POSTING the LIVING

When I began to collect postage stamps in the 1950s, there were rigorous rules about the kind of people who appeared on the nation’s envelopes. Since the Penny Black was first issued in 1840, only the reigning monarch was depicted on the stamps, the head and neck of Queen Victoria and Kings Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI, the head and shoulders of the present Queen, first in three-quarter face (all her predecessors had appeared as profiles, save for the younger George V), then from 1968 in profiled silhouette.

The first person seen on a stamp who was not head of state was George VI’s consort. The opening issue of his reign was a single brown stamp to mark the coronation; his wife unexpectedly took an equal share of the stamp. A couple of significant developments in stamp design had occurred in his father’s reign. In 1924 and 1925, successive pairs of issues marked the British Empire Exhibition of those years. These were the first of what came to be known as “commemoratives”, issued for a limited period and tied to a particular event, as opposed to the smaller stamps – always available and bearing only the monarch’s head with more or less decoration around it – that are known as “definitives”.

More commemoratives appeared in George VI’s time, including a set for the London Olympics of 1948 that, for the first time, included a non-royal figure. It was, however, a safely mythic one: “winged victory”. With Elizabeth II’s reign came more change. Figures began to be depicted that were not even mythic, though they were certainly emblematic: a postboy of 1660, stylized children representing Freedom from Hunger and generalized lifeboatmen.

Under the Postmaster-Generalship of the government minister then known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, a major change took place. Apart from a great proliferation of commemoratives and the aforementioned redesign of the Queen’s head, Benn permitted the first identifiable commoner to be depicted on stamps when the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth was marked by five issues, the largest set to date. The following year, the death of Churchill was even more controversially made subject of a two-stamp issue.

Thereafter, the convention has been that commoners may be depicted on the postage stamps, provided that they are no longer alive. In fact, several living members of the public have appeared, through the increasing use of photography as well as graphic design, but those depictions have been anonymous and as emblematic as the stylized postboy and lifeboatmen of the ‘60s.

Then, rather by accident, a living commoner did creep onto a stamp. In June 1999, the Post Office was partway into a project to mark the millennium with a succession of monthly sets on general themes. That month featured entertainers and the 19p issue showed Freddie Mercury on stage. Mercury was dead by this time but the other members of Queen were and are alive and, in the photograph that provided the basis for the design, the group’s drummer is visible. Thus does Roger Taylor merit a footnote in philatelic history.

Four years later, the England rugby team won the World Cup in Australia and, in the December, the Post Office issued a miniature sheet of four stamps to honour this victory. Each of the four designs carefully avoided showing the face of any player, though I dare say aficionados of the sport knew from the back views and shirt numbers which players were in the photographs and which were not.

By October 2005, the rules had been relaxed. A similar miniature sheet was issued to hail the England cricket team winning the Ashes. This time, players were seen full on and perfectly recognizable on the stamps. In that case, I couldn’t see why there shouldn’t be a stamp to mark Harold Pinter winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. But no such issue materialized.

The recent issue of stamps, which apparently “commemorates the first meeting of the young Paul McCartney and John Lennon fifty years ago”, takes the breakdown of the rules considerably further. Apart from a miniature sheet featuring Beatles collectables, the individual stamps each feature a Beatles album cover and hence the surviving members of the group, Sir Paul and Ringo Starr, are immortalized in the post. It says something about the philistine nature of the age that the first extant people in the public eye to be honoured on stamps are all sportsmen and pop stars.

Existing old masters, photographs and other images have been so miniaturized before but this issue is also a first in another way: the first time marketing images have been depicted on stamps. The reason for it quickly became clear to me. When I went to buy my own copies, the main post office in Bath had sold out of the stamps. A diligent counter staffer managed to rustle up a couple of strays but otherwise, she reported, their whole quota had gone in the first two days. Of course, collectors of Beatles memorabilia – a huge and ravening horde – fell upon this issue. It’s inevitable that the Post Office will note this and look at other subjects that have a commercial potential outside the usual run of stamp issues.

On Tuesday, a new set will be issued to celebrate half a century of the television programme The Sky at Night. Sir Patrick Moore is conspicuous by his absence. Not even a monocle indicates any connection of the issue to earth or its doings. Though BBC and ITV anniversaries have – legitimately, I feel – been marked by stamp issues, it seems nakedly populist for the Post Office to make a single television programme the subject of a set. Whatever next? A set based on I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here? A miniature sheet commemorating the Beckhams’ move to Los Angeles?

By the by, I eventually did find the remaining Beatles stamps, so please do not send me any, however poignant my plight might seem.