Royal Mail’s Crass Choice of Jubilee Stamps
One wonders who in Royal Mail is responsible for the subjects which it chooses for its stamps[1]. Sometimes we get postage stamps looking like trading stamps, but even they are preferable to one featuring England’s 1966 World Cup winning team announced as one of four Diamond Jubilee stamps on February 1st.
Surely even the closed world of Royal Mail’s Board of Management can understand that this event was forty-six, yes, 46 years ago. Does Royal Mail not realise that Britain has other things to define the Queen’s reign by which are far more notable than a football competition which England has failed to win for 46 years and whose miserable performance in the last competition in South Africa in 2010 was a national embarrassment.
Moreover, these are stamps meant to apply to the whole of the United Kingdom. Things like this only confirm to Scots, indeed to all who dwell outside inner London, the crass and invincible ignorance about their own country and its achievements of those who work in a tight little group of favoured London postcodes (in this case EC4).
Other stamps in the new series remind us of more 20th Century failures: the 1912 Scott expedition to the South Pole, however heroic the individuals, failed in its primary purpose – to get there first. Why not an image of Vivian Fuchs’s crossing of Antarctica in 1956, which really was a world-beating triumph, or for that matter the British conquest of Mount Everest in the Queen’s Coronation year 1953?
An image of King George VI and his wife on the 68p stamp evokes the London Blitz in 1940/41, but also the question – are we ever going to put the 2nd World War behind us and stop living in the past? If not, why not a picture of a real triumph: the successful landings on the Normandy beaches in 1944, or the iconic picture of Churchill and the Queen’s parents celebrating VE day on the Buckingham Palace balcony on May 9th 1945?
Instead of football, whose constant promotion many people deplore, why not have the Crick, Wilkinson and Watson Nobel prize for the double-helix DNA discovery in 1953, arguably the most profound of all human discoveries in the Queen’s long reign? For engineering, why choose the Channel Tunnel which was not a purely British project and of which there are many of similar length elsewhere in the world, when you can choose the Rolls Royce Trent engine which really is a British achievement powering half the world’s airliners?
Many, if not most Britons appreciate the efforts Royal Mail staff put in to make it arguably the most cost effective quality postal service in the world. But in choosing subjects to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on its stamps, which will be seen by all the people in the United Kingdom and millions overseas, Royal Mail should have invited their views and published a short list for inspection by the public. This way Royal Mail will in future avoid crass choices for its stamps and even for its own name[2].
[1] It is not the Stamp Advisory Committee even though it is appointed by Royal Mail. The choice of subjects is Royal Mail’s management alone – the Chief Executive of which is Moya Greene ex-head of Canada Post.
[2] For a time in the 2000’s it actually called itself Consignia, which is uncomfortably close to the Spanish word Consigna – “left luggage office” – an unfortunate association for an organisation handling 80 million letters and packages each working day.
