[press release]
Royal Mail Reveals Images of New Stamps to Mark 75th Anniversary of the End of World War Two

• • The stamp issue reflects on the end of the war both in Europe and in the Far East and the Pacific, with three concepts: Celebration; Return; and Remembrance
  • Eight stamps depict scenes of celebration by service personnel and civilians when news of the conflict’s end was announced, and the subsequent return of personnel from overseas and children who were evacuated
  • Originally shot in black and white, all eight images have been brought to life in colour for the first time by colourist, Royston Leonard
  • Four additional stamps presented in a Miniature Sheet show memorials built to remember and honour the fallen and victims of the Holocaust
  • The Second World War in Europe officially came to an end in the early morning of 7 May 1945
  • Royal Mail worked with experts and curators from: Imperial War Museums (IWM); the Commonwealth War Graves Commission; the National Maritime Museum; and the Association of Wrens
  • The stamps and a range of collectible products are available now to pre-order at www.royalmail.com/endofsecondworldwar and by phone on 03457 641 641
  • A full set of all 12 stamps, available in a Presentation Pack, retails at £14.60
  • The stamps will be available on general sale from 8 May

  Royal Mail today reveals images of a set of 12 new Special Stamps to be issued to mark the end of the Second World War. Eight stamps depict scenes of celebration by service personnel and civilians when news of the conflict’s end was announced. Also featured are images of personnel returning from overseas, as well as the return of children evacuated from major cities.

  The eight images were originally photographed in black and white, but have been brought to life in colour for the first time by colourist, Royston Leonard.

  The eight stamps depict:

  • A serviceman returning home to Oreston, South Devon, from his airbase in Lincolnshire
  • Jubilant nurses celebrating VE Day in Liverpool
  • Ecstatic crowds celebrating VE Day in London’s Piccadilly
  • Evacuees returning home to London after a wartime stay in Leicester
  • Troops marching along Oxford St, London, during a parade for the ‘Victory over Japan’ exhibition in August 1945
  • Soldiers and sailors leaving a demobilisation centre carrying their civilian clothes in boxes
  • Allied prisoners of war at Aomori Camp near Yokohama, Japan, cheering their rescuers
  • A Wren (member of the Women’s Royal Naval service) proposing a toast during the VE Day celebrations in Glasgow

  Four additional stamps presented in a Miniature Sheet show images of official monuments and cemeteries built to remember and honour the fallen as well as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.

  The stamps in the Miniature Sheet feature:

  Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
  Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Second World War Nazi genocide of six million Jews (which became known as the Holocaust), Yad Vashem – from the Hebrew for ‘A Memorial and a name’ was established in 1953. The Hall of Names memorial holds the names of millions of Holocaust victims, with some 600 portraits displayed on the exhibit’s cone-shaped ceiling.

  Runnymede Memorial
  Located near Egham, Surrey, and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the Runneymede Memorial – sometimes known as the Air Forces Memorial – was unveiled by the Queen in 1953. It commemorates over 20,000 airmen and women who were lost during operations from bases in the UK and Europe during the Second World War and who have no known grave.

  Plymouth Naval Memorial
  Originally unveiled in 1924 to commemorate more than 7,000 sailors who died in the First World War and have no known grave, the memorial was extended in the early 1950s to include nearly 16,000 sailors who perished during the Second World War. It is one of three national navel memorials built and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

  Rangoon Memorial, Myanmar
  Situated within the Taukkyan War Cemetery, the Rangoon Memorial commemorates almost 27,000 dead of the British and Commonwealth Land Forces who fell during the Second World War campaigns against the Japanese in Burma (Myanmar) with no known grave. Established by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1958, it forms the centrepiece of the cemetery which contains the graves of nearly 6000 Commonwealth soldiers.

  The End of the War
  The Second World War in Europe officially came to an end in the early morning of 7 May 1945, when Germany signed a document of unconditional surrender. Public celebrations to mark the end of the war began spontaneously in many places as soon as people heard the news.

  At 3pm on the following day, VE Day, Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast from 10 Downing Street in the same room from which Neville Chamberlain had announced the declaration of war in 1939. He told the BBC audience that hostilities would end officially at one minute after midnight that evening.

  Churchill went to the House of Commons and then Buckingham Palace in the evening where he appeared on the balcony, along with the Royal Family. Churchill returned to Whitehall to appear on the balcony of the Ministry of Health. Great crowds followed his travels around London. Then at 9pm, the King gave his address to the nation to give thanks that the war was over.

  But while war in Europe was over, Japan had yet to be defeated. It was not until 14 August 1945 that Japan also accepted unconditional surrender. A two-day national holiday began with VJ Day on 15 August.

  For this stamp issue, Royal Mail worked closely with: Imperial War Museums (IWM); the Commonwealth War Graves Commission; the National Maritime Museum; and the Association of Wrens. The following experts were also consulted:Professor Richard Overy of Exeter University; and military historian, Iain Ballantyne.

  Philip Parker, Royal Mail said: “Our new stamps capture how the end of the War was greeted and the resulting return of service personnel after nearly six long years of conflict. We also pay tribute to those who never returned, and the victims of the Holocaust.”

