De La Rue are still with us today, and is one of the world's leading security and banknote printers.
Their history goes back a long way.
But not quiet to the dawn of the philatelic age.
The company existed - and was successful - in 1840, but as you can read here, the first contracts to print stamps went to Perkins & Bacon.
De La Rue would have to wait, but when they did get the job they pioneered some exciting innovations in stamp printing.
Thomas de la Rue is still celebrated in his Channel Islands birthplace. Image: Unukorno, at Wikimedia Commons.
A short history of De La Rue printers in the Victorian age
De La Rue the first was Thomas de la Rue, a Guernsey-born man of relatively humble origins (born 1793), who created a dynastic business with a global reach.
Thomas’s was not rich (and had 11 children to support), and he was working as an apprentice printer as early as 1802, when he was just 9.
He obviously had some aptitude, and, in partnership with a Tom Greenslade, set up a weekly newspaper.
Making something of a success of his Miroir Politique, by 1815 Thomas was able to move to London, where he first set up as a hat maker.
Making paper bonnets returned Thomas to the materials of his first passion.
He was soon partnered with two others - Samuel Cornish and William Rock - to move into other areas, becoming, "cardmakers, hot pressers and enamellers", with Thomas able to concentrate on his printing work.
In 1829 he took the financially disastrous but canny decision to print 25 copies of the New Testament in gold powder.
One copy was given to new king William IV, and only one other was sold (to Lord Spencer of Althorp) for the enormous fee of £15.
But, the gesture showed De La Rue were seriously skilled printers.
In 1831 they were the first company to print playing cards, with a Royal Warrant allowing them to do so.
They set up shop in Bunhill Row and continued to grow, bringing in new investors, and becoming an internationally important playing card and envelope printer by the 1840s.
De La Rue playing cards are now a valuable collectible in their own right. This set is from around 1880.
One of Thomas’s new partners, called Warren, was friendly with Edwin Hill, brother of Sir Rowland Hill, the driving force of the Post Office reforms that produced the first self-adhesive stamps.
It was a useful friendship. Ahead of the game as the world went letter mad, De La Rue set off to the burgeoning circuit of industrial exhibitions to sell their wares.
As industrial revolutions swept around the world De La Rue were at Crystal Palace in 1851, 1853’s New York Exhibition and the 1855 Paris Exhibition proving to customers that they were the best, as well as the biggest, envelope printers in the world.
So impressed were the French, they awarded Thomas a Chevalier d’Honneur.
From 1853 De La Rue were printing stamps.
First Revenue stamps, then postage stamps, which they produced exclusively from 1855 until 1910.
An impressed revenue stamp of the type De La Rue replaced. They looked good, but were cumbersome to use.
As Britain secured, ruled, and profited from one of history’s largest empires, De La Rue stamps were often part of the package.
Thomas passed away in 1866, after passing control of the company to his sons in 1858.
They continued to produce postage stamps for the Crown and its colonies until beyond the end of the Victorian era, and have done so much more recently too.
De La Rue stamps
De La Rue’s period as Great Britain’s postal printer opens with an innovation.
Surface printed stamps.
The company started out producing revenue stamps.
Revenue stamps - which are still in use - act as a receipt for tax or duty paid on an item.
The first examples were hand stamped onto papers.
And as the postal revolution got underway, so adhesive stamps were adopted for revenue payments.
First, the impressed duty stamps (as hand stamps were called) were embossed ready to go onto sheets of gummed paper.
Then, from 1855, the switch was formalised and revenue stamps became very similar to postage stamps.
De La Rue had printed the first revenue stamps a couple of years earlier.
Collectors and experts consider De La Rue’s surface-printed designs the first “true” adhesive revenue stamps.
What are surface printed stamps?
A surface printing press busy producing some of the huge amount of wallpaper Victorians wanted for their homes.
Surface printing refers to the origin of the image transferred to the print medium (stamp paper in our case).
The first stamps were printed with intaglio or line-engraved plates.
Ink was forced into indentations in the plate and then transferred to paper.
Then, a short-lived experiment (designed to enhance security against forgery) used embossed printing.
This was slow and expensive.
Surface printing was also known as typographical or letterpress printing.
It was first used in the wallpaper industry (another great Victorian boom business).
Letterpress uses relief plates.
The design is transferred to the final medium via raised areas on a plate.
By using multiple plates making different passes over the paper, multiple colours can be brought into play.
Generally, it is a less precise method than engraved, intaglio plates.
However, it is cheaper. In fact, Henry Cole, (an inventor and businessman who was intimately involved in the early postal revolution), suggested that £10,000 would be saved by using De La Rue.
And, for postal authorities concerned about forgery, the De La Rue process came with their “fugitive inks”.
These inks would wash away if an attempt was made to clean a cancellation from a stamp.
De La Rue’s process would also answer one of the first great design failures of the postage stamp: perforations.
Stamps were sent out on sheets of 240, but there was no simple way of separating them. Staff in post offices had to take up a pair of scissors and cut off the number of stamps needed. Collectors of early Victorian stamps know to their cost that this time-consuming, cumbersome task was completed with a wide degree of skill.
Dampened paper was used to print stamps from engraved, intaglio plates. This was no good for the new perforating machines (the first attempts used cuts rather than holes in a process called rouletting) that were being developed.
There were no such problems with the letterpress printing.
The first surface printed stamps
De La Rue produced a high-quality product. You can buy this example by clicking on the image.
Another argument in De La Rue’s favour was aesthetic.
Their designs were attractive and popular.
The De La Rue story can’t be told without the enormous success of their show at the 1851 Great Exhibition, of which, not coincidentally, Henry Cole was one of the great organisers.
People flocked to their work.
The 4d Carmine or Fourpenny Carmine was their first surface printed postage stamp.
It was engraved by Jean Ferdinand Joubert de la Ferte, called “the last of the great
French line engravers”.
He went by the single name Joubert and was a remarkable artist.
It’s his portrait of Victoria you see on higher-value stamps from 1855 to 1880.
A 6d and a 1 shilling stamp soon joined their range.
In response to official requests Joubert had to add corner letters from 1862, and increase them in size from 1865,. With plate numbers - an act called “an aesthetic disaster” by one Victorian specialist.
Perkins & Bacon continued to produce lower value stamps until 1880.
But de La Rue had their foot in the door, and won considerable business in British territories overseas and in other nations with their work. (This includes a somewhat shameful offer to provide stamps for the Confederate States in the United States Civil War.)
As they tried to set up a state, the Confederate States needed the trappings of nationhood and the machinery of government. De La Rue sold them stamps.
Late Victorian innovations
In 1881, De La Rue started to produce dual Postage and Revenue stamps.
From 1872 they introduced the “key type”.
This adaptable design produced a portrait of Victoria, leaving a blank space at the bottom to allow the stamp’s purpose to be overprinted.
De La Rue's success made them global players in printing. This GB example shows their work at its best.
Global success
De La Rue printed some of the best known stamps of the most powerful imperial power of their age.
They went on to work on banknotes.
And were employed around the world.
A recent newspaper profile of the company, still going, described them as “the most important printers in the world”.
The company has had some ups and downs - decreases in quality, factories razed by World War II boms - but has never really looked back from that initial success.
Buy Victorian GB surface printed stamps now
Among our world-leading collections of stamps are many wonderful examples of De La Rue’s surface-printed works.
You can find some here.
But, if you want more information like this, and you’d like to know when we get new items in stock you need to sign up for our newsletter here.
