How did you come to be involved in the stamp world?

I was a stamp collector, quite simply; I was a stamp collector from when I was a small boy. I then had a job in trade journalism, in stamp magazines. I became editor of two of them, then moved into the Museum, as it then was. Stamps have been my hobby, and they’re now my work. (It ruins the hobby, but it’s very good for the work…)

Tell me about your job at the BPMA.

I take care of the Royal Mail stamp collection. It’s not just stamps, essentially it’s all the stamps and all the other things to do with the production of stamps and the design of stamps, from the Penny Black to the present day – and into the future, for that matter. So we have all the artwork, we have all the unadopted artwork for stamps, we have sheets of every stamp ever produced, including the Penny Black – eight sheets of the Penny Black – we get sheets of everything that comes out; and then a whole series of stamp products, such as postal stationery, envelopes, postcards, registered envelopes, things like that. And we are here to keep them, preserve them, catalogue them, and make them available to anyone who’s interested.

There’s a research element to the job, too…

There is a considerable research element. If you’re producing any exhibition, you need to be able to understand the content of the collections; similarly, when you catalogue you have to catalogue accurately – so certainly part of my job when it comes to exhibitions is to research in the files (which we also have here) and find out precisely what the items are and describe them appropriately.

And because you’re officially attached to the Royal Mail, your collection grows.

As stamps keep on coming out, it definitely grows. Equally, of course, we look at aspects of the Royal Mail, how letters are transported, how they’re sorted, how they’re delivered, and we have a collection of things to illustrate that – such as letters from 1600 through to the present day, with all the various sorts of markings on them. So the collection will always expand, it will never actually contract.

Tell us about your current exhibition.

The exhibition we have at the moment is Elizabeth: Queen And Icon. This is to celebrate the 80th birthday of the Queen, and began on the day when the Royal Mail stamps came out, which was the 18th of April.

The exhibition is divided into three sections. It shows the Queen as a person, both before she came to the throne and after; it then shows her as an icon of Britain; and thirdly it tells the story of how the actual 80th birthday stamps were created, and what designs were proposed.

What one must remember is that British stamps are unique in the world inasmuch as they don’t have a country name on them – there’s just the monarch’s head, and that’s always been the case since the Penny Black. In theory every country in the world has stamps with their name on it. But tacitly it’s been agreed that Britain doesn’t have to, and therefore the monarch represents Britain. What this has meant, of course, is that monarchs tend to become icons in themselves, and their images represent the country around the world.

Which brings us to the Machin. It’s unique in many ways – how did it come about?

The Machin portrait resulted from the attempt by Tony Benn, who was a Republican, to get the Queen’s head off stamps. It seems rather ironic…

In the middle of the 1960s, there were a number of stamp designers who found it difficult to use the older portrait of the Queen when she was a young woman by Dorothy Wilding. The reason for this was that it was a three-quarters profile, and didn’t fit in very nicely to the number of stamp issues that were then coming out. So what they wanted was a true profile, and through a period of a year and a half Tony Benn and David Gentleman in particular attempted to either get the Queen’s head off stamps or to replace it with a silhouette portrait – which they did. At the same time they wanted to replace the Wilding portrait in its entirety, and so what they did was they had a competition, with various artists, including Arnold Machin, to find a new portrait.

Machin spent just over a year working on it – he had previously designed the decimal coinage, although the coins hadn’t come out at that point, so he was used to working on a portrait of the Queen and in sculpture. He created a plaster-cast of the Queen based on photographs by Lord Snowdon, and then proceeded to simplify it, refine it down, make it simpler and simpler – the idea being to hark back to the classic simplicity of the Penny Black. And eventually after various changes – such as the diadem replacing the tiara, based on photographs by John Hedgecoe – he got it to its very simple, very classic icon type. However, at the time that he’d done that, it was what’s called "couped" – in other words, it was cut off at the neck. When this was shown to the Queen she didn’t like the idea of being cut off at the neck, and what she said was that she would prefer a corsage – that is a dress neckline – so Arnold Machin went back and re-did his plaster-cast almost overnight, and suddenly you have the image that everyone knows today. It is timeless, it is classic – you can look at it in 2006 and think that’s it’s relevant and of today, contemporary – you never ever think that it was made in 1966.

Is its simplicity the reason for its success?

Things that appear simple aren’t normally simple - and it isn’t simple. But it appears to be. The same with the Penny Black – it appears to be simple, in fact it’s very complex. But there is an absolute classic feel to it, totally timeless. It’s a symbol of the monarchy and symbol of Britain, rather than a portrait of any particular period. I think that’s why it’s lasted.