Please Help Me Know What Plate Number Our Penny Red Is?

Hi, could you help us please. What plate number is our penny red and what does the B O stand for? How much would you value this as?

New to stamp collecting and learning.
Regards

Can't be sure, given the quality of the picture, but looks like 101. You should be able to see it yourself in both sides of the design framing the Queen's head. The stamps were produced in large sheets with letters in all four corners, from A-A onwards. They have no significance beyond that. These stamps were produced in great quantities and, with a few notable exceptions, are worth pennies.

I agree, plate 101

Hi there.

Thanks so much for helping, really appreciate it. What would you say it is worth?

The perforations on the bottom looked trimmed. Unless somebody wanted it for a plate reconstruction it won't be worth very much at all. A sound example is worth £11 in the current SG QV specialised catalogue, but in reality you'd pay much less than that.

As I said above, pennies. This isn't a stamp worth selling separately - you find them in most old stamp albums, and auctions often have groups of hundreds, which will attract those working on the plate reconstructions that Bobby mentions.

Here is a picture of a similar stamp that shows the position of the plate number in the white boxes. Yours certainly is 10*. I think 101 is correct, but your picture is not clear enough to be sure.



A sheet was made up of 240 stamps in 20 rows of 12 stamps (a shilling a row, twenty shillings making a pound). The letters in the bottom corners identify the position (AA, AB, ..., AL, ..., TA, ..., TL). So, yours is not 'BO' but 'OB.' The 'O' at left is the 15th row. The 'B' at right is the second column. Your stamp is from r 15 / c 2.

The Post Office thought that giving each stamp a different combination of letters would make life difficult for forgers. The public would recognise multiples with the same letters as forgeries. At first, only the bottom corners had letters. Then the Post Office got worried people would use the bottom part that had not been obliterated of one used stamp with the top that had not been obliterated of any other used stamp. To make that more difficult, they added the letters in reverse order to the top corners.

Hi,

Thanks so much for your advice and also, NSK that's super interesting how the letters on stamps came about. Thanks for that.

I've taken the opportunity to post zoomed in photos of the stamp of the numbers. I think perhaps it's 109? It's odd because the first and third digits have a little line through the centre, perhaps 7's? However. I cam see the 0 clearly.in the centre. What do you think?

Here's a plate 104 for comparison.



Yours has a horizontal line which can throw you off. These stamps can sometimes be rather tricky

The first stamp I scanned turned out to be a plate 164!

Thank you Bobby, yes I can see the comparison now.