Simultaneous Development of Philately, Geology, and Palaeontology as a Result of the British Industrial Revolution

Part 4: Design of the first adhesive postage stamps in the world

Design of the first adhesive postage stamp (the Penny Black)

After Rowland Hill's proposal was accepted, he was given a two-year contract to run the new system.

Rowland Hill on postage stamp of Great Britain 1995, MiNr: 1587, Scott: 1625.

A competition to design the stamp and prepaid envelope was announced by the Treasury, but none of some 2,600 entries were considered suitable. Most of the proposals were too complicated or too expensive to produce, some were written proposals only, therefore none of them was awarded the main prize, but four of them received prizes of £100 each.
In a report to the Treasury Rowland Hill wrote: I hope to be able, however, by combining the suggestions of many, to propose a plan which will secure the objects which their Lordships had in view in framing the Minute.
One of the prizes was given to Benjamin Cheverton for his practical suggestions that stamps should be printed in rolls of 240 (240d = £1) on security paper with watermark. To prevent forgery Cheverton suggested
"the embossment of a female head of greatest beauty to be executed by Mr. Wyon"
(the female head was a profile of Princess Victoria, who became the Queen in June 1837 at the age of 18). Hill accepted these proposals.

William Wyon (1795-1851) was a British engraver who was official chief engraver at the Royal Mint from 1828 until his death. On 10 March 1838 Wyon became a Royal Academician, the first medallist to be so honoured. He also modelled and engraved the head of Queen Victoria for her coinage and various medals, to universal acclaim.

One Penny coin from 1839 - the profile of the Queen is similar to the one from the profile of the City Medal, but without the diadem on the Queen’s head.	The City Medal commemorates Princess Victoria's visit to the Guildhall in 1837 (made in bronze and in silver).
Minting a coin was a very different process from printing a stamp. The latter allowed for much finer detail, which also made forgery more difficult. For this reason, the design of William Wyon’s medal, rather than that of the coin, was chosen as the basis for the stamp. The design of the City Medal continues to be used today for major philatelic exhibitions in the United Kingdom. For example: Vermeil Medal, International Stamp Show London 2022, awarded to the Paleophilatelie website; 150th Anniversary Medal of the Royal Philatelic Society London (2019), re-purposed for EUROPHILEX Birmingham 2025.

The sketch of the stamp was provided by an English artist Henry Corbould (1787-1844), who reproduced the profile of the Queen engraved by William Wyon, a Chief Engraver at the Royal Mint in London, on a medal to commemorate the Queen's visit to the City of London after her accession to the throne in 1837. The engraved profile of the Queen on the medal was based on a sketch originally drawn in 1834 when Princess Victoria was only 15. One of the main reasons in choosing the profile of Queen Victoria for the stamp design was that it was instantly recognizable making any attempt at imitation easily detected. This portrait remained on British stamps until the Queen's death in 1901.

Hill chose the leading security printing firm of "Perkins, Bacon & Petch" to print one penny stamps in black colour and double rate, two pence as dark blue - often called "TWO PENCE BLUE", or "TWO PENNY BLUE". The company was probably selected because they used their own engine machine, called "Rose", originally invented by Mr. Perkins for making complicated backgrounds of banknotes and the Post Office was convinced it would make fraud nearly impossible.

Jacob Perkins (1766-1849) was an American inventor, mechanical engineer and physicist. He invented and sold "soft steel" plates for engraving that were hardened after being engraved. The plates were between one and three inches thick, and some weighed over 22kg.
In 1819, Perkins moved to London on invitation of Charles Heath, who was an engraver, a book publisher, and who convinced him to participate in the competition of Bank of England, who offered a prize of £20.000 for a banknote which was impossible to forge. Their firm, "Perkins & Heath", produced very promising samples, but did not win the competition. However, they did manage to secure smaller contracts for £1 banknotes, and later won more government contracts.
In 1829, after a complicated transaction in which Heath gave up his shares and Joshua Butters Bacon (Perkin's son in law) bought in, as "Perkins & Bacon". Henry Petch joined in 1835, and thus the firm printing the first stamps was actually known as "Perkins, Bacon & Petch".

