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The first ever missing value error in the 36-year history of the British ‘Machin’ series has recently cropped up via a missing £ sign on the recently-issued high value £2.00 slate blue definitive.
The £2.00 value – along with new £1.50, £3.00 and £5.00 Machins – were gravure printed by De La Rue using new cylinders produced to work with its ATN press at Byfleet but something appears to have gone awry during the production process.
Initially Royal Mail said that it had no plans to withdraw the error but it has recently switched policy on this and has withdrawn all stamps apart from those which are already in British post offices.
The faulty stamps are found on the ‘no dot’ sheets immediately adjacent to the D1 cylinder number. One theory now being put forward about the error is that an old-style High Wycombe (where the stamps used to be printed prior to 2002’s buy-out of Questa by De La Rue) cylinder number was deleted from the computer and a new Byfleet cylinder number inserted.
The error is believed to have happened on around 17,500 sheets and as many as 8,000 of these are believed to be in circulation, so Machin collectors shouldn’t pay more than between £25 to £50 for a cylinder block with the error.
The Machin series – named after the designer of the Queen’s head on the stamps, Arnold Machin – began back on June 5, 1967 and has survived decimalisation and Royal Mail experiments in the early 1980s to find a new-style head for GB definitive stamps.
There have been some errors in the past with high value Machins – the last one being the 1995 £1 bluish violet which produced some imperf pairs – but nothing on this scale has ever emerged before.
It’s not the first problem that has cropped up with the latest GB high value definitives, which were issued on July 1, 2003 – the colour of the £5.00 value had to be changed at the last minute (from brown to grey-blue) due to problems with the Iriodin ink. This ink can sometimes create shimmers and changes in the final colours, especially if they are meant to be dark.
To get hold of the new, high value Machins go to www.royalmail.com