Albert Tatlock

No original T & P stamp, but a diamond one, followed later (how much later we can only guess) by the ever-popular PBS defacement. How many times it subsequently changed hands I have no idea, I bought it fairly recently in an auction bundle.

No need to make a new stamp if there is an old one gathering dust at the back of the cupboard. But what was the diamond stamp used for when we still had shillings and pence? The traditional circular stamp appears on comics and magazines. Maybe the T & P reps were freelancers who handled other stuff besides comics, etc. Can it be found on packaging for toys, records, and so on?

Yawn, yawn, can't keep my eyes open , back tomorrow..........................

Dunno why the chap would go to the trouble of making up a stamp, they already had a cover price far in excess of what he was asking. I think that the 2 bob stamp would already have been there when my man got hold of them. I think that someone in Brunswick Mill was leaving, and chucked them out. My bloke spotted them, and told me they were his, and he could let me have them cheap. They were lying in the open air in an alcove in the yard, surrounded by cinders and all sorts. If I had not taken them, the rats would have.

I bought these maybe 5 years after the cover date. My feeling is that the stamps had been applied not long before I got them, but it could, of course, have been earlier.

Point taken, but the chap who bought them cheap, having been told about the cancellation stamp, would take it as a deterrent and not try it on. I think I have got one of these somewhere with a Popular stamp too, will try to dig it out.

It is just a code for those in the know. And we do not know when the earlier dated examples were sold on. The pre-decimal price is just a signal for those in the trade. They would know, but the punters would not. Maybe they were supposed to think, 'Hey, this should have been two bob, I'm getting a bargain'. But probably not, by this time, they would be being flogged off cheap, Joe Public would not have troubled his head about a little stamp in the corner of the cover, often one stamp among many.

Exactly.

Yes, we know about these, but how about the others? Only 1/6d DCs I know of are the 1960s annuals. Superman Annual # 1 was 1/3, but the later ones were 1/6, so no DCs had this diamond stamp price at the time of issue.

They were not priced in shillings so that they could be sold in shillings, a currency that no longer existed. They were so stamped, I believe, to indicate that they had been removed from the official distribution system. I, being not as daft as I look, paid next to nothing for them, I cannot remember at this remove of time, maybe a couple of grubby fivers changed hands. If the cover price was £50 per thousand for brand new stock, I don't think would have given more than a quarter of that, and probably less.,

But we do not know which of the price stamps was applied first. A 50 cent mag should have been priced originally at 2/6 to 3/6, if a 12 cent comic was on sale at 10d. Priced at only 6d, and failing to sell, where do you go from there? Get rid of it for whatever you can get, but mark it as unreturnable, maybe years later with an anachronistic price stamp. The problem we have is that we simply do not know when the diamond stamps were applied. My gut feeling is that they were put there as part of the last rites, just to make sure that no one was able to pull a fast one and feed them back into the SOR chain. The ones I found were certainly at death's door.

It is back in this thread, about page 30 or so.

Maybe more, my car boot was full, so I had to use the back seat as well. I still have a couple of hundred at least, all with wear and tear, they were in no fit state to be sold in regular outlets, as well as being about 5 years out of date.

Possibly just a one-off, an experiment from a local agent that was not repeated. All the ones I bought, possibly 1500 in total, were in a quite narrow date window, early to mid-1974. What are the earliest and latest dates (comics only) that you have found on these?

Many thanks to Baggsey here, as soon as I saw this post it set off a train of thought. Had I known back in the Bronze Age that T & P had premises at the mill listed above, I would have paid it a visit, as it lay on one of my regular routes hunting down whatever was to be found on the second-hand outlets in the area. I have had a little research to do, as I wanted to get my ducks in a row....... I mentioned back on about page 30 of this thread that I came across a large tranche of the diamond 2 shilling stamped items in an old mill. That was not the mill above, but the far larger Brunswick Mill, which still stands to this day, but is about to be converted into hipster apartments in the ever-sprawling Northern Quarter. Here is how it looks today..... But this is how it appeared to me at about the same time as my visit... Could T & P also have had space rented here? Maybe, maybe not, but the other mill was just a two minute stroll away. In any event, the diamond stamp bears such a strong resemblance to the circular T & P stamp that it is hardly likely that someone else applied it. But why? Let me propose a theory. T & P had a lot of surplus stock, and in spite of sending much of it out to do the rounds again, with the familiar triangle stamp, at reduced prices, there was still no chance of disposing of it all. I think that the diamond stamp material was offloaded at rock-bottom prices onto someone who reckoned they could shift them on to market traders and the like, and maybe even specialist back issue comic shops, which were up and running long before the date of 1974 found on my batch. In order to prevent them finding their way back into the SOR system, they had to be marked in some way. In the USA, this as achieved by tearing off the title, but that would render them almost unsaleable. I believe, therefore, that the diamond stamp is a cancellation, to stop unscrupulous dealers returning them to T & P for a credit. So, I have my arrow in my hand, you decide whether it has landed here... or here....... or has flown wide of the mark and has embedded itself here........ I will not post the link here, as it is a little off-topic, but anyone interested in our fast-disappearing industrial heritage can put Brunswick Mill into the Youtube search box, and click on the one with Disused Floors in the title

Who could blame this poor little waif, once she had reached the required minimum age, from hiking to Oadby, just so she could get her fix. She told Fred she would work for quarter pay as long as he would set aside a couple of hours a day for her to lock herself in the ladies with a stack of the grisliest items from the last delivery. Alas, her well-thumbed collection when she passed away was dispersed among the bin men who cleared out her garret. Ethel, the forewoman in the stamping department, renamed herself in her honour (probably). I believe I have mentioned George Pumphrey previously in this thread. He was taken on board as a mouthpiece for an anti-comic crusading organisation, who were, unknown to George at the time, a Marxist front. Will dig out chapter and verse later. Last year I bumped into a chap at a local fair who was researching this period for his PhD. Wish I had taken his details, he may have made discoveries of value to us.

