The Error World (18 page)

The judges were my heroes: Abbott, Gentleman, the Goamans and four others, but they took until October to decide. They chose a boy called James Berry, age six, from Beckenham in Kent, who had drawn a picture of an ordinary snowman with a red scarf and a pink hat. And a girl, also six, from Stafford in Staffordshire, who had painted the head of a king with rosy cheeks and a colourful crown. Her name was Tasveer Shemza, and she had won the greatest prize. Both Tasveer and James got £20 and a gold
Blue Peter
badge. But Tasveer's stamp had been selected as the key 3d issue, while James's design was on the is 6d. This meant that less than 11 million of James's stamp would be printed, but there would be 174 million of Tasveer's. It also meant that at the age of six Tasveer had become, from her family home in Stafford, Staffordshire, the bestselling British artist of all time. It was, quite simply, a miracle to me, and of course I felt madly jealous. But when Tasveer appeared on screen in a red and blue top similar to the colours on her stamp, I also felt that she was cute before that word was common, and I liked the way she held her brown toy koala bear for security. I had a bear just like that, almost certainly from the shop in London Zoo. Her stamp appeared on 1 December 1966, and it was vibrant, a king with jewels in his crown on a red background, with an embossed gold-foil profile of the Queen's head—victory for Tony Benn—which the unscrupulous soon discovered could be removed with chemicals or an iron. Within days of issue, many thousands were being circulated to dealers and at stamp fairs without the Queen's head, but as ironing would also remove the imprint of the embossing, the fakes were easy to spot. There were about 170 genuine missing-gold errors resulting from a printing glitch at Harrison & Sons factory in High Wycombe, but soon a far more available error emerged. At the foot of some stamps the initial 'T' for Tasveer had disappeared, leaving only her surname. This was probably caused by a speck of dirt covering the letter on the printing roller, and although it was not a spectacular error, it was an unusual one for a British stamp. It was also the first and only error that I actually received through the post.

It is difficult to convey just how exceptional this is—the equivalent for the error collector of finding a Renoir in a junk shop, although rather less valuable. To find that you had an error in your collection that you didn't have to buy above face value would only occur once in a collector's lifetime. Indeed, it has never occurred for me again. Unfortunately, it turned out (and very quickly) that there was one of these errors on almost every sheet of eighty stamps. Six rows down, two stamps in, and there it was, or rather wasn't: the infamous missing 'T'. One had a one-in-eighty chance of getting it, which, given the amount of mail sent using the 3d stamp, meant that the odds were very favourable. Many of these errors went unnoticed for eight weeks, and were thus thrown away or sent back to
Blue Peter
as part of its used stamp charity appeal, but then the February edition of
Gibbons Stamp Monthly
appeared. The column entitled 'Through the Magnifying Glass' reported 'shoals' of letters identifying the error, but the very first was reported by telephone—such was the urgency—by a certain K. Labbett, who just happened to be my kindergarten teacher.

The error went unnoticed by John Noakes. When Tasveer's victory was written up in the
Blue Peter
book of 1967, Noakes was pictured looking over the shoulder of a young checker called Jenny at the High Wycombe printing press. She had a large sheet of eighty stamps on the table in front of her, but it was also a high sheet, as beneath it there were fifty other sheets just the same. Behind her, in what looked like an airless and charmless room crammed with heavy metal furniture and very bored personnel, were three other women doing just the same. What were they thinking of as they checked more than two million sheets? According to Noakes, they were flicking through at the same speed as a bank cashier counts banknotes. 'But they weren't counting. They were checking.' They were checking, Noakes explained, because 'a fault in a stamp is what all collectors dream of. It could convert a 3d stamp into something worth thousands of pounds.' At one point during the
Blue Peter
visit, Jenny pulled a sheet to one side, the reject pile. It took Noakes about five minutes to spot what was wrong with it, and then he found it: a slight misalignment of perforations. Noakes told viewers that the faster Jenny flicked, the easier it was for her to find an error, something which seemed to make good sense at the time but now something I don't quite understand. At any rate, Jenny and all of her colleagues missed the missing 'T' flaw on every sheet they looked at, which gave the error collector enormous hope for the future.

