Great Britain 1882 GBP 5 Orange Queen Victoria

A telegraph stamp that changed jobs

The £5 orange began as a telegraph stamp. Britain introduced telegraph stamps on February 1, 1876, with a top value of 5 shillings, but some overseas telegrams could cost more than £5 and there was not enough room on the forms for that many 5-shilling stamps. Six new values, including £5, were approved on March 24, 1876. De La Rue made a die from the final essay, and ten different die proofs survive, dated between November 8 and 17, 1876.

The color took longer to settle. Trials were printed in gold, grey-green, slate-blue, dull claret, dull mauve, brown-lilac and pale ultramarine. Gold seemed fitting, and one sheet was printed with real gold, but it would have cost 4 to 6 pence a stamp. Pale ultramarine was chosen next, until officials realized it could be confused with the £5 Probate Court stamp in the dim gaslight of the day. The stamp was printed in orange, which the printers called vermilion, although no trial was ever made in that color.

The £5 Telegraphs plate was registered on January 17, 1877, and the stamp was issued on March 1, 1877. Only 1,500 sheets were printed before telegraph stamps were withdrawn on October 31, 1881, when ordinary postage stamps took over the job. That left Britain without a £5 stamp.

From TELEGRAPHS to POSTAGE

The Inland Revenue Act of 1881 reorganized the collection of duties and let postage stamps be used to pay them, so a high-value postage stamp was suddenly needed. Rather than design a new one, the Post Office adapted the telegraph stamp. All the marginal markings and the word TELEGRAPHS were removed from the plate, which was split into two panes of 28 stamps with a stamp-sized gutter between them.

The sheets were then printed again from a second, simple plate that filled the blank space with the word POSTAGE flanked by key patterns. In the words of the leading student of the stamp, it was Britain's first two-color printing, albeit in orange and orange. The new £5 postage stamp was first used on March 21, 1882, and examples are known with cancels as late as 1902.

Its face value was enormous. One dealer equates £5 then to nearly £600 today; another source describes it as roughly a month's average salary in the 1880s. Very few parcels or letters ever needed one. Most £5 oranges were stuck on accounting dockets and duty paperwork that were meant to be destroyed once they had served their purpose.

Blued paper, white paper

There were seven printings, totaling 248,472 stamps. The first two were on blued paper, colored by the potash in it, so any £5 orange dated before the third printing of 1889 must be on blued paper. Later printings were on white paper. Catalogs list the two separately: SG 133 for blued paper and SG 137 for white, the version this page covers.

Telling them apart is not always easy. The bluing varies from obvious to almost invisible, and the white-paper stamps tend to be a brighter orange than the dull salmon shade always found on blued paper. A 2015 study for the Royal Philatelic Society London found that scanning the stamp's mostly white value tablets, away from the surrounding orange, separates blued from white paper reliably, where ultraviolet light and color measurement do not. Early printings also tend to show a deeper impression of the word POSTAGE.

The study's author, Dr. John Horsey, gathered more than 5,500 auction and dealer images, which he reduced to about 3,500 unique stamps, and recorded each one's corner letters, cancellations and dates. His 312-page book on the stamp analyzed 3,534 examples, a number he calculated to be nearly half of all £5 oranges still in existence.

How used copies escaped, and two frauds

Because the stamps were used on internal paperwork destined for security waste, almost every used £5 orange in a collection today was 'liberated' from scrap that should have been destroyed. Dealers of the time may well have paid a few shillings to people with access to old dockets.

The research turned up fraud. One stamp bears the cancel of the Accountant's Office dated January 15, 1892, and the faint trace of an Edinburgh Exchequer violet oval dated November 21, 1891, which someone had tried to bleach out. The explanation offered is that a clerk took a cancelled stamp home from scrap, cleaned it, used it on a docket and pocketed a new £5 stamp, making a month's wages in a day. A second example from the same day later surfaced.

In another case, several stamps carry a genuine London Chief Office registered oval of December 9, 1899, struck heavily over the word SPECIMEN, which had been printed on stamps meant only as samples. Image comparison showed the cancels were real, so the fraud was a clerk using worthless specimens instead of new stamps from his stock. It took 113 years to uncover.

