REGIONALS

2) The "Litho" Issues

In 1980, the Post Office decided to to use the lithographic process for a few of the standard machins. This lead to further contracts being placed for all of the regional issues with two lithographic printers. The House of Questa became responsible for printing the Welsh and Northern Ireland issues, with the Scottish issues being printed by John Waddington Ltd. These were release on the 8th April 1981.

For each region, two types of emblem can be found. Whilst there are numerous differences between the two types the following guide can be followed to differentiate them :-

Scotland		The first place to look is the lions eye socket. In type 1 the socket is closed and there is a dot in the center of the eye. In type 2, the eye socket is open and has no eye dot. Second, in type 1, the lion's knee (nearest the center) is pointed whereas in type 2 it is rounded. Finally, the type 1 lion has a much fatter appearence than type 2.
Type 1	Type 2
Wales		The easiest difference to spot is the tips of the dragon's wings. In type 1 the tips are not actually connected to the wings whereas they are connected in type 2.
Type 1	Type 2
Norther Ireland		This is the hardest of the three emblems with which to distiguish the two types. A magnifying glass is needed, using which it will be ssen that the type 1 issues have a screend (dotted) background whereas the type 2 has a solid background. Trying to illustrate these differences has proved difficult, my scanner is good but not that good ! However, trust me, the screening dots are far more obvious than the illustrations on the right suggest.	Type 1 Type 2
Type 1	Type 2

During 1984, The House of Questa changed from P14 to P15x14, presumably so as to be in line with the standard Machin Issues. This change did not coincide with any price increase in postage, so some stamps from the period can be found in either guage.

Type 1, P14		Type 2, P14		Type 2, P15
Waddington				Questa

Waddingtons continued to use the P14 perforation guage. However, in April 1986 the printing of the Scottish regionals were taken over by The House of Questa who were by then already using the P15x14 guage and type 2 emblem. However this change occured just after Waddingtons had slowly started to switch to the type 2 emblem of which the last value to change was the 31p value just a few months before Questa took over. This leads to the scarcest of all regional printings, namely the Waddington-printed Scottish 31p type 2 perf 14 which, last time a looked several years back, was aready catalogued at £70 (mint).

The phosphor bands of some of the litho regionals differ from those found on the standard Machin definatives. For the 2nd class postage rate, the earlier issues had a single phosphor band displaced to the left instead of being in the center, with later issues it is replaced by a center band offset to the right.. I have no idea why such a difference existed.

Continuous	Short

A second more subtle difference is in the length of the phosphor band ; apparently the phosphor itself was thought to cause an increase in wear on the perforator and so short phosphor bands were tried such that they did not cover where the perforations would go. Only a few issues can be found with both continuous and short phosphor bands and in practice they can only be differentiated by examining vertical pairs of stamps.

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