'Fraudulent reuse of the Penny Blacks and the Rainbow Trials'.

The Penny Black was a tremendous success with a printing of 68,158,080 stamps !!! yes over sixty eight million Penny Blacks were printed!!, so it is not quite as rare as you might think ......the survival rate is unknown. At this time the Inland Revenue were responsible for stamp production although the stamps were printed by Perkins Bacon. The Inland Revenue from day one were obsessed with loss of income from people reusing the stamps. Were their concerns justified? No not really although there is a record of a Penny Black being reused on the first day of issue, May 6th 1840, reused on a letter from Manchester to the Editor of 'The Times' newspaper. I have been dealing, collecting and observing GB stamps for 40 years and in all that time I do not think I have seen 20 fraudulent reuses of the Penny Black. Anyway the Inland Revenue were concerned enough to change the colour of the stamp from black to red in February 1841 and alter the colour of the cancellation from red to black to reduce such fraud. In this video I look at this story.