1946 Victory Issue Using UK Parliament Design

Thanks for the link Huckles888. As readers of my blog will know I'm really a beginner collector, but nevertheless it's nice to know my blog is useful to other philatelists.

Aside from the fascinating story behind the design of the Hong Kong issues, I really like the multitude of information in them - especially the lucky bats!

hi wt1

looking at your list.......delete Cook Islands (they used the New Zealand design) and add British Virgin Islands and Falkland Islands Dependencies and you get the 41 countries !

I am not sure if Malayan Union is considered one of the issued country. the stamps (8c and 10c) were printed but not issued due to the political situation at that time. All the printed stamps been sent to burn but few sheets of 8c red managed to survive. some examples selling today still come with burn mark.

I seem to have come to this posting several years late!

Towards the end of World War II the decision was taken to issue a set of commemorative stamps.

For Great Britain, two stamps were issued on 11th June 1946.

The Crown Agents in London organised the design, production and distribution of two stamps to be issued across British Colonies & Dependencies. These stamps - known as "a-typicals" - featured the Houses of Parliament as a background with the head of King George in the foreground. Stamps showed the name of the relevant colony/dependency.

In total, 40 countries issued these stamps on a variety of dates in 1945/1946 and 1947.

My understanding is that the Crown Agents were effectively the Postal Administration in colonies/dependencies.

Other parts of the Commonwealth which were not colonies - eg Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand etc - had their own postal administrations but they also issued commemorative stamps of their own design, resulting in a total of 62 countries. These were often referred to as the Peace issues rather than the Victory issue.

The a-typical sets are known as the Victory Omnibus set with the wider set known as the Peace and Reconciliation issues.

In case it's of interest I have an Excel file for the list of countries that issued the Victory (or equivalent) set along with date of issue information

Anyone know why the issue dates of the typical set varied so much? (other than for post-war logistics)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1M...BTxYrvq5RMVt

And in case like me you were wondering where some of these countries were in 1945/46 the map might help

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briti...h_Empire.png