Tasveer's stamp, which appeared in the Gibbons catalogue as SG 713 'King of the Orient', a name she had not given it herself, did not meet with universal approval. Many collectors couldn't understand how a stamp could possibly be designed by a child. In December 1966, the Stamp Magazine ran a letter describing them as 'gaudy monstrosities'. The following month H. Elliot Pearse, of the World Association of Young Stamp Collectors, argued that, to the contrary, both Tasveer's and James's stamps showed the true spirit of seasonal goodwill. He believed the Postmaster-General was 'inspired', and although the stamps 'may appear crude when compared with our usual issues, they have opened up an entirely new field'. Two months later the debate raged on, and the tone had again become disapproving. This time, D. T. Phillips from Balcombe, Sussex, spoke for many of his colleagues in GB philatelic societies: 'The great majority of collectors—and indeed of the general public with whom I have discussed the matter—have either regarded these Christmas stamps, especially the 3d value, as a joke or as something far better suited to adorn a Christmas cracker than to represent Great Britain all over the world! Let us face it ... they are only suitable for the nursery!' They didn't much like the runner-up designs either. When these appeared in the Philatelic Bulletin in December 1966, mine was not among them. Brenda Cooper's design featured a person at a piano and a choir of three. Lucy Richardson sent in three snowmen. Sarah L. Nash submitted a goose. Stephen Conroy sent in a snowman going downhill on a sled, smoking. And Tejinderjit Singh featured a snowman dressed as a clown.
That Christmas the Post Office received more than forty thousand letters addressed to Father Christmas at the North Pole. Rather than delivering them, they were put away somewhere, and possibly disposed of in a bin. Everyone who wrote got a reply from 'Reindeerland' in photocopied handscript with one of Tasveer Shemza's stamps in the corner:
My dear young friend,
Thank you for writing to me. My team of gnomes has been working very hard making all sorts of toys ready for Christmas. Of course there may be something they have not thought of, but when I load my sledge I will do my best to see that you get the presents you would like.
I hope you have a very happy Christmas,
Santa
I met Tasveer Shemza forty years after I had seen her on television, and I would like to say she hadn't changed a bit. Certainly she was instantly recognisable by her hair, hazel brown in a Louise Brooks bob, then as now. Also, although she had recently turned forty-seven, she was still fairly small, and her cheeks still rosied up when she smiled. I liked her instantly, especially her slight nervousness and her willingness to please, and when I told her that I found her very attractive when I saw her on television in 1966 she said, 'Surely not.'
She sat in her office at Sussex Downs College, near Eastbourne. The only thing that wasn't so good was her memory. She couldn't, for instance, remember much about entering the competition, or the day she heard the news she had won. She wasn't sure whether she had any help with the design from her parents, which would have disqualified her, although the statute of limitations had long passed when she said, 'But if you look at it now, it does have a very nice border, hasn't it, the top blue bit and the red background—it is rather professional...'
She was an only child. Her parents were both art teachers. She already had all the inks and paints at home, and as well as the winning entry she thinks she may also have submitted a picture of an angel with odd wings and curly blonde hair.
'Any snowmen?'
'No, although the snow in 1964 was pretty impressive, wasn't it, so perhaps snow had made a big impression on a lot of kids. I don't know how I got the idea of doing a king's head, although it was basically my dad. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but it was very much what he looked like, very stylised facial hair, actually quite a typical Muslim beard [she runs her fingers over own chin as she describes it], nicely trimmed. And he always used to wear a hat in the morning to hold his hair down, and stop it flying all over, rather like the crown of course.'
I was taken by the idea, shrouded until now, that Great Britain's first Christmas stamp was modelled on a Muslim. Her father left Pakistan in 1956, and went to the Slade school of art. He married Tasveer's English mother in 1958, and Tasveer was born in Stafford a year later, where her parents both worked in local schools.
