British Cancel Markings - Or Coding?

Hi,

we had a discussion in a German forum and there were 2 different answers to my question.

I checked my British kiloware recently and found a lot of stamps with interesting "dots" on them - a round and a square silver dot (size about 2 mm or less than 1/10" each). These markings are clearly printed on - what makes them different from the regular cancels is that they are silverish-grey, not black.

The 2 answers I got were basically:

- they are codes, consisting of more than those 2 dots (although I can't remember seeing more than 2 on the kiloware I have), encoding British zip codes and so on

- they are (additional) cancels

The second answer seems to make more sense to me, as there is another British code for zip codes (RM4SCC) which looks somewhat similar to the US code.

Please tell me what those two dots are for and preferrably what they are correctly called, so I can find some more info about them. (If you can post a web link, even better).

Thank you very much in advance,

George

P.S.: I can't upload any images here, apparently. This is probably due to the space in my user name. Thus I included an external link, hope it works correctly.

I got a good answer in the other - German - forum, now. Those dots are "blue phosphor dots" - the Brits used them for a while to sort their mail automatically. An interesting thread in a British forum can be found here, where part of this is discussed:

http://www.stampboards.com/viewtopi...12&start=100

Some info can be found here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A12338615

I just wanted to share this with you all, as someone might find it interesting. (I had a really hard time finding info as I would never have guessed that the dots are called "blue" - to me they are clearly silver or grey.)

Here is a link to an earlier discussion on this matter on this forum:

https://goscf.com/t/10141&SearchTer...,silver,dots

I have also shown a link to Adminware.ca where these silver dots are discussed in item #6.

http://adminware.ca/machin/m_faq.htm

Thank you very much, mhc99. Great links. The site adminware.ca is a treasure trove. Very interesting read. Machins got more interesting after reading some there.

One of the most interesting forum postings I found through your links was here:

http://www.stampboards.com/viewtopi...hosphor+dots

Check the first 2 posts from "footysphere" for some very interesting background info - he was a postal worker at the time.

Sadly, there just isn't enough time to get involved with everything I find interesting. I started to check my "Notopfer" stamps (Germany, right after the war) which are probably good enough to eat up half a lifetime, then I also find "Bauten 1948" from the same period and location interesting. I probably can't do Machins as well, simply because my life will be too short ...