Also to be found in these reprint titles from the 1950s were the ads from Ellisdons. Here is one of their catalogues from the early 1970s. All you could ever want in the way of stink bombs, X-Ray goggles, card tricks and whatever else would make you the life and soul of your corner of the playground. Send your pocket money today! Don't waste it on rubbishy American comics, they are only a fad that you will soon grow out of.

Clicking through, we come across this: Speed, accuracy and a passion for collectables are qualities required by Vectis to enable us to fulfil our vision to become the UK’s largest, premium collectables auction company. and also this: Vectis is the largest Toy and Collectables Auction House in the world processing over 50,000 lots annually. We hold over 90 auctions per year, specialising in over 18 collectable genres - and we are always looking to add to the repertoire. Well, make your minds up, gents. if you are already the largest in the world, why do you have a vision to be the largest in the UK? I have the largest capacity for ale in the world, and I hope one day to have the largest in the snug in t'Rovers. Budgetary constraints permitting, of course. The pension doesn't go far these days.

Not been 32 since '32.

Arrange a job interview, and when they ask you what your qualifications are, make it known that you can spot a UKPV at a thousand paces, are aware which titles were distributed by T & P and which by Miller, and have access to the accumulated wisdom recorded within these pages. Bingo, you will be in, at double the salary of the last bloke, who got the sack when his ignorance of the distinction between nd and ND was exposed.

Thanks for sorting this out. It is exactly what I was trying to do, but being the doddering old duffer that I am, managed to bungle it. Still not up to speed with this new-fangled internet thingy, by the time that I have mastered it, they will have invented summat else and I'll have to start all over again.

https://merrymaids.co.uk/spring-clean-flash/freddy-mercury-gif/

Another 1 shilling stamp, but unusually at the bottom. The T & P stamp is usually found at upper right, where it would be more easily visible in the spinner rack.

Frederick Ebenezer Thorpe tossed, turned and groaned, but sleep eluded him. He was having repeated flashbacks to the previous afternoon. It was, he lived through the experience once again, just one minute after 1.30 pm on December 24th, when the lunch break in the stamping shed is officially over. Ethel was gossiping with Myrtle and Cynthia, when the door flew open and a besuited figure strode into the room. ‘Back to work, ladies, back to work’ boomed Fred (for it was he). ‘What d’you think I pay you for?’ Ethel hurriedly slipped her hip flask of gin back into her corset, hoping Fred had not noticed. She was finding it harder and harder to get through a shift without at least a couple of nips. From the other side of the room little Daisy, the youngest recruit, timidly spoke up: ‘Mr Thorpe, sir, do you think we could get away a little early today, just half an hour or so, so we could finish off the Christmas shopping? It would help so much.’ Fred’s jaw dropped and he felt he was about to faint. Never had he experienced such a mutinous sentiment. Regaining his composure, he rallied and pointed to the clock. ‘When that says 5 o’clock’ he announced, ‘that is when the shift is over, and not a minute before.’ Slamming the door behind him, he was suddenly gone, but the girls never thought of slacking, as Fred wore rubber soled shoes, and could take them unaware at any time. Ethel knew that the appeal was foredoomed to failure, just like the request to turn up the heating. Fred had brandished the electricity bills and told the girls that the winter solstice was behind them, and Spring would soon be on the way. Sighing, she picked up the top copy in the stack in front of her and wielded her stamp. She crashed it down with vigour on the face of Aquaman, pretending it was Fred. Her Steptoe style fingerless gloves were just about sufficient to keep her circulation going, as long as she kept up a rapid tempo. ‘Just (stamp) you wait (stamp), Fred’ she muttered under her breath, ‘when (stamp) my Pools come up (stamp), I’ll buy (stamp) this place (stamp), then you will need (stamp) at least three promotions (stamp) before we let you be the lavatory cleaner (stamp). But it was only a dream, she knew. Where else could a girl get a living around these parts? It wasn’t the West End, it wasn’t even the West End of Leicester, just a drab and dingy bit of the sticks called Oadby. Fred sat up with a jolt. What was that mysterious figure materialising through his bedroom wall? ‘I am the ghost of Christmas 1966’, were the words that Fred sensed, rather than heard. ‘Unless you mend your miserly ways, I will use my supernatural powers to bring about a hiatus in your supplies. Others, including pornographers, will muscle in on your racket.’ Fred trembled and pulled the blankets over his head. When he re-emerged, the figure had vanished. ‘Just a cheese sandwich induced nightmare’, he told himself, ‘that could never come to pass’.