'I went to a girls' grammar school where it was expected that you went to university. I was an atheist, and I got the Religious Studies Prize.' She then went to York University, where she saved her grant in term-time to go travelling in the holidays. She trained to teach English as a foreign language, and now teaches others to become teachers. She met her husband in Egypt, and they now have two daughters who have long outgrown Blue Peter.
'It was all very nice indeed in the studio,' she says. 'Val Singleton I remember well, more than John Noakes. Just before we went on air, Val asked me how I got such shiny hair. And the producer—was it Libby Purves?'
'Perhaps Biddy Baxter?'
'Biddy Baxter—that's it. Libby, Biddy, similar. She was a lovely woman.'
The official prizegiving, another photocall, was held at the Post Office Tower. 'We went to the revolving restaurant and had fish and chips, and I was shocked and scandalised. There was me and James Berry, who was my age, and there was also a teenage girl who did the design of the first-day cover. I thought she may also have done a parcel stamp. She seemed terribly much older to us. She's almost been written out of the story. So we had fish and chips, and she licked the ketchup bottle. I was so shocked—I couldn't believe it. That's my strongest memory of the whole thing.'
For several years after her stamp was selected, Tasveer received a large amount of correspondence from collectors asking her for a signed photograph ('Good Wishes from Tasveer Shemza') or a signed first-day cover. In return, she would receive stamps from foreign countries or other gifts. When she got married she decided to keep her maiden name. 'I think it's a fantastic name—Tasveer Shemza, it goes together. And I was of that feminist generation where people thought, "Why would you change your name?" Also, my husband's name is Hodgson, he's a Yorkshireman, and I don't think that would go at all.
'Every so often people would come up to me and say, "You're the..." and they'd tell me what they could remember about the stamp. As I became a teenager I would become quite embarrassed about it. That normal teenage thing of being self-conscious. And it took me until I had kids of my own to not be embarrassed about it. Now I think it's a really fantastic achievement for a child.'
In 2005, one of my two sons almost appeared on a British Christmas stamp. Or at least he appeared in the Royal Mail Yearbook promoting the Christmas stamps, which is not quite as good, but distinctly closer than most people get.
In 1990, when my son Ben was two, the artist Catherine Yass took a photograph of him in my arms in a darkening street in South End Green, north London, where I lived. It was a chilly evening. I had a maroon jacket, and Ben was wearing a very large blue sweatshirt. Yass, a friend for about fifteen years, was the cousin of my first long-term girlfriend, and in the years I had known her she had experimented with many artforms, including sculpture and film. Her big breakthrough came with her photography, lightboxes and film, and in particular a signature technique in which she overlays a positive and a negative image of the same scene, heightening and deepening colours in the process. She had employed this to stunning effect in studies of graveyards, hospitals and portraits of Indian film stars, and in 2002 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. One of my favourite works was not a photograph but a looped video in which she sat facing the camera as she recited a long list of jokes in a mirthless and deadpan way. Two Jewish women meet in the street and one says gosh you look wonderful what have you been up to. The other replies I'm having an affair. Her friend says an affair how wonderful, who's doing the catering? A beggar stops a man in the street and says I haven't had any food for so long I've forgotten what it tastes like. The man says don't worry it still tastes the same.
Yass, who is in her early forties, first came to the attention of the Royal Mail in 1999. One day in late summer she received a call asking whether she'd be interested in designing a Christmas stamp. Christmas stamps are always special, but this year particularly so. They were the Christmas stamps of the Millennium Series, a sequence of ninety-six stamps released as four stamps each month for two years. It was the most ambitious stamp issue ever undertaken, and each one was commissioned from a leading artist. Yass was in good company: David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Howard Hodgkin, Patrick Caulfield, Ralph Steadman, Anthony Gormley, Craigie Aitchison, Don McCullin. They were chosen to illustrate a particular theme or achievement in Britain's past—The Farmers' Tale, The Scientists' Tale, The Citizens' Tale, The Entertainers' Tale, The Travellers' Tale.
