MIOR watermark varieties on King George VI revenue key types
Andrew McClellan
Most revenue collectors will be familiar with the key types (unappropriated die stamps) used at different periods of the 20th century for revenues of Great Britain, Ireland (Northern, Southern and both together), Isle of Man, Trucial States and Wei Hai Wei. In this article I will record a handful of watermark varieties recently discovered on stamps of this kind, all bearing the portrait of King George VI. The watermark in all cases is ‘MIOR’, that is to say, Multiple Orbs with IR (=Inland Revenue).
The following is a list of all the varieties currently known to me:
|
Appropriation |
Value and colour Orientation of wmk |
|
|
Companies Winding Up |
1s green Inverted *
|
|
|
Consular Service
|
1s pale green | Inverted |
|
Contract Note
|
6s deep claret | Inverted |
|
Contract Note N Ireland
|
2s claret | Inverted |
|
Foreign Bill
|
2s pale olive | Inverted |
|
Foreign Bill
|
4s pale olive | Inverted |
|
Foreign Bill
|
4s dull olive-bistre | Reversed |
|
Foreign Service
|
7s6d pale sage-green | Inverted |
|
Isle of Man
|
2s dull green
|
Inverted
|
|
Land Registry |
1s pale green
|
Inverted |
|
Public Records
|
£5 claret
|
Sideways |
* This is almost certainly right but has not been confirmed beyond doubt. The MIOR watermark can be very difficult to see, especially with stamps on piece or document.
A note on shades: anybody who has ever tried to identify used stamps based on the listing in R G Booth, A Priced Check-list of the U.K. G.VI Unappropriated Die Adhesive Revenue Stamps (privately published, 2000) will surely be aware of how difficult this is. The inks are notoriously susceptible to change when exposed to either water or sunlight; also some collectors suggest that other shades exist, not listed by Booth. In any case, the colours given above should be taken as approximations at best. I am pretty confident that the Isle of Man 2s is dull green and therefore an early printing (registered 15/12/50 according to Booth), while other values such as the Foreign Bill pale olives must be later. This brings us to the significant observation that the watermark varieties were not all produced at the same time, which leads in turn to the question of how they came about.
Booth mentions the sideways watermark on the pound values, pointing out that “this occurs in cases where the paper used is that prepared originally for the high value issues of King George V” (op. cit., page i). In other words, the pound values bearing the portrait of King George V had been printed on large rolls of paper fed sideways into the printer, causing all stamps to have sideways watermark MIOR as standard.[1] Later KGVI printings had sheets of paper fed into the printing the normal way round, giving an upright watermark. The question is what happened during the changeover period: was the KGV paper used for entire printings at a time, or was the old paper mixed in with the new? Booth records only one printing of the £5 Public Records. If there was no second printing, this must mean that part of that printing used the old KGV paper (resulting in sideways watermark for those sheets) and part of it used the new paper, giving watermark upright. It would also be interesting to know which KGVI high-value stamps beside the £5 Public Records are known with watermark sideways – I interpret Booth’s comment as meaning that there may be others, but he does not list them and I have never seen them.
Inverted and reversed watermarks are harder to account for. Occasionally stamps are deliberately printed with inverted watermark, but since there is no apparent advantage to printing KGVI revenue key type sheets upside-down, one is left to conclude that these watermark varieties are not special printings but errors. The likeliest explanation is that one or more sheets of paper were accidentally fed into the printer the wrong way round; stamps with reversed watermark are caused by a sheet being fed in upside-down. The scarcity of the errors will of course depend on the number of sheets wrongly fed into the printer, so it is worth remembering that a security printer such as Somerset House builds its reputation on the quality of its output, which means by definition that printing errors (including watermark errors) will be exceptional.
That said, I have seen more examples of the Isle of Man 2s with inverted watermark than with upright; the same goes for the Consular Service 1s. Whilst every stamp listed in the table above is also known as a normal (ie with watermark upright) so that the varieties are unusual, it is not yet clear whether the watermark varieties are worth much of a premium on the basis of scarcity.
A related question is whether these stamps are worthy of a separate catalogue listing, or indeed worth collecting. For some people they will be of no more account than a flyspeck printing flaw; one advanced collector of UK revenues to whom I spoke recently expressed no interest in them at all. In my view they rank on a par with watermark varieties on postage stamps, which are listed by Stanley Gibbons and other major catalogues. If any reader finds more, I would be very keen to receive details.
I gratefully acknowledge the help of Peter Mansfield, who replied to my initial enquiry with immediate enthusiasm and diligence. The Foreign Bill 2s and Foreign Service 7s6d with inverted watermark were both discovered by Peter, along with the Foreign Bill 4s reversed and the suspected invert on the Companies Winding Up 1s. I am also deeply grateful to Alan Elder-Brown, who at my request carefully checked his extensive stock of KGVI revenues in search of watermark varieties.
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[1] Peter Mansfield has helpfully pointed out to me that the practice of feeding sheets into the printer sideways dates back to the introduction of the Two Orbs watermark in 1881, and possibly even earlier – see his ‘GB – Two Puzzles: Scales and Thistles’, The Revenue Journal of Great Britain vol XV no 4 (March 2005), pp132-135.