Rerun in honor of the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
Twenty five years on the Throne is quite a milestone, one that many Monarchs don’t make. George V’s Silver Jubilee spawned a blizzard of interesting stamps. With no Empire, Queen Elizabeth II couldn’t match that. but that doesn’t mean that the motoring industry couldn’t come up with a special gift to the Queen. One that breathed new life into a storied old model, the hand assembled Phantom VI, and allowed it to be continued to be made for another 14 years. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
The 1977 stamp showed a timeless Queen in profile, similar to but not the same as the Manchin image so familiar in British stamps. For the Golden Jubilee in 2002 the stamp set showed Elizabeth’s full face at different stages of life. Royals should have some mystery, so I vote for the Silver Jubilee style. In case you are wondering, a 75 year Jubilee would be called platinum, even though that is usually 70 year anniversary. A cartoon king made it 75 years and they called it the Palladium Jubilee.
Todays stamp is issue A276, a 10p stamp issued by Great Britain on May 11th, 1977. It was a five stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents whether mint or used.
The Rolls Royce Phantom was a line of very large and heavy limousines that were made by hand at a separate facility under the companies Mulliner Park Ward division. Regular Rolls Royces of the day, the Silver Shadows, had their bodies built on an assembly line by British Leyland subsidiary Pressed Steel at a separate site, only shipping them to the Crewe factory for painting and fitting engines and interiors. This was less special and closely resembled how MGBs were built. The one issue was the limousines were based on much older separate frame models and so the cars were more 1950s cars than 1970s cars. The annual sales of Phantoms had fallen to only a few dozen a year and the price had to rise very fast to keep the operation profitable, but with the similarly made Corniche coupe production winding down, the model, and with it the whole idea of coach built cars did not have a bright future.
The British Motoring Industry decided to make a gift to the Queen a Phantom VI that would go far to bringing the Phantom up to date. The car would finally get the larger 6.75 liter V8 and the more modern model GM made THM400 automatic transmission. The brakes were finally given modern hydolic power assist, though they still drums on all four wheels. Inside the car now had two air conditioners for both front and rear compartments and there was central power locking.
The Queen got a few specials just for hers. The seats were done in cloth instead of the usual leather and the padding of the seats differed from side to side to reflect the different weights of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip. There was a dictation machine built into the rear center armrest. The car received a special two tone paint treatment in Black and Royal Red Claret. The roofline was higher using again the Canberra Roof with larger plexiglass windows for use in processions. The special roof was only ever used on three cars the first used on a Royal visit to Australia, hence the Canberra name. The Queen’s model weighed 6800 pounds.
The rampant strikes of the era meant the car was not actually delivered until 1978 and is still in use. The improvements in the Phantom VI allowed it to stay in production until 1992. The price in America was had gone from $17,600 in 1959 to $1,000,000 for the last one in 1992. The new 90s style Bentley coupes and convertibles had Pressed Steel bodies, so coach making by hand was no longer on the agenda. As the 1990s went along, what had been British Leyland was owned by Honda of Japan and they closed the Pressed Steel division. Rolls Royce had to suddenly spend heavily on an assembly line to build their own car bodies. The expense contributed to the 1998 sale of Bentley to Volkswagen and Rolls Royce to BMW. Now the cars are built off platforms of their parent company, The BMW 7 series for Rolls and the VW Phaeton for Bentley.
Well my drink is empty. Come again soon for another story to be learned from stamp collecting.