectors, and presumably will continue

to grow with collectors, and that should be a good investment,

but not a bubble investment that suddenly rises and falls.

So now you need a more subtle understanding of what the collectors want.

I think you always did if you want to understand the collecting world

and you wanted to be successful let's say long-term.

Short-term, you might be able to get in and get out to make a quick

profit, as you say, but that was not related to the collecting world.

David Feldman's auction house near Lake Geneva

is just a short boat trip from where Count Philipp von Ferrary

died of a heart attack in 1917.

He'd just been buying some more stamps.

What drove his obsession?

I'd like to think it was something to do with the beauty of stamps,

a quality that consistently struck me while watching the Feldman auctions.

But Ferrary also took stamp collecting into the big money league

and David Feldman advises anyone who wants to invest in stamps

to study the collectors.

In order to observe them in their natural habitat,

I'm going to have to exchange Geneva for Croydon.

Specifically the East Croydon United Reformed Church

and a meeting of the local Philatelic Society.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to tonight's meeting.

This evening we'll be entertained by our own members,

so we can look forward to a wide variety

and plenty of material to enjoy.

Now, I've selected just 15 sheets

and I've tried to select some rather sexy sheets, if you like.

I mean, philatelically sexy, of course.

I didn't have any firm notion of how a modern stamp club operated

and I admit that I was slightly thrown.

I'd expected to see more actual stamp albums on display.

And if you can't see the overprint through the back of the stamp,

it's a forgery.

-I'll have a custard cream.

-Yes, likewise.

Apparently, if we'd come to this stamp club 30 years ago,

there would've been plenty of people with stamp albums

and the business of the club would have been one person

showing another person their stamps in their album.

But now the stamps have broken free of the albums because it's easier

to display them and easier to talk about them if they're mounted,

like this, on what are called frames.

And the idea is that the members of the club give a show and tell,

like a kind of school assembly, explaining about their collection,

why it's of interest

and perhaps hinting at how much it's worth as well.

There's one thing you might not know, Andrew.

It's a funny little quote.

"A postage stamp is a dirty piece of paper

"that somebody else has spat on."

-And it's so true.

-Yes.

Or it was, but now a lot of them are self adhesive,

so that blows that one out of the water!

I think you've put me off starting a collection.

Now, Pauline, you collect stamps showing cats...

-I do.

-..from all around the world.

You are a rare breed yourself,

because you are a female philatelist.

-Here, we have got about 20-odd men and three women.

-Yes, yes.

What do you think, is the appeal of a stamp, to a man in particular?

It's the hunter-gatherer, got to collect.

So if there is one of something and there's another one out there,

you want it.

But you have a glaring example of just that here.

-I do, yes.

-From this issue of cat stamps,

issued by the island of Stroma, off Scotland.

-Yes, yes.

-A rare example of a local issue of a stamp.

-Yes.

-One's missing. Why is it missing?

The chances of me finding it are virtually nil.

-But that stamp does exist?

-It must do.

-It's out there.

It must do. It will be out there.

Well, are you not tormented by the thought of filling in

-that black hole there?

-Erm... No.

I am, and it's not my collection!

A lot of stamp collectors are very secretive.

-Male ones?

-Yes, yes.

When I worked at Stanley Gibbons, I quite often had a client,

who would be male, say,

"Please don't tell the wife what I've spent,"

or, "If I'm not in, please don't leave a message."

If this club is typical

then the standard philatelist is a person of a certain age,

but inducements to the young,

or at least new collector, continue to be offered.

They take the form of first-day covers,

specially-designed envelopes bearing new stamps

postmarked on their first day of issue.

In my boyhood, these were considered the most exciting things

to come out of a post office,

with the possible exception of a postal order.

But do people still buy first-day covers?

I've come to the main post office at Trafalgar Square

on the morning of a new issue.

The issue is called Masters Of Music,

which, in practice, means Pink Floyd. A range of stamps

commemorating the 50th anniversary of the formation of the group,

I think. I have no interest whatsoever in Pink Floyd,

but I should imagine that's true

of anyone who comes here to buy the stamps.

If anyone does come, because, so far,

I'm the only one in the queue.

-Excuse me?

-Hi.

-Are you here for the Pink Floyd stamps?

-Yeah.

-Are you a stamp collector?

-No, I'm a Pink Floyd fan from Japan.