The Die on the cachet of FDC with stamps "175th anniversary of Penny Black". The original can be seen in the British Postal Museum.

The star-like designs at the top corners of the stamp

Check letters on two "Penny Black" stamps (plate No. 2 and No. 8)

"Perkins, Bacon & Petch" combined the engraved profile of Queen Victoria with the central band of a banknote plate, created for the reverse side of a specimen banknote the company submitted to the Bank of England about 1822 in the competition to print banknotes for the bank.
When the master die was prepared and proof stamps with the profile of the Queen were printed at the end of February 1840, it was sent to Queen Victoria for her approval.

The reverse image was engraved into soft steel to create the master die. The die was hardened in a furnace. The master die was used to create plates of 240 stamps each. A soft steel roller was put in a transfer press and rolled under great pressure back and forth over the hardened die until the design was transferred to the roller.
The image of the die was transferred to the steel roller as a positive image. The roller was rolled over the soft steel plate under pressure to create recessed images which retain ink.

The first stamps in the world did not need to show the issuing country, therefore no country name was included on them. Today the United Kingdom remains the only country to omit its name on postage stamps.

The star-like designs (see on the right) on the top and wording "POSTAGE" and "ONE PENNY" on the bottom were added by engraving at the beginning of March 1840.

To make forgery complicated, it was decided to punch letters which indicated position (row/column) of the stamp in the sheet from "A A" to "T L".

Each Penny Black sheet contained 240 unique corner letter combinations, and the stamps were printed from 12 different plates (treating plates 1a and 1b as separate). This results in 2,888 distinct stamp variants.

It was thought that, if every stamp on the plate had a different lettering, forgeries would likely be of one particular stamp only, and any considerable sale or use of stamps all of the same lettering might attract attention and lead to enquiry.

The circular from the General Post Office dated April 1840, to the postmasters under his control, explained:
In the event of your suspecting that the Stamps used on any Letters are forged, you will not detain the Letter, but simply take the Address, and report the circumstance to me without loss of time, in order that the Party to whom the Letter is directed may be at once applied to. You will observe, however, that the adhesive Stamps vary almost in all cases, one from the other, having different Letters at the bottom corners, and I point this out that you may not be misled by the circumstance, and be induced to suspect Forgery, where the variation of the Stamps has been intentional.
Two copies of "the Penny adhesive Labels" were attached to be used as the reference by the postmasters.
The letters on the corners of the bottom side were manually punched on the plates. This was precision work, because the size of the letters is about 1mm tall, and they had to fit tiny squares on the bottom side of the stamps of 19mm by 22mm in size, therefore no two pairs of letters are ever in precisely the same position. In some cases, the letters were significantly shifted from the center of the square or placed crookedly.

These stamps were printed in sheets of 240: 20 rows, 12 stamps each, makes accounting easier.
The margins of the sheet included the following explanatory text:
"Price 1d Per Label. 1/- Per Row of 12. £1 Per Sheet. Place the Labels ABOVE the Address and towards the RIGHT HAND SIDE of the Letter. In Wetting the Back be careful not to remove the Cement."
The text on the margin of the "TWO PENCE BLUE" stamps sheet was the same but with altered values: 2d, 2/-, £2.

In the official General Post Office notes and circulars from the 1840s, the "TWO PENCE BLUE" stamps are often called: "Twopenny" or "Two-penny" adhesive labels.

Initially, it was proposed to print the stamps on paper containing thin threads. However, after careful consideration and consultation with the Bank of England, Rowland Hill suggested that the paper should be manufactured "in the ordinary manner, but with a very well defined and peculiar water-mark be employed for all Franking Stamps issued by the Government".

