H.M.S. Vanguard and the post-war Royal Tour
After WWII it was proposed that Geo VI and Queen Elizabeth should make a good will tour of the Commonwealth countries that supported the War. Each commonwealth country would produce a set of stamps to commemorate the tour which was proposed for 1949. In the event George VI was taken ill with cancer and the visit postponed. Subsequent tours were also postponed in 1950,1952. He eventually died on 6 February 1952 whilst Princess Elizabeth and Duke of Edinburgh were touring Kenya.
For New Zealand a set of four stamps was proposed as shown, featuring The Waitangi Treaty House, H.M.S. Vanguard, the Crown and Sceptre and the King & Queen with Princess Margaret (who was to accompany them). The 1949 tour party was to sail on the newly commissioned battleship H.M.S. Vanguard. This was laid down after the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya in Dec. 1941. H.M.S. Vanguard was not completed until after the end of the war.
When the Royal tour of 1949 was postponed. It was a very stringent economic climate in the U.K. and the new Labour Government was beginning to realise that a new battleship in peacetime was an economic luxury, costing something like a million pounds a year to keep in commission. In the reduction of the armed forces postwar, HMS Vanguard was a casualty and decommissioned in 1950. 1 have so far been unable to find what happened to her after decommissioning was she sold for scrap, or sold off and renamed to another country.
The designs for H.M.S. Vanguard were carried out by James Berry a notable designer of New Zealand Stamps and coins. The plate laid down and stamps printed by Waterlow & Sons. These sent to New Zealand but shelved and put into storage. By 1970 these were now obsolete and by order of the Post Office these and other obsolete values for subsequent tours were dispatched to the furnace.
During the 1970s a copy was reported in a dealer's hands in New Zealand. This occasioned some investigation as to how it came on the market, being subsequently sold to an Australian sapphire miner for NZ$14,000. It is alleged the dealer subsequently had to repay his commission to the NZ Inland revenue. So far two more copies have in the intervening years been discovered. The latest being sold for_£6000 in 1999. It is still a mystery how they were saved from the furnace, or how they came into private hands.
A farther Royal tour for 1952 was again cancelled due to Geo VI further illness. 'This time the H.M.S. Vanguard was replaced by the SS Gothic II. The stamps and die proofs again printed and once again burnt when the tour was cancelled. However when Waterlow & Sons closed in 1968, the die proofs and a progress proof of part of the laid down sheet were on file, as were numerous other die proofs and photographic records of designs of various other cancelled issues. These subsequently sold through Robson Lowe, record the events of the post-war tours.
The SS Gothic was eventually used for the Coronation tour of Q.E.II and Duke of Edinburgh in 1953/4. This hired for £825.000 for the tour. Of which the Australian Government paid £200,000 towards the cost of their part of the tour. The HMS Britannia, due to be built for this tour, was again not completed, thus the SS Gothic had to be hired. Even the SS Gothic broke down, one of its turbines broke on reaching Sydney. Another turbine had to be flown out specially to complete the tour to New Zealand.
On the return trip the tour completed a triumphant return in the newly commissioned HMS Britannia. This just ready for the end of the tour and ships were changed at Tobruk with all the Royal furniture, taken off the Gothic and put on the Britannia for the return to Britain.
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