What are ‘high values’?
Postal rates are creeping ever upward, so how long before we see postage stamps with values in the tens of pounds, wonders Richard West as he looks back on the history of high value stamps
For most Great Britain collectors to define ‘high value definitives’ is easy. Before decimalisation it was the values from 2s 6d to £1. Following decimalisation there was a temporary reduction to 10p (2s), while the upper limit has increased to £5 (not counting the £10 value of 1993).
I wonder what Victorian collectors thought when a 5s stamp was issued in 1867, to be followed by the 10s and £1 in 1878. Then, to cap it, came the £5 orange in 1882 – at a time when you could still send a letter for 1d. (£5 in 1882 would be the equivalent of nearly £350 today.) Not long after arrived new designs for the values from 2s 6d to £1 – with a further change of colour for the £1 in 1891. For those who wanted to delve even further, all these ‘high values’ were subject to variations of watermark and/or paper. Indeed, the Editor of The Philatelic Record, advising of the plans for new high values up to £5 in the October 1881 issue, wrote, ‘How nice it will be to collect a variety of shades, and the plate numbers of the higher values unused.’
We know that the ‘Seahorses’ high values of King George V were well received. However, understandably the philatelic fraternity accused the Post Office of exploitation when the £1 stamp for the 1929 Postal Union Congress was issued, even though the design was highly admired. Sales of the stamp remained sluggish for many years with a total of 66,788 being sold. In contrast the 1948 Royal Silver Wedding £1 proved highly popular, with total sales of 419,628, of which it is believed around 390,000 were bought by collectors. Interestingly, when I had a holiday job with a stamp wholesaler in Brighton in the mid-1960s, he was offering the unused stamp for 17s 6d.
The Royal Silver Wedding £1, issued on 26 April 1948, was followed by a King George VI £1 definitive on 1 October 1948, with another change to the ‘Festival’ high values on 3 May 1951. However, there were seemingly few complaints at the time.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth saw several changes to the high values, from recess-printed Castles, photogravure-printed Machins, revised Castles again recess-printed, before the Machin portrait returned in a smaller size (the same size as the ‘low values’), initially printed in recess and then in gravure. Now we have ‘barcode’ versions.
The £10 already mentioned has proved – so far – to be a one-off. At the time of issue it was said the intention was to avoid ‘high postage’ items being covered with stamps: as the £10 was double the size of the £5 definitive, that seems a futile argument.
Postal rates are, of course, creeping ever upward. The ‘new tariff’ stamps of 2022 produced a definitive of £4.20 face value. The cost of sending a standard-size letter up to 100g overseas is now £2.20. Is it therefore rather nonsensical that Royal Mail still refers to the £2, £3 and £5 definitives as ‘high values’, not only the recent ‘data matrix code’ versions but also presumably their replacements when they appear with the portrait of King Charles III.
Can it be that far off when one of the ‘new tariff’ definitives will exceed £5? How long will it be before the £10 returns as a ‘new tariff’ definitive in its own right?