Existing comment:
In 1837, Parliament created a select committee headed by Robert Wallace, a Member of Parliament from Scotland and noted postal reformer. Wallace championed Rowland Hill's recommendation that postal fees be set at a uniform rate everywhere in the United Kingdom and be prepaid by the sender using a postage stamp or printed letter sheet. Parliament approved the plan in 1839 and Hill was appointed to supervise its implementation.
On April 10, 1840, less than one month before the new postal reform was to take effect, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (roughly equivalent to the US Secretary of the Treasury) sent examples of the new one-penny stamp and letter sheet to Wallace, who mounted and annotated them on a card in his own handwriting. This document was recently rediscovered among Wallace's personal papers held by his descendants.
The letter sheet is a proof of an early lacking the words "POSTAGE ONE PENNY" at the bottom. The stamp, however, is exactly as issued to the public on May 1, 1840. It was printed using Plate 1a, the first of eleven steel printing plates created to produce the stamps. This is the earliest dated example of a finished Penny Black yet discovered, and was quite probably taken from the first sheet ever printed. |