What collectors pay

Dealers call the £5 orange one of the most coveted stamps of British philately and a sad gap in most albums. As a basic stamp it is not scarce, but demand keeps it expensive, and cancellation, centering and paper all move the price.

At a British auction on October 31, 2018, a well-centered, fine used example with a Manchester cancel dated June 12, 1893, sold for a hammer price of £1,500. At auction in the United States in March 2023, a perfectly centered example lettered A-J with a Preston date stamp of March 15, 1902, realized $3,000, and an example lettered C-J with a London registered oval of July 19, 1899, and small flaws realized $850. A copy from the same sale with an 1885 cancel, which by date must be on blued paper, realized $1,500.

Unused examples cost much more. A never-hinged white-paper example lettered A-F sold for $20,000 at auction in New York on November 8, 2012, and the mint blued-paper stamp, with more than 100 examples recorded, has been catalogued at £70,000. Used white-paper copies offered by one dealer were priced at £4,000 and £4,500.

The numbers

Catalog number

SG 137 (white paper); SG 133 is the blued-paper version

First use

March 21, 1882

Quantity printed

248,472 in seven printings (all papers)

Paper

White paper from the third printing of 1889; first two printings on blued paper

Watermark

Anchor

Perforation

14

Plate

Plate 1, two panes of 28 (56 stamps a sheet), from the converted £5 Telegraphs plate

Printing

De La Rue, surface-printed; POSTAGE added from a second plate

Survivors

A study of 3,534 was calculated to be nearly half of those in existence

Timeline

1. Feb 1, 1876

   Britain introduces telegraph stamps, with 5 shillings the top value.

2. Mar 24, 1876

   Six new telegraph values, including £5, are approved.

3. Nov 1876

   De La Rue pulls ten die proofs of the £5 between November 8 and 17.

4. Jan 17, 1877

   The £5 Telegraphs plate is registered.

5. Mar 1, 1877

   The £5 Telegraphs stamp is issued in orange.

6. Oct 30, 1877

   Earliest recorded use of the £5 Telegraphs, at Birmingham.

7. Oct 31, 1881

   Telegraph stamps are withdrawn, leaving no £5 value.

8. 1881

   The Inland Revenue Act lets postage stamps pay duties.

9. Mar 21, 1882

   The £5 postage stamp is first used.

10. 1889

    The third printing begins the white-paper stamps.

11. Jan 15, 1892

    A clerk uses a bleached, previously cancelled £5 on an accounting docket.

12. Dec 9, 1899

    London Chief Office cancels are struck over specimen stamps in a second fraud.

13. Nov 8, 2012

    A never-hinged example sells for $20,000 at auction in New York.

14. Oct 1, 2015

    Dr. John Horsey presents his £5 orange research to the Royal Philatelic Society London.

15. Oct 31, 2018

    A used example with a Manchester cancel sells for £1,500 hammer in Britain.

16. Mar 2023

    A used Preston-cancelled example realizes $3,000 at a U.S. auction.

The world in 1882

• Jan 12, 1882

  London's Holborn Viaduct power station opens, the world's first coal-fired public power station.

• Feb 3, 1882

  P.T. Barnum buys the elephant Jumbo from London Zoo.

• Apr 3, 1882

  Jesse James is shot dead by Robert Ford in Missouri.

• May 6, 1882

  The Phoenix Park murders take place in Dublin.

• Aug 18, 1882

  The Married Women's Property Act 1882 receives royal assent.

• Aug 29, 1882

  Australia beats England at The Oval, the match behind The Ashes.

• Sep 4, 1882

  Edison's first U.S. commercial power plant lights lower Manhattan.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Great Britain 1882 GBP 5 Orange Queen Victoria is number 76 of 100 in the stamps entries of the FLOAT 100. 82 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (84 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• The £5 was nearly printed in real gold, until it worked out at 4 to 6 pence a stamp.
• It was meant to be blue, but officials feared it would be confused with the £5 Probate Court stamp in gaslight.
• Almost every used £5 orange was rescued from paperwork that should have been destroyed.
• One Victorian clerk recycled cancelled £5 stamps and pocketed new ones, a fraud uncovered more than a century later.
• Its leading student examined more than 5,500 images and wrote a 312-page book about what is basically two stamps.