VICTORIA'S EMPIRE

When Uniform Penny Postage was established in 1840 Rowland Hill pinned his faith on the pictorial envelopes with their allegorical design by William Mulready. When it was pointed out to him that people might not be able to buy these wrappers from their nearest post office he came up with the solution, some kind of gummed slip bearing the stamp which the sender of a letter could affix to the cover.

Thus, almost as an afterthought, adhesive stamps came into being. Putting this idea into practice proved more difficult, because there was no precedent for it. The design competition promoted by the Treasury in 1839 received more than 2,000 entries but relatively few of them focused on adhesive stamps. Sir George Mackenzie of Coull came nearest, with an essay showing the head of Queen Victoria, but he was not awarded one of the four prizes. Conversely, none of the prizewinners produced anything remotely like the stamps eventually adopted.

Hill himself gets most of the credit for the concept that led to the Penny Black, but the end result was very much a team effort. The profile of Victoria was based on the Guildhall Medal sculpted by William Wyon in 1838, translated into a two-dimensional image by Henry Corbould to guide