In an attempt to plug the hole it had punched in its traditional issuing policy, the GPO insisted this was not an issue honouring Shakespeare himself, whose 400th birthday it was, but one commemorating the Shakespeare Festival as an event.
Nevertheless, this was a ground-breaking and controversial issue, the first to depict a commoner.
In a multi-coloured set of five showing scenes from plays, the only recess-printed stamp, and the only one to name the play in question, was the monotone top value in deep slate purple illustrating the hapless Hamlet contemplating mortality.
Dame Shirley Bassey became the first solo female music artist to be honoured with a dedicated British stamp issue, as Royal Mail celebrated her 70 years in show business on September 21.
Royal Mail’s set of 10 stamps celebrating Flowers, released on March 23, is the first special issue carrying the new cameo portrait of King Charles III.
The Germans call it Englandschlacht, but to the rest of the world it is better known as the Battle of Britain – unique in the history of warfare in that it was fought entirely in the air.
The campaign which followed the fall of France in June 1940 was simply for control of the skies over England.
If it won, the German war machine would be able to press home its advantage with an attempted invasion.
Sir Winston Churchill was 90 years old when he died on January 24, 1965.
Remarkably, he had been a member of the House of Commons until as recently as the previous autumn.
As Britain’s greatest parliamentarian and war leader, not to mention a Nobel Prize-winning author, a journalist and an accomplished artist, he was an obvious subject for a set of stamps, but the Post Office established a new precedent in issuing them.
The exact date on which William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon is unknown, but tradition says it was on St George’s Day, April 23, 1564.
The Post Office’s long-standing refusal to countenance stamps in honour of famous people gave it a problem in 1964 when there was agitation for a special issue of stamps to mark the 400th anniversary.
A set of eight stamps issued by Royal Mail on August 10 celebrates the 40th anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the series of fantasy novels with total worldwide sales of more than a hundred million copies.
The 1924 three-halfpence for the British Empire Exhibition
Until the mid-1920s, the British postal authorities had consistently shunned the idea of commemoratives, an opinion shared by the 'philatelist king' George V, who branded the notion of special event stamps ‘un-English’.
Before 1924 the British Post Office had issued a few items of commemorative postal stationery, but never a commemorative stamp.
The birth of the stamps
In the early planning for the British Empire Exhibition, a strong case was made that the only special issue should be postal stationery.