'For some reason,' Yass told me one day at her studio near Brick Lane in east London, 'I'm always asked to do Christmas projects. The stamp, the Christmas page in the Royal Mail Yearbook, decorating the Tate Christmas tree.' Yass is Jewish. I told her that it was Britain's modern institutional way of being multiculural without a big song and dance. I told her I was proud of my discovery that the first British Christmas stamp was based on a Muslim. Unlike Tasveer Shemza, Yass said she was disappointed that her stamp was to be used for overseas postage, rather than second or first class inland. But she was pleased that more people would become familiar with her art than ever before. 'Licking my work,' she said. 'You don't get more intimate than that.'
The stamp, which cost forty-four pence and marked the St Andrews pilgrimage, depicted the ruins of a church wall in gold and midnight blue. Yass showed me the many photographs and layers that went into its design, recalling how a person from Royal Mail had been particularly helpful in computer manipulation, and in turning the night-time into a thick velvety blue.
Six years later she was commissioned again. This time they didn't want a stamp, but an image they could use on a spread in the 2005 Yearbook, an annual gathering of all the year's stamps in one 'lavishly illustrated volume'. This was of interest predominantly to desperate completists and grandparents, but it wasn't thrown together as an afterthought; each of the year's stamps—in 2005 these included studies of Magic, Jane Eyre and Classic ITV—not only had a little biography about the designers, but also some illuminating essays about the theme. Catherine Yass's brief was to produce an image to accompany the theme of Madonna and Child. Because she is not a conventional artist, Yass suggested an original image: a father and child. Rather than take some new portraits, she retrieved an older image she had taken some years before: me and my son Ben in the dusk near a traffic island. The absence of a woman in this picture caused a frisson of tension at Royal Mail, fearful, perhaps, of the Daily Mail. A conflict was averted when Yass came up with a compromise: you wouldn't see the man. So my son is being held by someone, and you can see the holder's shoulder, but that's it. It's still a poignant moment for me, far more so than for my son, who isn't particularly interested in yearbooks. But there is my clothed shoulder on an image issued by the Royal Mail, a remote outpost in the long and distinguished journey of philately.
Shortly before I had visited Yass in her studio, I had heard other tales of millennium and Christmas stamps from Andrew Davidson, the illustrator best known (beyond the stamp world) for his illustrations for Ted Hughes's The Iron Man. Unlike Yass, who was an artist who derived most of her income from project grants and gallery shows, Davidson was a graphic illustrator by training and profession, a specialist in distilling essences from corporate mission statements. Designing stamps had become a habit he was keen to foster, for his reputation and sanity as well as his income.
I met Davidson at the British Postal Museum and Archive around the back of the Mount Pleasant sorting office near King's Cross, and he was instantly likeable. He was a Scotsman nearing his fifties, and he had a large balding pate and clear smile. He was a traditional craftsman, full of enthusiasms, a man who worked in a timber studio in his Cotswold garden, ideally with Radio 4 and a nice chunk of English boxwood to be engraved with spitstickers and scorpers. His woodcuts had graced envelopes and collections for fifteen years—Sherlock Holmes, ice-age animals, Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn—and had led him to a theory about how to make a good postage stamp. You needed a good brief, an intellectual challenge. One benefited from well-researched references. One needed a large amount of inspiration, and respect for the subject matter. Experience helped, as did a knowledge of the principles of design, because 'it's not just a bit of perforated paper with the Queen's head in the corner and some picture placed in the space that's left'.
Like other solitary toilers, Davidson had mischievous streaks. There is something about traditional and painstaking design that invites subversion: the Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin with fornicating dogs in the bushes,* the top-secret film scripts that deliberately contain a different error in each one so that any leakages online can be easily traced to an individual. Davidson's triumph came with his Sherlock Holmes stamps of 1993. These were intricate designs, five stamps commemorating the centenary of the publication of 'The Final Problem', and they left plenty of room for creative manoeuvre. On the illustration for 'The Six Napoleons' stamp, depicting the scene where Holmes smashes a bust with a riding crop to find the black pearl, Davidson placed a piece of twisty pasta among the ceramic shards. On 'The Reigate Squire' he put something among the folds of the rug, 'but by this time the Royal Mail had found out what I was doing and asked me to get rid of the syringe.'