  The full range of stamps, and other collectible products are available to pre-order now from www.royalmail.com/endofsecondworldwar and by phone on 03457 641 641.

  The full set of 12 stamps, available in a Presentation Pack, retails at £14.60.

  The stamps will be available on general sale from 8 May.

[press release]
Royal Mail Issues New Stamps on the 250th Anniversary of the Birth Of William Wordsworth

• Wordsworth is regarded as having been at the forefront of the Romantic movement of British poetry
• The stamps also celebrate other notable Romantic poets from the period: William Blake; John Keats; Lord Byron; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Mary Robinson; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Walter Scott; John Clare; and Letitia Elizabeth Landon
• Each stamp uses an extract from one of their most popular and enduring works, along with a specially-commissioned illustration by the artist, Linda Farquharson
• Royal Mail worked with the award-winning biographer, Jonathan Bate on the stamp; issue
• A full set of all 10 stamps, available in a Presentation Pack, retails at £8.50
• The stamps and a range of collectible products are available now at www.royalmail.com/romanticpoets and by phone on 03457 641 641
• The stamps will be available on general sale from today (7 April)

Royal Mail has announced the launch of 10 new Special Stamps on the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Wordsworth, the renowned Romantic poet, born on 7th April 1770.

The stamps also celebrate other major Romantic poets: William Blake; John Keats; Lord Byron; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Mary Robinson; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Walter Scott; John Clare; and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

Each stamp uses an extract from one of their most popular and enduring works, along with a specially-commissioned, monochrome design that reflects the theme of the poem.

The Romantic poets made poetry more passionate and more personal than ever before, and they embraced romantic landscapes and the natural world with vigour. Some became international household names. Lord Byron (1788–1824) was the original celebrity author and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) became famous as the inventor of the historical novel. By contrast, the genius of some others, notably William Blake (1757–1827) and John Clare (1793– 1864), was recognised only after their deaths.

The poet who came to be seen as the primary voice of the Romantic movement, was William Wordsworth (1770–1850). Wordsworth’s early work was initially neglected. Lyrical Ballads (written with his friend and contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and published anonymously, was often derided, but leading Victorian thinkers would come to regard him as the greatest English poet since Shakespeare.

In 1843, Queen Victoria made Wordsworth her Poet Laureate. When he died seven years later, his influence was immense, and his poetry genuinely changed the world.

Coleridge (1772– 1834) wrote some of his best work around the turn of the century – penning the mysterious ‘Kubla Khan’ as well as his beautiful poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, addressed to his sleeping baby son Hartley.

An admired female poet of the era was Mary Robinson (1757–1800) [stamp illustrated above]. In her mid-twenties, Mary was crippled by rheumatic fever and lost the use of her legs. She remade herself as a bestselling novelist, an author of a book arguing for women’s rights and a prolific lyric poet.

Many other women poets were celebrated during this period, including Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–38), who published under the initials LEL, and became known as ‘the female Byron’. Her life was beset by scandal, but her poetry – most of it published in the early 19th-century – was greatly admired for its intelligence and imagination.

Technically, Lord Byron was a master of every poetic form, as adept in satire and wit as in the lyric of love or the evocation of Mediterranean landscapes. In exile on the Continent following a scandalous divorce, he befriended Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) [stamp design above]. Shelley was both a romantic idealist and a political radical: he was at his best in his glorious odes addressed to the skylark and to the west wind. He died, tragically, just before his 30th birthday, when out sailing in a storm off the Italian coast.

Another early death was that of John Keats (1795–1821), who succumbed to tuberculosis in Rome, aged just 25. Keats was the epitome of the Romantic poet: impoverished but idealistic, full of vitality in everything he wrote but always conscious of mortality. As with Shelley, his most anthologised poems are his odes, lyrical works addressed to a particular subject – in Keats’s case, a nightingale or the season of autumn or a beautiful urn that has survived since ancient Greece, with its depictions of sensuous scenes and its message that truth is beauty and beauty truth.

Some of the Romantics were highly respectable figures, such as Sir Walter Scott, whose poem, The Lady of the Lake,inspired generations of tourists to visit the Scottish Highlands; others were marginal, isolated figures. William Blake [stamp design below] published his own works in tiny, illustrated, hand-engraved editions. Though his ‘Jerusalem’ is now known by everyone, and his Songs of Innocence and of Experience are much loved, not many read his poems while he was alive. John Clare, meanwhile, achieved brief fame as ‘the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’ – he suffered from poverty, neglect and mental illness, spending the last 25 years of his life in a lunatic asylum.

Royal Mail spokesperson Philip Parker said: “The Romantic poets composed some of the most loved poetry of all time, and our striking new stamps celebrate the genius of their imaginations.”

Royal Mail worked with the award-winning biographer, Jonathan Bate, on the stamp issue. The images are lino-cut illustrations by the artist, Linda Farquharson.

The full range of stamps, and other collectible products are available now at www.royalmail.com/romanticpoets and by phone on 03457 641 641.

The full set of 10 stamps, available in a Presentation Pack, retails at £8.50.