By lunchtime tomorrow Royal Mail will have produced and have on sale in Post Offices a Gold Medal stamp to celebrate Helen Glover and Heather Stanning’s gold medal win in the Women’s Pairs rowing final.
A fleet of 90 Royal Mail vehicles will deliver the stamps across the UK to over 500 Post Offices including in Helen’s home town of Penzance and Reading, Berkshire where the pair live. Royal Mail will also paint a much-loved red post box gold in each of their hometowns of Lossiemouth, Moray and Penzance, Cornwall to celebrate their gold medal win.
As well as Helen and Heather’s achievement a fantastic first as never before has a women’s team won an Olympic rowing event, but it’s also the first all-women sports team ever to appear on a Royal Mail stamp. It is also the first stamp that Royal Mail has ever produced within 24 hours, normally it takes anything up to two years from conception to the finished stamps appearing on sale to the general public.
As soon as Helen and Heather won their gold medal, Getty Images, the official Photo Agency of the IOC, submitted a selection of the best images from that moment to the eight-strong Royal Mail design team. The Royal Mail design team had just one hour to review all the images sent, locate the most fitting and atmospheric image, crop and refine the photo, add Helen and Heather’s name, then position within the templated design of the six-stamp miniature sheet.
On stand-by, poised to collect the completed sheets once printed, are a fleet of 90 Royal Mail vehicles ready to deliver them to over 500 Post Offices to be on sale by lunchtime tomorrow. An additional 4,700 post offices will receive the Gold Medal stamps within a week. Customers can already purchase the stamps at www.royalmail.com/goldmedalstamps.
With the whole country celebrating Helen and Heather’s victory Royal Mail will be printing millions of stamps to ensure everyone that wants to can get their hands on this historic memento.
19 Responses
I may as well be the first to say it – Good to see that Royal Mail are piling their resources into the important stuff….
😀
8 people to design a stamp?????
How long have Royal Mail dispensed with the rule of no living person to be pictured on a stamp. I know it was first broken in 1999 with the Freddie Mercury stamp which also contained Roger Taylor but is this normal now ?
https://colnect.com/en/stamps/stamp/3758-Freddie_Mercury_lead_singer_of_Queen-Millennium_Series_6_-_The_Entertainers_Tale-Great_Britain
was this girls DNA checked to make sure she was cornish?
Even though I am not following the Olympics I did go to School in Penzance for several years. So it would be churlish of me not to send my congratulations to Helen Glover and Heather Stanning on their magnificent achievement.
I was thinking about going to Penzance. So I might delay my trip for a day or two(perhaps half a dozen) and go and look for the Post Box and perhaps take with me a letter to post in it(I was going to wait a few days to give the paint time to dry).
Quite frankly I don’t really care if her DNA is pure Cornish or not it is still a magnificent achievement.
With the amount of gold medals that GB are accumalating’ are Royal Mail going to have enough time to distibute the different stamps ? And will there be lots of ‘Gold’ coloured post boxes ?