But it wasn't all fun. Davidson had crushing accounts of stamps commissioned but never issued, a Pond Life set, a Holiday Postcards set, a Bronte set, and he consoled himself as best he could: 'Because yours isn't adopted, it doesn't mean it's rubbish. It means that perhaps another set works better in the series through the year, or it may be politically sensitive. It's nothing personal.'
When he was growing up his one of his heroes was David Gentleman, who designed Churchill and the Battle of Britain in the mid-1960s. He says he'd be happy to be considered even in the same paragraph as Gentleman. Stamps bring him great joy, he says, and he delights in the happiness they bring to others. 'You know when you're on a long train journey and someone says, "What do you do, then?" I can reach for my wallet and take out some stamps and say, "This is what I do." I had a meeting a few weeks ago with a hugely important chap from Switzerland, and I showed him a set of these Ice Age stamps [the sabre-tooth cat, giant deer, woolly rhino, woolly mammoth and cave bear], and I laid them out on a table in front of him and he was thrilled. I said, "You can have them, they didn't cost me much.'"
Andrew Davidson appeared to me to be a kind and generous man, and one who would not say a word against his employers in public. But at a lecture in the autumn of 2006 he stood up for his fellow designers and, with incredulity and dismay, showed a photo of an envelope carrying a label one can print from the Internet at home, just bar codes and other writing, no illustration, no creative thought or graphic design to speak of.
The country that invented stamps was now forging ahead with SmartStamp, something that swept away the need for the security printing presses of De La Rue in London, High Wycombe and Basingstoke, a domestic franking service that had stepped out of the office into every home with a computer. The adverts heralded a breakthrough: 'Print out the exact postage you need ... mail-merge contacts from your PC's address book ... manage how much you're spending on postage 24/7.' *
This seemed to me to be in direct conflict with the stated aims of the Royal Mail's Special Stamps programme, which, at the time of Catherine Yass and Andrew Davidson's work, was to: Commemorate important anniversaries; reflect the British contribution to world affairs, especially to the Commonwealth and Europe, in a variety of fields of activity, including the arts and sciences; display the many and varied aspects of the British way of life; extend public patronage to the arts by encouraging the development of minuscule art.
The biggest problem with SmartStamp, of course, is that it is not a sta
mp. With a printing press in every home, fewer people each year would buy or see artworks in minuscule, and the noble patronage of Tasveer Shemza, Yass and Davidson would slide away. A stamp no longer used for postage would become that dread thing: 'a collector's item', like those many useless things sold in newspaper magazines, an item produced solely for profit. Stamp collectors have seen this pattern emerging for many years, and SmartStamp made me feel that I wasn't a collector any more, but an owner and a sucker.
Mounts Long Dry
At the end of 2006, Royal Mail confirmed its stamp programme for 2007. There were to be eighteen new issues, an absolute nightmare for the completist. The Beatles. Sea Life. The Sky at Night. World of Invention. Wales. The Abolition of the Slave Trade. Celebrating England. Wembley Stadium. Beside the Seaside. Fortieth Anniversary of the Machin. Grand Prix. Scouts. Lest We Forget (Part 2). Endangered Species: Birds. British Army Uniform. The Queen's Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary. Christmas. And then a few months into the year, a new set was added to the list, the finest example yet of Royal Mail's matchless (although obvious) grasp on marketing: Harry Potter stamps, marking the publication in July 2007 of the final book. There were to be seven first-class stamps, each showing a different book jacket. There was also a miniature sheet containing five other stamps (the school crest of Hogwarts school and its four houses), as well as a Generic Smilers sheet, a collection of twenty stamps attached to labels featuring magic spells from the Harry Potter books, which are only revealed when warmed by the palm of a hand. The whole package, including two first-day covers, was available from the Post Office for £19.40.
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