The watermarks from 1840 and 1855 (type I, II)

The watermarks on the reverse sides of Penny stamps from 1840 and 1864 (type II).

The Jacob Perkins' press, which printed the "Penny Black" and the "Two Pence Blue" stamps in 1840.

A Small Crown watermark appeared on every stamp. In 1854, the watermark was replaced by the Large Crown. The Large Crown was available in two very similar designs: Type I and Type II. Type I included two small lines in the lower arches, which were deleted in March 1861. Occasionally, the paper was loaded into the press in the rotated position, creating stamps with inverted watermarks.

The gum was made of potato starch, variable in colour (rare variant was almost colourless), efficiency and taste and was applied on the stamps after the sheets were printed, while hot by the printers with brushes and then dried.

Production of the first plate (Plate 1) was completed on April 8^th, 1840. The imprimatur sheets were printed on April 11^th and after approval by the General Post Office, the plate was registered and started to print stamps for production on April 15^th.
To increase productivity (one press machine was capable of printing about 400 sheets or 96,000 stamps per day), the second plate was added on April 27^th, 1840. The next plate was registered on May 9^th, 1840, eight days after the issue of "Penny Black" and another eight plates were added gradually during the year.

In total, there were 11 plates used for production of over 68 million "Penny Blacks" stamps by the end of January 1841, when the ink of the stamp was changed to red. The estimated survival rate of around 2% makes the "Penny Black" to be not a particularly rare stamp. Most surviving stamps are used stamps, which were removed from the business correspondence, mint examples are scarce so these can cost several thousand Euro.

Plate No.1 printed the stamps in two variants, before and after extensive renovation due to excessive wear, because the plate had not been hardened. Due to extreme wear, the engraved lines of the Queen's head became very faint, and this required the restoration of every one of the 240 units of the plate.
The plate was taken to repair on May 16^th and returned to production between May 23^rd and May 27^th (exact date is unknown), 1840 after hardening. These variations are marked as plate No. 1a and plate No. 1b accordingly. These stamps from these two plates can be differentiated by the absent rays at the top of the star-like design. Plate No. 1 was withdrawn on March 23^rd, 1841 and destroyed at the end of the year.

Plate No. 11 was registered on January 27^th, 1841. Originally created to print the "Penny Red" stamps which were set to replace the "Penny Black". The red stamps were printed on January 29^th and 30^th. On February 1^st and 2^nd, due to the lack of red ink, the plate was used to print 700 sheets of the black stamps. Since February 3^rd the plate was used to print "Penny Red" stamps only.

Design of the second adhesive postage stamp (the Two Pence Blue)

The "Two Pence Blue" stamps were printed from two plates only (plate No. 1 and No. 2), which were destroyed in 1843.

"Two Pence Blue" stamps from 1840 (Plate No. 1) versus 1841 (Plate No. 3).

Plate No. 1 was registered on May 2^nd, 1840 and the first stamps printed by this plate (619 sheets), came on sale in London on May 6^th, 1840.
Plate No. 2 was put on press on July 18^th 1840 and the earliest known used stamps of this plate are dated August 18^th, 1840.

A total of 6,460,000 stamps were printed until 29^th August 1840 when their production was stopped - 3,916,000 stamps were printed by plate No. 1 and 2,544,000 stamps were printed by plate No. 2 respectively.
The slightly modified version of "Two Pence Blue", printed by plates No. 3 and No. 4 went on sale in March 1841 - a horizontal white line was added below word "POSTAGE" and above words "TWO PENCE" on the top and bottom sides of the stamp respectively. The blue stamp with small modification was in production until 1879.

These line-engraved stamps can be assigned to a specific plate based on the shape of star-like designs on the left and right corners on the top side (the rays have different length or missing on some plates) and letter variations in the words "POSTAGE" and "ONE PENNY"/"TWO PENCE" (flaw of some letters) as well as the check letters on the left and right corners on the bottom side.

Anchors

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