1860. 🇳🇺🇳🇿🇨🇦🇬🇧🇸🇬 New Issues From Niue, New Zealand, Canada, Royal Mail And Singapore.

 🇳🇺 The postal service of Niue issued a set of 4 stamps and 1 miniature sheet containing all 4 stamps on 7 April 2021 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Boys’ Brigade in Niue. The issue was designed by Hannah Fortune and lithographed by the Collectables and Solutions Centre in Whanganui and the stamps are perforated 13.5. Rating:- ****.

🇳🇿 New Zealand Post will issue 4 stamps and 1 miniature sheet containing all 4 stamps on 5 May 2021 on the subject of works by the botanical artist Sarah Featon (1848-1927). The issue was designed by Hannah Fortune and lithographed by Southern Colour Print and the stamps are perforated 13.5. Rating:- ****.

🇨🇦 Canada Post has revealed details of 3 more stamp issues. They are as usual all single stamp issues, all self-adhesive and sold in booklets.

8 April 2021 - 50th anniversary of the Junos, Canada’s music awards. Designed by Paprika with an illustration by Amanda Arlotta. Rating:- ****.

15 April 2021 - Centenary of the Discovery of insulin - designed by Subplot Design. Rating:- ****.

22 April 2021 - Eid festival - Designed by Lionel Gadoury, Andrew Conlon and Brad Pyne of Context Creative. Rating:- ****.

🇬🇧 Royal Mail has now placed details of its Classic Science Fiction set of 6 stamps on its Stamps and Collectables internet site. The information supplied confirms that the excuses used for producing this set include its relationship to the 75th anniversary of the death of HG Wells and the 70th anniversary of the publication of John Wyndham’s Day Of The Triffids. The issue uses the work of 6 different artists - Sabina Sīnko (Frankenstein), Francisco Rodriguez (The Time Machine), Timothy Danthony (Brave New World), Mick Brownfield (The Day of The Triffids), Matt Murphy (Childhood’s End) and Sarah Jones (Shakasta). The design is attributed to Webb and Webb who obviously didn’t have much to do and the issue was lithographed by International Security Printers and perforated 13.5.

🇸🇬 Singapore Post will issue 4 stamps depicting tetra fish on 23 April 2021 which it calls ‘high value definitives’. These are attractive stamps but with $5Singapore being equal to only about £2.72 they can hardly be described as ‘high values’. Rating:- ****.

1859.🇿🇼 Zimbabwe’s COVID-19 Awareness Issue.

 

🇿🇼 Zim Post, the postal service of Zimbabwe, issued a set of 4 stamps and an imperforate miniature sheet containing all 4 stamps, on 31 March 2021 on the subject of COVID-19 awareness. I have no other details of the issue at present. Rating:- ****.

  🇵🇰 As its first issue of 2021, Pakistan Post released a single stamp on 31 March to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the founding of Karnal Sher Khan Cadet College in Swabi. Rating:- **.

🇪🇬 I do not often mention the stamps of the postal service of Egypt (an informal British Protectorate from 1882 to 1914 and then a formal Protectorate for the relatively short period from 1914 to 1922 when it became a Kingdom but heavily under the influence of the British with British forces based in the country until the Suez Crisis of 1956) but a se-tenant strip of 3 stamps and a sheetlet of 22 different stamps with an accompanying miniature sheet was issued on 3 April 2021 and has caught my attention because of the spectacular event the issue commemorated. Over the past weekend a fabulous parade was held in Cairo in which the mummies of 22 ancient Pharaohs - 18 kings (including Ramses II) and 4 queens (including Hatshepsut) - were transported in motorised vehicles from the century-old Egyptian Museum to the magnificent new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation. Snatches of it have been shown on the media here and it was certainly a memorable event. I’m afraid I have something of a weak spot for spectacle even if it’s sometimes a little tacky and it’s not too often that we are likely to see 22 kings and queens all travelling along together in a golden parade (even if they are dead). I might just buy this set and add it to my Egypt 1884-1922 collection just for the fun of it. I particularly like the fact that all 22 pharaohs are depicted on the stamps in the sheetlet. It’s all a bit lavish but it was indeed a very lavish and somewhat extravagant event.

