RPSL 4th June 2024: Numeral Cancels by Simon Richards FRPSL

Live via Zoom on 4th June 2024, an international audience of 70 members and guests of the Royal Philatelic Society London from 12 countries were treated to a presentation about numeral cancels by the Society's Senior Vice President Simon Richards FRPSL.

Adhesive postage stamps were not the only postal service innovation that Great Britain gave the world. The system of numeral cancellations, effectively using a numeric code to identify the office where an item was posted, was introduced in Britain in 1844. As the advantages of using adhesive labels to denote prepayment became apparent to other administrations in the late 1840s and early 1850s they decided to adopt the postage stamp themselves, often copying the coded numeral cancel system. Some of the designs are quite fancy and attractive and add considerable interest to these early stamps.

In his presentation, Simon examined how the system was taken up across Europe and the British Empire. The very success of the postage stamp and the lower uniform rates of postage dramatically increased the amount of correspondence going through the post, and educational reforms led to higher levels of literacy further increasing demand for the service. In most countries there was an associated rapid increase in the number of offices and this posed challenges to the coded system, which are examined. Simon also looked at how numeral cancels can be collected and exhibited.