The Error World (19 page)

The stamp, which cost forty-four pence and marked the St Andrews pilgrimage, depicted the ruins of a church wall in gold and midnight blue. Yass showed me the many photographs and layers that went into its design, recalling how a person from Royal Mail had been particularly helpful in computer manipulation, and in turning the night-time into a thick velvety blue.

Six years later she was commissioned again. This time they didn't want a stamp, but an image they could use on a spread in the 2005
Yearbook,
an annual gathering of all the year's stamps in one 'lavishly illustrated volume'. This was of interest predominantly to desperate completists and grandparents, but it wasn't thrown together as an afterthought; each of the year's stamps—in 2005 these included studies of Magic,
Jane Eyre
and Classic ITV—not only had a little biography about the designers, but also some illuminating essays about the theme. Catherine Yass's brief was to produce an image to accompany the theme of Madonna and Child. Because she is not a conventional artist, Yass suggested an original image: a father and child. Rather than take some new portraits, she retrieved an older image she had taken some years before: me and my son Ben in the dusk near a traffic island. The absence of a woman in this picture caused a frisson of tension at Royal Mail, fearful, perhaps, of the
Daily Mail.
A conflict was averted when Yass came up with a compromise: you wouldn't see the man. So my son is being held by someone, and you can see the holder's shoulder, but that's it. It's still a poignant moment for me, far more so than for my son, who isn't particularly interested in yearbooks. But there is my clothed shoulder on an image issued by the Royal Mail, a remote outpost in the long and distinguished journey of philately.

Shortly before I had visited Yass in her studio, I had heard other tales of millennium and Christmas stamps from Andrew Davidson, the illustrator best known (beyond the stamp world) for his illustrations for Ted Hughes's
The Iron Man.
Unlike Yass, who was an artist who derived most of her income from project grants and gallery shows, Davidson was a graphic illustrator by training and profession, a specialist in distilling essences from corporate mission statements. Designing stamps had become a habit he was keen to foster, for his reputation and sanity as well as his income.

I met Davidson at the British Postal Museum and Archive around the back of the Mount Pleasant sorting office near King's Cross, and he was instantly likeable. He was a Scotsman nearing his fifties, and he had a large balding pate and clear smile. He was a traditional craftsman, full of enthusiasms, a man who worked in a timber studio in his Cotswold garden, ideally with Radio 4 and a nice chunk of English boxwood to be engraved with spitstickers and scorpers. His woodcuts had graced envelopes and collections for fifteen years—Sherlock Holmes, ice-age animals, Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn—and had led him to a theory about how to make a good postage stamp. You needed a good brief, an intellectual challenge. One benefited from well-researched references. One needed a large amount of inspiration, and respect for the subject matter. Experience helped, as did a knowledge of the principles of design, because 'it's not just a bit of perforated paper with the Queen's head in the corner and some picture placed in the space that's left'.

Like other solitary toilers, Davidson had mischievous streaks. There is something about traditional and painstaking design that invites subversion: the Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin with fornicating dogs in the bushes,
^*
the top-secret film scripts that deliberately contain a different error in each one so that any leakages online can be easily traced to an individual. Davidson's triumph came with his Sherlock Holmes stamps of 1993. These were intricate designs, five stamps commemorating the centenary of the publication of 'The Final Problem', and they left plenty of room for creative manoeuvre. On the illustration for 'The Six Napoleons' stamp, depicting the scene where Holmes smashes a bust with a riding crop to find the black pearl, Davidson placed a piece of twisty pasta among the ceramic shards. On 'The Reigate Squire' he put something among the folds of the rug, 'but by this time the Royal Mail had found out what I was doing and asked me to get rid of the syringe.'

But it wasn't all fun. Davidson had crushing accounts of stamps commissioned but never issued, a Pond Life set, a Holiday Postcards set, a Bronte set, and he consoled himself as best he could: 'Because yours isn't adopted, it doesn't mean it's rubbish. It means that perhaps another set works better in the series through the year, or it may be politically sensitive. It's nothing personal.'