1858. 🇬🇧 Royal Mail Will Issue COVID-19 Heroes Set.

 

  🇬🇧 Royal Mail has at last announced that it intends to issue a set of stamps to commemorate the Heroes of the battle against COVID-19 here in Britain which we now seem to be winning unlike so many of Britain’s European neighbours. With well over half of the adult population having received vaccinations against the virus (and more than one fifth of them also having received their second injection -  I’m about to receive mine) perhaps this is time to commemorate the front-line workers and others who have joined in the hand-to-hand fighting with the virus and seen us through to what’s starting to look like the other side. As cases of COVID-19 continue to fall in Britain the time for life to return to normal draws ever nearer here and it will be time also for the country to start helping other less well-off countries, many in The Commonwealth, 

 Royal Mail’s approach to celebrating the nation’s COVID-19 heroes is to hold a design competition for school children aged 4 to 14 in which schools will be encouraged to participate (as a school governor I have already drawn our head teacher’s attention to it the competition and he is very enthusiastic about it) and the publicity surrounding the competition includes an illustration of the frame which should be filled by the competing child’s artwork (see above).

  Each competition entry must be hand-drawn by the child and must be completely the child’s original work.The subject of the stamps is formally named ‘Honouring the Heroes of the Pandemic ... on a stamp’. Publicity emphasises that the stamps must not be in black and white and should be reducible to the size of the postage stamp. The competition closes on 28 May and  is restricted to 6000 schools on a first come first served basis. A complex series of judging will then take place, firstly on a regional basis and then 8 national winners will be chosen from the regional winning entries. Finally, after approval by The Queen, the 8 winning designs will be announced on 30 September 2021 (by post to the winners so with luck they may discover that they have won by some time around Christmas) and the winning children will receive £1000 in ‘high street vouchers’ and £1000 will also be awarded to the schools which are attended by the winning artists. One assumes that the new stamps will then be issued early in 2022.

  In its publicity Royal Mail points out that children’s art has been used in the designs of British stamps on four previous occasions - in 1966, 1981, 2013 and 2017, all as Christmas issues. Some of the designs have been rather better than some others.

  

It is pleasing that Royal Mail has initiated this design competition. It may even lead to a few younger people discovering that there is a hobby which involves collecting postage stamps and that it may be an interesting way for them to pass some of their time.

1857. 🇬🇧 ‘Unique’ Royal Mail 95th Birthday Pane.

The Royal Mail Stamps and Collectables internet site is advertising a combined Coin and Stamp cover to be sold for £19.99 which commemorates the 95th Birthday of Queen Elizabeth II to be issued on 21 April 2021 and which has on it “a unique pane” of Machin Head and regional definitive stamps and central label. The item is to be sold in a limited edition of 10000 and includes a new £5 coin which celebrates the Queen’s notable birthday. At this stage the site is only offering the pane cancelled on the cover but I wonder if the unused pane will also be offered. For a fleeting second I actually wondered if this was a Royal Mail April Fool joke but paying £19.99 for a potentially popular Machin item available only in this way is no joke at all. Rating:- 0.