Tasveer's stamp, which appeared in the Gibbons catalogue as SG 713 'King of the Orient', a name she had not given it herself, did not meet with universal approval. Many collectors couldn't understand how a stamp could possibly be designed by a child. In December 1966, the
Stamp Magazine
ran a letter describing them as 'gaudy monstrosities'. The following month H. Elliot Pearse, of the World Association of Young Stamp Collectors, argued that, to the contrary, both Tasveer's and James's stamps showed the true spirit of seasonal goodwill. He believed the Postmaster-General was 'inspired', and although the stamps 'may appear crude when compared with our usual issues, they have opened up an entirely new field'. Two months later the debate raged on, and the tone had again become disapproving. This time, D. T. Phillips from Balcombe, Sussex, spoke for many of his colleagues in GB philatelic societies: 'The great majority of collectors—and indeed of the general public with whom I have discussed the matter—have either regarded these Christmas stamps, especially the 3d value, as a joke or as something far better suited to adorn a Christmas cracker than to represent Great Britain all over the world! Let us face it ... they are only suitable for the nursery!' They didn't much like the runner-up designs either. When these appeared in the
Philatelic Bulletin
in December 1966, mine was not among them. Brenda Cooper's design featured a person at a piano and a choir of three. Lucy Richardson sent in three snowmen. Sarah L. Nash submitted a goose. Stephen Conroy sent in a snowman going downhill on a sled, smoking. And Tejinderjit Singh featured a snowman dressed as a clown.

That Christmas the Post Office received more than forty thousand letters addressed to Father Christmas at the North Pole. Rather than delivering them, they were put away somewhere, and possibly disposed of in a bin. Everyone who wrote got a reply from 'Reindeerland' in photocopied handscript with one of Tasveer Shemza's stamps in the corner:

My dear young friend,

Thank you for writing to me. My team of gnomes has been working very hard making all sorts of toys ready for Christmas. Of course there may be something they have not thought of, but when I load my sledge I will do my best to see that you get the presents you would like.

I hope you have a very happy Christmas,

Santa

I met Tasveer Shemza forty years after I had seen her on television, and I would like to say she hadn't changed a bit. Certainly she was instantly recognisable by her hair, hazel brown in a Louise Brooks bob, then as now. Also, although she had recently turned forty-seven, she was still fairly small, and her cheeks still rosied up when she smiled. I liked her instantly, especially her slight nervousness and her willingness to please, and when I told her that I found her very attractive when I saw her on television in 1966 she said, 'Surely not.'

She sat in her office at Sussex Downs College, near Eastbourne. The only thing that wasn't so good was her memory. She couldn't, for instance, remember much about entering the competition, or the day she heard the news she had won. She wasn't sure whether she had any help with the design from her parents, which would have disqualified her, although the statute of limitations had long passed when she said, 'But if you look at it now, it does have a very nice border, hasn't it, the top blue bit and the red background—it is rather professional...'

She was an only child. Her parents were both art teachers. She already had all the inks and paints at home, and as well as the winning entry she thinks she may also have submitted a picture of an angel with odd wings and curly blonde hair.

'Any snowmen?'

'No, although the snow in 1964 was pretty impressive, wasn't it, so perhaps snow had made a big impression on a lot of kids. I don't know how I got the idea of doing a king's head, although it was basically my dad. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but it was very much what he looked like, very stylised facial hair, actually quite a typical Muslim beard [she runs her fingers over own chin as she describes it], nicely trimmed. And he always used to wear a hat in the morning to hold his hair down, and stop it flying all over, rather like the crown of course.'

I was taken by the idea, shrouded until now, that Great Britain's first Christmas stamp was modelled on a Muslim. Her father left Pakistan in 1956, and went to the Slade school of art. He married Tasveer's English mother in 1958, and Tasveer was born in Stafford a year later, where her parents both worked in local schools.

'I went to a girls' grammar school where it was expected that you went to university. I was an atheist, and I got the Religious Studies Prize.' She then went to York University, where she saved her grant in term-time to go travelling in the holidays. She trained to teach English as a foreign language, and now teaches others to become teachers. She met her husband in Egypt, and they now have two daughters who have long outgrown
Blue Peter.