When he was growing up his one of his heroes was David Gentleman, who designed Churchill and the Battle of Britain in the mid-1960s. He says he'd be happy to be considered even in the same paragraph as Gentleman. Stamps bring him great joy, he says, and he delights in the happiness they bring to others. 'You know when you're on a long train journey and someone says, "What do you do, then?" I can reach for my wallet and take out some stamps and say, "This is what I do." I had a meeting a few weeks ago with a hugely important chap from Switzerland, and I showed him a set of these Ice Age stamps [the sabre-tooth cat, giant deer, woolly rhino, woolly mammoth and cave bear], and I laid them out on a table in front of him and he was thrilled. I said, "You can have them, they didn't cost me much.'"

Andrew Davidson appeared to me to be a kind and generous man, and one who would not say a word against his employers in public. But at a lecture in the autumn of 2006 he stood up for his fellow designers and, with incredulity and dismay, showed a photo of an envelope carrying a label one can print from the Internet at home, just bar codes and other writing, no illustration, no creative thought or graphic design to speak of.

The country that invented stamps was now forging ahead with SmartStamp, something that swept away the need for the security printing presses of De La Rue in London, High Wycombe and Basingstoke, a domestic franking service that had stepped out of the office into every home with a computer. The adverts heralded a breakthrough: 'Print out the exact postage you need ... mail-merge contacts from your PC's address book ... manage how much you're spending on postage 24/7.'
^*

This seemed to me to be in direct conflict with the stated aims of the Royal Mail's Special Stamps programme, which, at the time of Catherine Yass and Andrew Davidson's work, was to: Commemorate important anniversaries; reflect the British contribution to world affairs, especially to the Commonwealth and Europe, in a variety of fields of activity, including the arts and sciences; display the many and varied aspects of the British way of life; extend public patronage to the arts by encouraging the development of minuscule art.

The biggest problem with SmartStamp, of course, is that it is not a stamp. With a printing press in every home, fewer people each year would buy or see artworks in minuscule, and the noble patronage of Tasveer Shemza, Yass and Davidson would slide away. A stamp no longer used for postage would become that dread thing: 'a collector's item', like those many useless things sold in newspaper magazines, an item produced solely for profit. Stamp collectors have seen this pattern emerging for many years, and SmartStamp made me feel that I wasn't a collector any more, but an owner and a sucker.

At the end of 2006, Royal Mail confirmed its stamp programme for 2007. There were to be eighteen new issues, an absolute nightmare for the completist. The Beatles. Sea Life. The Sky at Night. World of Invention. Wales. The Abolition of the Slave Trade. Celebrating England. Wembley Stadium. Beside the Seaside. Fortieth Anniversary of the Machin. Grand Prix. Scouts. Lest We Forget (Part 2). Endangered Species: Birds. British Army Uniform. The Queen's Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary. Christmas. And then a few months into the year, a new set was added to the list, the finest example yet of Royal Mail's matchless (although obvious) grasp on marketing: Harry Potter stamps, marking the publication in July 2007 of the final book. There were to be seven first-class stamps, each showing a different book jacket. There was also a miniature sheet containing five other stamps (the school crest of Hogwarts school and its four houses), as well as a Generic Smilers sheet, a collection of twenty stamps attached to labels featuring magic spells from the Harry Potter books, which are only revealed when warmed by the palm of a hand. The whole package, including two first-day covers, was available from the Post Office for £19.40.

How did it come to this? When did it get to the point where smitten and loyal collectors felt they were being fleeced? These issues were not a nightmare for collectors in the old-fashioned sense. There were no 'difficult' stamps among them, stamps that were hard to locate. The Royal Mail philatelic HQ at Tallents House in Edinburgh would have no problem sending them to you in several different formats (neat stamps, first-day cover, presentation pack, mini-sheets, 'prestige' booklet, complete sheets) and you'd be charged a handling fee for it. No, the nightmare was the cost. Some of the stamp values went as high as £1.19, most new issues would include six stamps, and in a year a collector could easily spend more than £100 trying to keep up with the basics. If you also wanted the new definitives and the multi-formats and special sheets and the yearbooks this would be several hundred pounds a year.