-Oh.

Excuse me? Are you here for the Pink Floyd stamps?

Are you here for the Pink Floyd stamps, sir?

Can I ask if you are here to buy some Pink Floyd special issue stamps?

No? Pink Floyd special issue?

Pink Floyd stamps?

No, they're just regular punters.

# Money

# It's a gas

# Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash... #

So the old first-day cover trick seems to have lost some of its allure.

And even the sending of ordinary letters

with ordinary stamps is in decline because of e-mail.

Britain's average daily mailbag peaked in 2005,

at 80 million letters.

It has been contracting sharply ever since.

So, what is the future of stamp collecting?

For the past 20 years,

this woman has been trying to ensure it has one.

Erene Grieve visits schools to promote philately,

and she has helped to establish numerous stamp clubs,

some of which have waiting lists.

When I was your age, you saw an advert and it said,

"Send for a sack of stamps for ten shillings."

We opened up the sack,

emptied them out on the table and, believe it or not,

there were hundreds of stamps in there, from all over the world.

Places I'd never heard of. There was the world on our table.

Zanzibar, Mozambique, Madagascar,

Turks and Caicos Islands, Trinidad and Tobago.

Places I'd never heard of and things on there I'd never seen,

cos, of course, we didn't have what you've got today

that shows you a window on the world.

Put your hand up if you've got a television.

Oh, we didn't have television when I was your age.

Put your hand up if you've ever been abroad to another country.

'I think adults have stopped introducing children to stamps,'

getting them interested.

I think, when a child starts looking at a stamp,

looking at what's on a stamp,

and understanding that that foreign word

or those squiggly signs actually refer to a country

and a currency, and the pictures on it refer to something

that's happening round the world, there is a magic to it,

and it's rather hard to put one's finger on it.

That is a very famous stamp.

You see, somebody, one or two people, knew it.

-Why do you think it's famous?

-Cos it was the first stamp.

Absolutely right. It was the very first stamp.

Things seemed to change a lot in the '70s.

Mums started going out to work more.

I think perhaps parents don't have as much time now

to follow that sort of hobby with their child.

Is there any evidence that it is being taken up

by the latest generation?

It tends to be where you've got somebody in the family,

usually a grandparent, who is encouraging their grandchild.

Or where a school has set up a stamp club,

that really seems to make a big difference.

I just love the reaction from the children.

A little girl in one of the schools announced that it had been

the best day of her life. I mean, how can you better that?

Yeah, let's hope she goes on and acquires a Blue Mauritius in 30 years' time.

Will it ever go back to being like it was in the '50s,

-with almost every child doing it?

-The best prospect, for me,

would be that more stamp collectors would come forward

to help run stamp clubs in schools,

cos I think that is where we have the right atmosphere

for stamp collecting, really. I think that's the best place.

This one is... You've got '06 on it.

It's from France.

And that would be 1906.

So, that is 110 years old.

I've been in top public schools, I've been into inner-city schools,

I've been to sink schools, village schools, tiny schools,

enormous schools, but the reaction is always the same.

Now, explain that.

-Well, it's down to the mystique of the postage stamp.

-Yes.

I've learned something of that mystique, I think,

having communed with the Penny Black in the dark,

seen the way that early stamp collectors disturbed the peace

in the back streets of London,

and learned of Count Ferrary's obsession,

a word that might also be applied to the philately of King George V.

The battles fought over commemorative stamps

and the profile of the Queen tell us something about

the importance of stamps to our national identity.

I've seen stamps go under the hammer for a lot of money,

and heard the proud speeches of amateur collectors,

of which there are plenty left.

Even if it's no longer the rainy day fallback of almost every child,

stamp collecting remains a popular hobby,

but its focus will become increasingly retrospective.

As postage gives way to electronic communication,

so the romance of philately

will be compounded by the romance of nostalgia.

And when we do get a letter,

there's very often an impostor in the top right-hand corner.

Rather than this pallid frank,

who wouldn't prefer to get a letter with a stamp on it?

I know I would.

# I've got one from Spain and two from Japan

# I've got a couple from Israel and Azerbaijan

# I've got a plenty from Poland but none from Sudan

# Or from Fiji or Uzbekistan

# Did you know I can't believe I'm telling everyone that I know

# That every stamp in my collection is a place we could go. #