'It was all very nice indeed in the studio,' she says. 'Val Singleton I remember well, more than John Noakes. Just before we went on air, Val asked me how I got such shiny hair. And the producer—was it Libby Purves?'

'Perhaps Biddy Baxter?'

'Biddy Baxter—that's it. Libby, Biddy, similar. She was a lovely woman.'

The official prizegiving, another photocall, was held at the Post Office Tower. 'We went to the revolving restaurant and had fish and chips, and I was shocked and scandalised. There was me and James Berry, who was my age, and there was also a teenage girl who did the design of the first-day cover. I thought she may also have done a parcel stamp. She seemed terribly much older to us. She's almost been written out of the story. So we had fish and chips, and she licked the ketchup bottle. I was so shocked—I couldn't believe it. That's my strongest memory of the whole thing.'

For several years after her stamp was selected, Tasveer received a large amount of correspondence from collectors asking her for a signed photograph ('Good Wishes from Tasveer Shemza') or a signed first-day cover. In return, she would receive stamps from foreign countries or other gifts. When she got married she decided to keep her maiden name. 'I think it's a fantastic name—Tasveer Shemza, it goes together. And I was of that feminist generation where people thought, "Why would you change your name?" Also, my husband's name is Hodgson, he's a Yorkshireman, and I don't think that would go at all.

'Every so often people would come up to me and say, "You're the..." and they'd tell me what they could remember about the stamp. As I became a teenager I would become quite embarrassed about it. That normal teenage thing of being self-conscious. And it took me until I had kids of my own to not be embarrassed about it. Now I think it's a really fantastic achievement for a child.'

In 2005, one of my two sons almost appeared on a British Christmas stamp. Or at least he appeared in the
Royal Mail Yearbook
promoting the Christmas stamps, which is not quite as good, but distinctly closer than most people get.

In 1990, when my son Ben was two, the artist Catherine Yass took a photograph of him in my arms in a darkening street in South End Green, north London, where I lived. It was a chilly evening. I had a maroon jacket, and Ben was wearing a very large blue sweatshirt. Yass, a friend for about fifteen years, was the cousin of my first long-term girlfriend, and in the years I had known her she had experimented with many artforms, including sculpture and film. Her big breakthrough came with her photography, lightboxes and film, and in particular a signature technique in which she overlays a positive and a negative image of the same scene, heightening and deepening colours in the process. She had employed this to stunning effect in studies of graveyards, hospitals and portraits of Indian film stars, and in 2002 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. One of my favourite works was not a photograph but a looped video in which she sat facing the camera as she recited a long list of jokes in a mirthless and deadpan way. Two Jewish women meet in the street and one says gosh you look wonderful what have you been up to. The other replies I'm having an affair. Her friend says an affair how wonderful, who's doing the catering? A beggar stops a man in the street and says I haven't had any food for so long I've forgotten what it tastes like. The man says don't worry it still tastes the same.

Yass, who is in her early forties, first came to the attention of the Royal Mail in 1999. One day in late summer she received a call asking whether she'd be interested in designing a Christmas stamp. Christmas stamps are always special, but this year particularly so. They were the Christmas stamps of the Millennium Series, a sequence of ninety-six stamps released as four stamps each month for two years. It was the most ambitious stamp issue ever undertaken, and each one was commissioned from a leading artist. Yass was in good company: David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Howard Hodgkin, Patrick Caulfield, Ralph Steadman, Anthony Gormley, Craigie Aitchison, Don McCullin. They were chosen to illustrate a particular theme or achievement in Britain's past—The Farmers' Tale, The Scientists' Tale, The Citizens' Tale, The Entertainers' Tale, The Travellers' Tale.

'For some reason,' Yass told me one day at her studio near Brick Lane in east London, 'I'm always asked to do Christmas projects. The stamp, the Christmas page in the
Royal Mail Yearbook,
decorating the Tate Christmas tree.' Yass is Jewish. I told her that it was Britain's modern institutional way of being multiculural without a big song and dance. I told her I was proud of my discovery that the first British Christmas stamp was based on a Muslim. Unlike Tasveer Shemza, Yass said she was disappointed that her stamp was to be used for overseas postage, rather than second or first class inland. But she was pleased that more people would become familiar with her art than ever before. 'Licking my work,' she said. 'You don't get more intimate than that.'