When I read about this forthcoming eighteen-set list I decided to end my direct debit with Royal Mail for an automatic purchase of every stamp. I had talked to friends who had done the same: my friend Paul Hersh had given up in 2000. The stamp magazines were full of letters from people saying things 'had got completely out of hand'.

The difficulty is, giving up collecting stamps is a very hard thing to do. When you stop looking forward, you stop believing in the future of stamps. I would like to be populist and optimistic about this, and I would like to think I am keeping things up to date for my grandchildren (as if they'd ever be remotely interested in stamps). And I like a lot of the new designs. I also had to acknowledge that giving up collecting stamps would not be a new thing for me, and it is usually regrettable. Fifty years ago, the postal historians L. N. and M. Williams noted that 'it has been held that unnecessary issues, that is to say, stamps that are not primarily issued for the pre-payment of postage, are choking philately and reducing its status ...,' but they also reasoned that new issues would encourage young people to enter the hobby. This argument is still advanced by Royal Mail today, not least when it issues such news-making sets as Harry Potter.

But who likes to be taken advantage of? Who likes to be told, in effect, 'you buy what we tell you to buy?' Is there any other hobby where obligation and habit compel you to buy things you don't like? With stamps it has ever been thus, and everyone has their breaking-point. On those rare occasions when I regret my decision I console myself with the knowledge that the stamps will never be rare, and my grandchildren could always buy them from a dealer at minimal mark-up. And then ... and then I miss not owning the stamps.

The final straw for me came not with the list for 2007, but the possible list for 2009. In December 2006, collectors registered with Royal Mail received a voting card. The Stamp Committee had decided on 'nominations' for Special Stamps for 2009, and we could vote for the five we liked the sound of. We weren't voting for the designs, because they hadn't been designed yet. And there were no promises that anything suggested by collectors would make the final cut, but it was a goodwill attempt at democracy and public relations, and it was hard not to play along. There were thirty-six choices, including: The Theory of Evolution, Legendary Football Managers, Buses through The Ages, The National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies, Animal Heroes,
Come Dancing
and Horse Racing—The Sport of Kings. I could go on. Great British Opera. Universities of the UK. By Royal Appointment: Dress Designers. Crufts. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Comedians. And that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was the address to send your selections: The Data Solutions Centre, Man ton Wood Enterprise Park, Worksop.

On the day I posted my choices, I made my first visit to the Royal Mail Archive around the back of the Mount Pleasant sorting office near King's Cross. The tagline on my admittance card said 'Our History through the Post', and they weren't mucking about. This was one thing Royal Mail did superbly well—protect and honour its past. It was home to the Reginald M. Phillips collection of Victorian stamps, one of the finest ever assembled. The main research room on the ground floor held the catalogues and journals, there was a little exhibition area with three glass cases showing how the Queen has been portrayed on stamps down the years, and then in the basement there were two storage areas. The first contained a few uniforms, some black-and-white photographs of postmen visiting lonely houses on remote hillsides, and many fantastic laminated posters (intricate designs for direct messages: 'Post Early for Christmas', 'Buy Your Radio Licence', 'Your Money Will Be Safe In Post Office Savings Bank—The Fritter Fly Will Get It If You Don't Look Out!'). But most of the space was occupied by vast shelves laden with document boxes relating to everything postal since the seventeenth century. Even the simplified catalogue ran to 212 pages, and made me feel very excited and very small. There were records about postmen and the owners of sub-post offices, and how much they received in pensions. There were thirty-seven volumes on Post Office property and income tax assessments between 1813 and 1891. There were 106 volumes on the conveyance of mail by railways, from three years before this service began in 1830, to 1975. I wanted to spend some time with the history of Post Office counters (106 volumes), and I could have passed a happy week with the private papers of Rowland Hill from 1836 to 1879. But there were other things to explore, not least the second basement room.