The Penny Black Changed the World
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In June 2005 the BPMA received a £47,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for the digitisation and outreach project The Penny Black Changed the World.
The HLF grant means that the world-renowned Reginald M Phillips Collection of Victorian philately is now digitised and available online (from September 2006).
The Phillips Collection tells the story of the development of the postage stamp in the 19th century. The full catalogue to the collection is also available online as archive class POST 141, and links to the digitised album pages.
Alongside the digitisation work, we produced an education resource pack for teaching Victorian History at Key Stage 2. Ideas from this pack were used in art and history outreach workshops involving more than 400 pupils in the summer term of 2006.
Rhiannon Looseley was the Project Officer and Natasha Ludlam was the Project Outreach Officer. For more information about how the project was carried out, please see our project report.
Background to the project
In an age when we can communicate at the push of a button, it can be hard to imagine that using a pre-paid label to stick on a letter was once such an incredible idea. Yet telephones, text messages, and email all owe a debt to the power of the first postage stamp - the Penny Black - and to the postal reforms which inspired mass communication.
Rowland Hill's Big Idea
The stamp seems such a simple notion, and yet it wasn’t until the late 1830s that social reformer Rowland Hill suggested "a bit of paper just large enough just large enough to bear the stamp, and covered at the back with a glutinous wash".
Hill matched this with the radical principle that a standard letter could be sent anywhere in Britain for one penny, opening up the world of letters and literacy to millions of people. We decided to call this project The Penny Black Changed the World because, quite simply, it did.
The Phillips Collection charts the development of this big idea, from design to different experiments with production, and from the iconic Penny Black to the 'Jubilee' issue of 1887. It contains rare examples of original stamps, experiments with paper and ink and documents on postal history.
Preserving the past for the future
The fragile nature of the Phillips Collection means that it has previously only been accessible to the public by appointment, and with one-to-one supervision. Digitising this national treasure means it is now open to an international audience through this website, at an image resolution of 96 dots per inch (dpi).
Visitors to our Search Room can use even higher resolution images than we can make available through the internet: an impressive 250dpi. This will minimise the use of the original material, ensuring its long-term preservation.
Stamps into schools
We want to help teachers to look beyond the conventional in finding sources for the learning & understanding of history, and the Penny Black education pack offers a fresh new slant on the important ‘Victorian Britain’ part of the Key Stage 2 curriculum.
