1930. 🇬🇧 A Visit To Kidderminster.

🇲🇾 Pos Malaysia issued a set of 4 stamps and 1 miniature sheet on 19 August 2021 on the subject of durian fruit. I have no other details at present. Rating:- ***.

 

 🇵🇳 Tower Mint has posted information about new issues from the Pitcairn Islands postal service, Bounty Post, on its internet site. Two issues are planned for 2021 “full details will be announced in due course”. I am slightly concerned by the promise that next year’s “full” programme will have “new and exciting themes” - I do hope that the themes will be relevant to the territory and that “full” is not another word for excessive.

  Being at a loose end for once, I decided that the dog and I might have a little trip to the town of Kidderminster, not very many miles away from my home but somewhere I have not visited since 1979.  I remember going there on a sort of pilgrimage to visit the town in which Rowland Hill, the inventor of the Penny postage system, was born in 1795 on the centenary of his death.

  It’s a fairly non-descript town in the English West Midlands located as it is in the Black Country, the great industrial heart of the country where the flames of the Industrial Revolution were lit, that Revolution celebrated on a recent Royal Mail stamp issue which thrust Great Britain on to the centre of the world stage, brought great wealth to the country and in turn paid for it to build an empire “on which the sun never set” - the empire which eventually made way for a Commonwealth.

   Kidderminster’s role in the Industrial Revolution centred firstly on weaving and then more precisely on the production of high quality carpets and the old carpet-making mills can be seen in the town transformed now into shops and hotels. Steam of course was the wellspring of the Industrial Revolution and as one leaves the modern railway station to go into the town centre one passes the old station from which steam trains still run to the town of Bewdley as part of the Severn Valley Railway. The first philatelic item of interest to be seen in the town is to do with the railway - there is a post box opposite the old station which was one of those fitted with a unique plaque in 2015 commemorating the alleged 50th anniversary of British ‘special’ stamps, this plaque featuring a stamp originally issued in 2004 depicting a steam engine of the Severn Valley Railway.

  In the town centre a statue of Sir Rowland Hill stands outside the Town Hall. Beside it is a postbox and a signpost with a picture of a penny black on it. The inscription on the statue reads ‘SIR ROWLAND HILL K.C.B./BORN AT KIDDERMINSTER 1795/BURIED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY 1879/ IN HIS CREATIVE MIND AND PATIENT ENERGY/THE WORLD IS INDEBTED/FOR THE/PENNY POSTAGE/INTRODUCED 1840’. On the rear of the statue a further inscription reads ‘ERECTED BY/200,000/SUBSCRIBERS/THROUGHOUT/THE THREE KINGDOMS/THE COLONIES/AND THE CONTINENTS/OF/EUROPE AND AMERICA/1881’. At the base of the rear of the statue is an additional metallic plaque which reads, ‘A CIVIC CEREMONY TO MARK THE CENTENARY/OF THE UNVEILING OF THIS STATUE AND TO/RECORD ITS RESITING WAS HELD HERE ON THE/22nd June 1981/MANKIND CONTINUES TO BE INDEBTED TO/SIR ROWLAND HILL FOR HIS SIGNIFICANT/CONTRIBUTION TO WORLD COMMUNICATIONS/JAMES P. BOURKE/TOWN MAYOR’.

  Outside the Town Hall is a board telling the story of Hill’s life and his work on the Penny Post. A short distance from the Town Hall one can find the town’s main post office which shares a Victorian building with a branch of a national newsagents chain. The post office looks remarkably undistinguished considering it’s location in a town with such a remarkable place in the history of the postal service.

1648. 🇨🇦 Canada To Commemorate End Of Second World War In Europe

🇨🇦 Canada Post will issue 2 self-adhesive stamps on 29 May 2020 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. The stamps will be released in booklets of 10 containing five of each stamp. The stamps were designed by Ivan Novotny and printed in lithography.
 The designs feature Veronica Foster who was selected by the Canadian government to appear in a public relations campaign aimed at inspiring women to join the war effort on the home front. Veronica assembled Bren guns in a Toronto factory and was labelled ‘Ronnie, the Bren gun girl’ in the campaign.
  The second stamp depicts Private Léo Major who in April 1945, while scouting the German-occupied Dutch town of Zwolle, singlehandedly tricked the Germans in the town into thinking that they were under full-scale attack and as a result he captured dozens of prisoners and caused the enemy to retreat. For this he earned the Distinguished Conduct Medal and, according to Canada Post publicity for the issue, “the lasting gratitude of the people of Zwolle”. He was, apparently, known as ‘The One-eyed Ghost’.
   Rating:- ****.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong Post was planning to issue a set of stamps during 2020 with the somewhat unpromising title of ‘Centenary of Hong Kong Correctional Services Department’ but has now cancelled that particular issue and will replace it with a set titled ‘Christmas Stamps IV’.
  🇦🇺🇳🇫 The decision to cancel the issue made me wonder how many stamps have featured prisons, not many I thought until I remembered the exception of Australia and Norfolk Island which more than once have depicted the prisons which were constructed there to hold the convict ancestors who were transported in times past for crimes committed thousands of miles away in Britain. Norfolk Island housed a particularly harsh prison.
   Stamps have also depicted the ships which transported the convicts to Australia. In the 62 years from 1788 to 1850, 162000 convicts were transported to Australia from Great Britain in 806 ships. The first convoy of ships conveying convicts to Australia was made up of 2 Royal Navy ships, HMS Brig Supply and HMS Sirius, 3 supply ships - Golden Gove, Friendship and Borrowdale - and 6 ships containing the criminals themselves - Charlotte, Alexander, Prince of Wales, Lady Penrhyn, Fishburn and Scarborough. The fleet was under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip.

