Happy Christmas to all my Man of TIN blog readers – wishing you many shiny toys!
Image: From a lovely old 1978 British Royal Mail stamp set of Christmas customs (see below), the 13p stamp postcard is in my 1580s – 1590s / 1940 “Arma-Dads Army” Elizabethan Sealion project scrapbook. New summary blog page for this project here:
During my childhood, my late dad as a lifelong stamp collector used to buy me the postcard versions and sometimes the highly educational presentation packs or first day covers, which had insert pages all about the stamp topic. Stamp collecting and model railways are two of the family hobbies in the blood (in a malarial or genetic way) that I am resisting from lack of time, storage, space and money.
Happy Christmas to all my readers & fellow bloggers from Mark Man of TIN!
Happy Christmas from the whole Man of TIN family of spin off blogs:
Man of TIN blog two – all set up ready for when I fill up and run out of my free 3GB WordPress Man of TIN blog site sometime in early 2022.
Pound Store Plastic Warriors Blog – including tabletop snowball fight fun!
https://poundstoreplasticwarriors.wordpress.com/2021/08/03/pound-store-snowball-fight-2021/
Scouting Wide Games for the Tabletop – also with festive snowball fight fun!
Look Duck and Varnish – my occasional Home Guard and Sealion gaming blog
Sidetracked2017 – where model railways meet toy soldiers and wargaming
Warrior and Pacific Magazine 1901 one-off handwritten children’s magazine 1901
Collecting Peter Laing 15mm figures – cataloguing my collection of these figures ahead of their 50th anniversary In October 1972
Enjoy your family and festive time.
Who knows what Christmas and the New Year will bring? Keep safe and well, here’s wishing you happiness and health, if not wealth. Whatever happens, we have our marvellous hobby to enrich our lives and deplete the coffers.
Blog posted by Mark Man of TIN, Christmas Eve, 24 December 2021
This set was designed in 1978 by British artist and book illustrator Faith Jacques (1923–1997) who had an interesting wartime career as a WREN (Women’s Royal Navy Service):
“She was posted to Oxford where she was stationed in the New Bodleian Library. Her duties included control of a filing department containing over a million photographs, holiday snaps included, of Germany and Occupied Europe, with particular attention given to pictures of coastlines and village approaches.” Wikipedia source.
The 13p (most expensive) stamp design was the 16th Century carollers singing the Boars Head Carol.
Man of Tin blog 
Great stamps, background info and greetings!
Same to you sir!
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And to you and your Christmas houseful! I suspect there will be board games … Many thanks for all the support and all your blogging this year.
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Happy Christmas Mark
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Thanks MJT – glad to see your gaming coming back at the end of a difficult year! Here’s to shiny toys at Christmas and a better New Year …
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A Merry Christmas to you as well !
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Best wishes to you and yours Tony, many shiny toys!
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Merry Christmas to you and yours too Mark, have a great time. Back in the early and mid 70’s in the early days of my career I worked on the Post Office counter selling these stamps. We were glad to get rid of them as the sheets were an odd size and did not fit our portfolio’s properly !!!!! Best wishes.
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What a strange coincidence – beautiful little art works, along with some other familiar and charming 70s and 80s Christmas issues, steamed or soaked off envelopes for the childhood album.
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Those are a lovely set of stamps, I must look out for some! Happy Xmas!
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Affordable mint versions are around on eBay – beautiful illustrations.
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Happy Christmas to you and family, Mark. 🙂
Faith was a local girl, I note! Very nice illustrations.
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Such Wyggeston Grammar Schoolgirls won the war! Trustworthy girls for such hush hush Bletchley Park type intelligence work.
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Merry Christmas to you, Mark! Trains and stamps are certainly related to miniatures, so I see where it came from. My dad still hasn’t quite got the connection between history, airplanes and toy soldiers yet.
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It was cleverly suggested in one of the toy soldier collector or gamer magazines that the way to boost the hobby participant numbers of all these declining hobbies is to spread the coat and hold mixed shows. Not so sure. Having seen mixed modelling and craft tents at local country shows, I find I can quite happily walk past displays of massed tables of model boats or cars or airliners or trucks which I have no interest in, however much I admire the skill and craft and thousands of hours involved.
Stamps are a good way to learn a bit of geography and history.
Having a basic working knowledge or toehold into the world of stamps has helped surprisingly in the past in different projects at work partnering in education and community projects as they are attractive artwork.
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