The Commonwealth’s greediest stamp issuing territories of 2020:-

🇸🇱 For the fourth consecutive year Sierra Leone is revealed as having been the greediest stamp issuing territory in The Commonwealth during 2020 - or at least the despicable so-called philatelic agency, Stamperija,  which it allows to release philatelic products in its name is revealed to once more be the greediest philatelic item producer representing the postal service of a Commonwealth country. I only hope that any money paid by Stamperija to the Sierra Leone postal service is worth the ruining of the country’s reputation and the soiling of its name. In all I have identified that 1223 philatelic items (stamps, miniature sheets, sheetlets and booklets but not including the vast numbers of imperforate, hilariously-named ‘deluxe’ variants) were released with the name of Sierra Leone printed on them. We should not be too surprised either that the other two Commonwealth territories with a contract with Stamperija are highly placed in the list of 2020’s greediest territories - Maldives (458 items at no.3) and Mozambique (274 items at no.4). Neither should we be surprised that the appalling Australia Post pitches up at number 2 in the list with its vast outpouring of philatelic items during 2020 swollen by the items it releases with the names of Australian territories printed on them. Australia Post managed to unload 462 different items on to the market with the ghastly new range of My Stamps adding to the profusion. Badges of shame also, as we expected, for Royal Mail (at no. 5 with 195 items) and the British offshore islands (Isle of Man Post Office at no.6 with 126 items, Guernsey Post (Guernsey and Alderney) at no. 7 with 115 and Jersey Post at no. 10 with 99 items. The top 15 list is shown below but its main weakness is that it does not show total face value of the stamps produced by or for each territory as that may change things somewhat in that although the agency Philatelic Collector Inc’s two client postal services - those of Tonga and Cook Islands - are about tenth in the list the face values of many of the stamps and miniature sheets released for those territories were very high. Still this list gives a reasonable impression of which territories were producing or allowing to be produced in their names excessive numbers of philatelic products during 2020.

1. Sierra Leone (Stamperija) 1223.

2. Australia Post (Australia, Australian Antarctic Territory, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Island, Norfolk Island). 462.

3. Maldives (Stamperija) 458.

4. Mozambique (Stamperija) 274.

5. United Kingdom (Royal Mail) 195.

6. Isle Of Man (Isle Of Man Post Office) 126.

7. Guernsey Post (Guernsey, Alderney) 115.

8. New Zealand Post 108.

9. Cook Islands (Cook Islands, Aitutaki, Penrhyn, Rarotonga - Philatelic Collector Inc) 103.

10=. Jersey Post 99.

10=. Tonga (Tonga, Niuafo’ou - Philatelic Collector Inc) 99.

12. India Post 84.

13. Pos Malaysia (Malaysia) 80.

14. Bangladesh Post 62.

15. Singapore Post 60.

 

 Meanwhile the list of postal authorities which were most modest in their philatelic issuing was little changed from the previous year with 11 territories not known so far to have issued any stamps during 2020 and with 6 known to have issued only a single stamp. Interestingly three on the list are British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean area (Anguilla, Montserrat and Turks And Caicos Islands) and anyone collecting the stamps of the various dependent territories could put together a nice collection at a fairly modest price excepting the offshore Crown Dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey and Isle Of Man) and Gibraltar (though the number of products put out by Royal Gibraltar Post Office was somewhat reduced during 2020 to a total of 49 items). Hence with Akrotiri And Dhekelia never issuing stamps and territories such as Bermuda, Cayman Islands, St Helena, Pitcairn Islands, British Indian Ocean Territory and the postal services which are clients of Pobjoy Stamps/Creative Direction (Ascension Island, British Antarctic Territory, British Virgin Islands, Falkand Islands, South Georgia And The South Sandwich Islands and Tristan Da Cunha) all fairly to very modest in their releases a mini-global collection could be assembled but as it would represent the residual British Empire perhaps the concept would be far too imperialist to be acceptable in these current philatelic times!

1= Anguilla 0.

1= Cameroon 0.

1= eSwatini 0.

1= Lesotho 0.

1= Montserrat (IGPC) 0.

1= Rwanda 0.

1= St Kitts (IGPC) 0.

1= Saint Lucia 0.

1= Samoa 0.

1= Turks And Caicos Islands (IGPC) 0.

1= Zambia 0.

12= Barbados 1.

12= Nauru 1.

12=Pitcairn Island 1.

12. Seychelles 1.

12= Solomon Islands 1.

12= Vanuatu 1.