THE KEY PLATES

Page 2 : The Second Series

King Edward VII	King George V	King George VI	Queen Elizabeth II (Pre-decimal)

With the passing of Queen Victoria, a new style of key plate was used. The same basic design would be used throughout the following five reigns (there was no new issue for King Edward VIII whose reign was very short).

The designs were made sufficiently different so as to make it easier to distinguish the different values, which had been a problem with the earlier Queen Victoria designs. In order to further differentiate the values, the usage overprint in a number of cases was made in different colours for each value.

For the King Edward VII issues, the middle value key plates (1s through 10s) had the previous Script-VR watermark replaced with a Script-IR watermark. However the lower denominations continued to use the Orb watermark and the higher values the two-orbs watermark.

However, with the introduction of the King George V issues, every keyplate value used the multiple Orb-IR watermark. Below £1, the watermark was horizontal but for values £1 and above the watermark appears sideways, reading upwards. The watermark remained in use for all subsequent issues.