In 1840, the United Kingdom introduced the penny black, the first adhesive postage stamp issued anywhere in the world.
This page is intended not to give detailed information about the stamp, nor are we presenting definitive advice on collecting these fascinating stamps, or their values; it is here to relate some of the interesting facets of the penny black, and give some general non-specialised information.

Background History  |  James Chalmers  |  May 1840  | Basic Technical Matters  |  Corner Letters  |  Commercial Values  |  Site Links

Background History
For many years the postal service in the U.K. had been a very expensive service for ordinary people to use. The costs were prohibitive, a single letter sometimes costing a working person's full day's wages. The postal system also had many strange anomolies, such as certain categories of mail going free (and being therefore paid for by the charges on others), newspapers going for nothing, most mail being paid for by the addressee rather than by the sender, and so on. There were moves for postal reform for many years, until eventually these moves started gathering some force (through the attention of many, amongst whom Rowland Hill is the best known, and Robert Wallace, MP for Greenock, was instrumental). The story is long and involved, but eventually The Penny Postage Bill was passed by Parliament on 17 August 1839. Some basic elements of the plan were the lowering of postage rates for basic letters to one penny, the removal of certain idiosyncrasies, that prepayment would become normal, and the availability of printed envelopes, lettersheets, and labels to show prepayment. The "labels" were the penny black and twopence blue. 

James Chalmers
A bookseller and printer from Dundee, James Chalmers, holds a strong claim to be the actual inventor of the adhesive postage stamp. He is said to have been interested in postal reform from about 1822, and to have printed samples of his idea for printed gummed labels in August 1834. It seems that, although Hill also presented the idea of adhesive stamps, he was probably keener on the use of standard prepaid letter folders or lettersheets or envelopes, such as were issued in 1840 using a design by William Mulready. [The book James Chalmers Inventor of the Adhesive Postage Stamp edited by W.J. Smith, and published in Dundee in 1970, is a fascinating, if partisan, read.]

May 1840
The new stamps went on sale on 1 May 1840, and were valid for postage from 6 May 1840 (although some were used during the 1-5 May period). The Mulreadies were issued at the same time. Public reaction to these new items was quite the opposite to Rowland Hill's expectations. The labels were well-received and admired; the Mulready design was lambasted and ridiculed. Initial supplies of the stamps were rushed through the printing and distribution process, but supplies soon caught up with requirements.

Basic Technical Matters
The stamps were printed in sheets of 240, engraved on steel plates, on gummed paper with a single small crown watermark on each stamp. Eleven different printing plates were used (and plate 1 is usually differentiated into plate 1a and plate 1b), and it is possible in almost every case to work out which plate any individual stamp was printed from by little characteristics. Things like the positioning of the corner letters within their squares, the presence of the "O flaw", which rays of the stars in the upper corners are broken at what points, and so on, can point to a correct plate identification, but more specialised literature is required in order to do this. Some plates are scarcer than others, plate 11 being the scarcest.
[From time to time we run workshops at our shop, and our "Common UK Problems" workshop includes an introduction to plating "blacks". These workshops only happen once or twice per year, but are always noed on our home page.]

Corner Letters
Every penny black stamp has letters in the lower two corners. These simply identify what sheet position the stamp occupied. When the printing plates were produced the lower squares were blank, and the letters were punched in by hand. The left square letter shows which horizontal row the stamp was in - the first row being A, the second B, and so on down to the twentieth row with T. The right square letter indicates the vertical column, again with A for the first column, B, C, and so on across to L for the last (twelfth) column. It should be noted therefore that each letter combination is just as common or as scarce as any other.