A little while ago, a lady contacted me out of the blue about some stamps. She’d been going through her father’s rather large stamp collection and was wondering what to do with it. She remembered she’d bought a pack of Pigeons from us before, and so she contacted me, to see if I was interested in buying some from her. You’ve guessed it – I was!

A few weeks later, we were both sitting around a large coffee table in my office, leafing through the most enormous philatelic collection I’ve ever seen – four hefty boxes full. I rather inappropriately joked that it felt like a drug deal.

She had royal stamps; stamps commemorating the opening of the Channel Tunnel (1994), stamps with smiley faces on (complete with separate googly eyes with which to adorn your envelope); Gruffalo stamps, Beano stamps, James Bond stamps. You name it, if a stamp had been produced in the last 50 years, she had one (or a whole sheet of them).

Needless to say, I parted with a lot of cash… But what really struck me was how vast and beautiful the collection of stamps that this small island has produced over the years. Stamps by so many designers, artists and illustrators, commemorating so many wonderful events and achievements.

Since buying all of these stamps, I have photographed and put some of them on Instagram, to show people what we have, and also talked about stamps in general with lots more people. And what I discovered was that many people think you can’t use these stamps anymore… They think that since Royal Mail introduced their (rather ghastly) bar code, all old stamps have become defunct.

Well, happily, I can tell you they are still useable, and they are not defunct. If you have bought Pigeons from us (in the UK), you’ll have seen that we send them out with these stamps on the box. I’ve been to houses where people have cut out the stamps from our boxes and pinned them to their walls like a poster because they are so beautiful!

But not only do we use them to send you your Pigeons, we also sell them (in convenient packs of 6) on the Pigeon website. We even have a new section on the site dedicated to stamps. So when you next buy a pack of Pigeons or two, don’t forget to look at the stamps as well. Because you can’t really get these stamps anywhere else (at least, not in small quantities like this) and once they’re gone, they’re gone. (I should add that you need to buy them with Pigeons – if we started sending little orders of 1 or 2 packs of stamps to our packers they’d explode!)

So it’s definitely not a ‘goodbye’ to the old British stamp. And here’s hoping they will be used more and more, bringing back the joy of our rich British heritage of stamp design into our everyday lives.

John Morse-Brown
November 2024