Stamp Series – Five Shilling Penguin 355
£100.00
Description
Introducing Five Shillings Penguin 355 based on the rare Five Shillings Penguin
Stamp (1930)
In the 1920s and especially 1930s the British colonies around the globe increasingly moved away from basic functional designs for their postage stamps.
The remote Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic were no exception.
The first permanent British settlement of the Falkland Islands had been established, and in 1932 plans were afoot to celebrate the new centenary with a proposed set of commemorative postage stamps. The committee included the acting postmistress, Miss Maude Carey, and Colonial Engineer George Roberts, who was also a keen amateur photographer.
Mr Roberts devised a series of pictorial designs, intended to showcase the life and history of the Islands, which in the hands of Bradbury Wilkinson, specialist engraver and printer, became perhaps the most beautiful and immediately recognisable of all the British colonial sets issued in the 1930s.
Roberts’ masterpiece of a King Penguin, the noble bird, which stands 3ft tall, is the largest of the five species of penguin native to the Falklands, the photograph used on the original stamp had been taken by Roberts himself a couple of years before.
The original stamp uses a black and yellow colour combination it was an immediate favourite with collectors, and it remains so to this day.