  🇬🇧 We must not forget that the British postal service issued 1 stamp out of a set of four on the subject of ‘Social reformers’ on 28 April 1976 to commemorate the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780 - 1845).

🇨🇰 Finally it is fun to consider that one of Philatelic Collector Inc.’s philatelic entities, for which it produces a significant number of stamps, is named after a prison ship - the Lady Penrhyn which sailed past the island now known as Penrhyn in the Cook Islands on 8 August 1788 as part of the first convoy of transported criminals as detailed above. Penrhyn is likely to be unique among islands in being named after a means of transporting convicted criminals!

Addendum- response to Richard Rundle’s comment re. Prisons on stamps. (See below in Comment box)

  Thank you for your excellent comment. I rarely think outside the Commonwealth box but the Bastille is an excellent example, many times featured, of a prison on stamps and it has certainly made a few appearances on stamps from Commonwealth postal services. It also occurs to me that any stamps depicting views of St Helena would qualify for inclusion in the theme as the whole island served as a prison for Napoleon Bonaparte from his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo until his death. Also, I suppose, places of exile for political prisoners might be included - for instance Seychelles has issued stamps in the past which depicted Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus who was exiled there by the British as well as including a stamp depicting King Prempah of Ashanti in a pre-Independence definitive set. If anyone ever wants to exile me I shall ask to be sent to the same place as Makarios and the King of Ashanti.

1255. 🇬🇧 England Winners Stamps Next Week?

  🇬🇧 In Blog 420 I wrote at considerable length about the stamps issued by the British postal service and other Commonwealth countries, particularly those which had hosted or participated in the Finals, to commemorate the football World Cup which takes up a month of a good number of peoples' lives every four years. Now we are approaching the final stages of another one of these Championships and the team representing England has reached the semi-finals which is an achievement longed hope for by a sizeable percentage of that Commonwealth nation. The English usually have a quite unjustified belief in their team's ability to win the World Cup but on this occasion the team has done so particularly well as to put Royal Mail in a position where it must surely be preparing a set of stamps, probably in miniature sheet format, to release as soon as possible after any English victory in the Final of the Championship as to catch the maximum number of purchasers of such a set while they are still in the throws of their victorious patriotic fervour.

  Blog 420 points out that the British Post Office issued a single stamp in 1966 to commemorate the previous and only time when the English football team won the World Cup in the year that England was the host country. The Post Office had issued 3 stamps to commemorate the hosting of the Championships and the lowest value was overprinted 'ENGLAND WINNERS' to commemorate the victory. Rarely has there been such a rush by the English general public to buy a stamp as occurred then and the stamp was soon selling, I recall, for 10/- (50p) compared with a face value of 4d (less than 2p). Of course anyone who bought this very common stamp for 10/- was soon to find that they had seriously overpaid to obtain their Victory souvenir.

  Since 1966, The Post Office/Royal Mail has never had another chance to commemorate a second World Cup victory. Nevertheless several opportunities have been seized to issue stamps which recall the famous victory of 1966.

  1999 - Millenium series, The Entertainer's Tale - 1 stamp depicting the 1966 England team captain holding the Jules Rimet Cup.

  2006 - World Cup Finals hosted by Germany - 1 stamp noting the 1966 winning team.

  2012 - The House Of Windsor, England World Cup winning team of 1966 - 1 stamp from a miniature sheet of 4.

  2013 - Famous footballers - 3 stamps depicting members of the 1966 World Cup winning team - Bobby Moore, Gordon Banks and Bobby Charlton.

  We must of course wait for the outcome of the upcoming semi-final in which the English team will play against that of Croatia and the final which will be against either Belgium or France but it will be interesting to see what Royal Mail comes up with if the English team captain Harry Kane finds himself holding the World Cup aloft next weekend.

802. New Zealand Post - The Medal Stamps Begin.

  As mentioned in Blog 801, the New Zealand team at the Olympic Games has won its first medal - a silver in the women's trap shooting event - and the medallist, Natalie Rooney, therefore becomes the first of New Zealand's competitors to be featured on New Zealand Post's medal winners stamps. A delightful photograph of the medallist with her medal makes this an attractive issue and it is bound to be enormously popular in New Zealand. Rating:- *****.

  Australia has now won 3 gold and 3 bronze medals (see Blog 801) but no news is available yet of the first of Australia Post's gold medallist stamps.

  Just for the record, the Great Britain team has won its first gold medal in the form of Adam Peaty's victory in the men's 100m breast stroke swimming event but unlike the gold medallists at the London 2012 Games he will not feature on a stamp as Royal Mail has no plans to issue any such stamps this time round. I'm relieved about that mainly but now the Games have started and the medals have started to be awarded I have a slight twinge of regret that the British medallists will not  be commemorated this year. 

  Finally, leaving the Olympics behind us, can anyone explain why the postal service of Netherlands, which has its own monarch, issued a stamp depicting Queen Elizabeth II on 2 August 2016? The "stamp" is produced in silver and has a tiny diamond included in it and sells for £43.43p. At least the price of this diamond-studded philatelic item is considerably less (£120 + tax) than the Jersey Post diamond-studded miniature sheet of 2012 - I guess in that context this Dutch item is a relative bargain.

  You could argue that Netherlands is entitled to become a member of The Commonwealth should it wish since it had historical constitutional links with Great Britain, not the least of which being the choice of William Of Orange, the Dutch Stadtholder, as King of England in 1689. 

  Somehow, despite our close ties with Netherlands, I still don't think I shall be able to find a place in my collection for this particular "stamp". On the other hand, if the Dutch want to join The Commonwealth, well I just might have to think again.