Chris West - Professional Writer

First Class is a history of Britain with a difference – it uses postage stamps as the ‘hooks’ on which to hang the story of the country since 1840.  We start, of course, with the Penny Black, then move on through the reign of Queen Victoria, past her 1887 Jubilee and the glory days of Edward VII (glory for some, anyway), through two world wars, to the conservative fifties, swinging sixties, confused seventies…  And end up with a simple question: can Britain still call itself a ‘First Class’ nation?

The idea came when I found an old stamp album that I’d had as a boy.  I’d been given it by a Great Uncle who had fought in the trenches in 1916 – it was full of early 20th century stamps.  Then I had foolishly taken it to school, where a big chunk of the collection was stolen.  After which, what was left of the collection had sat and mouldered in an attic…

Discovering the album again made me want to recover the lost stamps, and actually to build a better collection than the original.  Over a number of evenings on eBay I did this – missing out a few of the really pricey ones, such as Victorian high values (I cheated and got forgeries of these…)  As I did so, I became ever more fascinated by the history that surrounded the stamps.  And so this book was born…

It has been a wonderful experience to write it.  I learnt that my knowledge of history , which I thought was pretty reasonable, was actually very patchy –  a lot of research was necessary to fill out each story that the stamps were trying to tell me.  By the end, I had a great feeling of having been on an amazing journey through the life of the country in which I was born and brought up.

It’s a journey I now invite you, the reader to join me on…