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| Coronation Celebration |
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ABOVE: The back and front of a Festival of Empire postcard addressed to Geelong, Australia. The card bears no postage stamp, but has boxed 'PAQUEBOT' cancellation (probably from Sarawak) |
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With this being the Jubilee Year, we thought a look at another Coronation would be interesting. One of the greatest Coronations was that of King George V, the stamp-collecting King, and Queen Mary. As a cele-bration of the Coronation, a spe-cial exhibition was held at Crystal Palace called the 'Festival of Empire'. Two stamps were pro-duced by Perkins Bacon & Co. Ltd., London. They depict Britannia holding a trident in her left hand and a 'horn of plenty' in her right hand. Her shield carries the Union Jack and she is standing in a boat that has a lion's head on its prow. There are five unusual looking children at her feet, hold-ing a garland of laurels draped around the boat. The stamps were issued in either red or blue.
The Crystal Palace was original-ly designed by Sir Joseph Paxton as the building to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, in Hyde Park. After the Great Exhibition closed, it was purchased by a private company, and moved to a 200 acre park at Sydenham Hill in South London. It was reconstruct-ed into what was effectively a Victorian theme park. It was one-and-a-half times as big as the original. To get an idea of the size, one of the two basins used for the water fountains now holds the National Sports Arena Stadium! The cost of erection was ^1.5 mil-lion - a huge sum in 1854.
In 1911 the Crystal Palace housed the 'Festival of Empire' exhibition. This consisted of three-quarter size models of the
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ABOVE: The red and blue Festival of Empire stamps
produced by Perkins, Bacon & Co., Ltd., London |
parliament buildings of Empire and Commonwealth countries, each containing exhibits of that country's products. There was a life-size replica of a South African diamond mine, an Indian tea plantation, and a Canadian log-ging camp. It even had a minia-ture railway to take visitors around the show. The climax of the exhi-bition was a 'Pageant of London' in which the great events in British history were enacted in front of 40,000 schoolchildren. |
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| Who sold the stamps? |
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| Returning to the two stamps issued for the exhibition, so far we haven't been able to find in the Perkins Bacon Day Books the orig-inal order to establish who sold the stamps. There is no mention of them in contemporary philatel-ic literature - thus, we would sug-gest that they were ordered by Crystal Palace and used for pub-licity purposes, as well as being sold as souvenirs. Certainly, there was no stamp exhibition within the Festival of Empire. The stamps are not that common to find and we would suggest that not that many were printed. |
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