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Great Britain's Queen Mother: A Life On Stamps

Royal Mail is commemorating and honoring the life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who passed away peacefully in her sleep on March 30, with a set of four commemorative stamps.

The stamps were to have been issued on April 25, just 16 days after her funeral was held in Westminster Abbey.

The four stamp designs, featuring portraits from different eras of the Queen Mother’s long life, were originally issued in 1990 to celebrate her 90th birthday.

They have been reissued as mourning stamps — some of the few to have been released in recent decades — framed in black as a mark of respect and inscribed “HM QUEEN ELIZABETH / THE QUEEN MOTHER / 1900-2002” with the silhouette of Queen Elizabeth’s head also in black, and a crown centered in the black frame at the top of the printed design.

Figure 1 shows two of the four stamps — a 65-penny stamp depicting Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon at the age of six and a non-denominated “E” (European rate) stamp depicting her as Queen Consort to King George VI after 1937.

The other two mourning stamps are a non-denominated “1st” domestic letter-rate stamp showing a late 20th-century portrait of the Queen Mother “wearing one of her trade-mark hats” as Royal Mail put it, and a 45p stamp picturing her as the Duchess of York, her formal title after her marriage to the Duke of York in 1923.

Gavin Macrae, the managing director of Royal Mail stamps, said “We believe these classic portraits of the Queen Mother’s life form a fitting tribute and one that people can keep or give to friends or relations.” A first-day cover with the set of four, postmarked at St. James’s Palace, will be available in the United Kingdom until May 23.

This mourning set is just the final page in a lifelong album — a 70-year series of stamps picturing the Queen Mother.

That album begins as far back as 1932. It was in that year that Newfoundland — then the oldest colony in the British Empire, some 17 years before it was to join Canada as the final province in that nation — released a 7¢ stamp depicting the then Duchess of York as part of its pictorial definitive series.

The Queen Mother was most frequently pictured in omnibus issues put out by nations throughout the British Commonwealth over her long life. These began with the omnibus issue for the coronation of King George VI in 1937, two stamps from which are shown at the top of Figure 4.

They also included issues for the royal couple’s Silver Wedding anniversary in 1948-49, and issues on her 80th, 85th, 90th and 100th birthdays, as well as a Queen Mother’s Century series in 1999.

A substantially complete chronicle has ben published in The Queen Mother's Century Celebrated in Stamps by Peter Jennings and Tim Graham, published by Sahara Publications Ltd. of London.