Rather topical with today`s new Prime Minister, but here is your final clue to this week`s theme. And this is here because it is one of the most popular buildings in the Open House Weekend - it is so popular that people wishing to visit have to enter their name in a kind of lottery, and there are just a few names drawn every year. That closes in mid August, so you have missed your chance this year. But do remember for 2023!
This card is a bronze plaque, and in this format has no issuer`s name. Indeed in our original World Tobacco Issues Index of 1956 the set is listed at the back of the book under the anonymous issues as ZT1-1. This is because nothing appears on this "card", it is only when you get lucky and find the cellophane envelope that they were originally issued inside that you find out the truth, that being that they were issued by International Tobacco Company Ltd of London. This vital envelope also tells the title, the number of the card, and has text on it about the building. For our updated World Tobacco Issues Index the identity is restored, and it is listed as I635-200, under International Tobacco, so this must mean that the envelopes were discovered after 1956. It was also discovered that there are two different styles of envelopes, one, the home issue, says "International Tobacco Ltd", whilst the other, the export issue, says "International Tobacco (Overseas) Ltd"
Ha.580 lists all the cards, which are in four groups, so it will be scanned in rather than typed. The first thing you will see is that the cards followed on, so if you wanted the set you had to have large and small card. However what is not shown here, and comes from the London Cigarette Card Company Catalogue of 1950, is that Series B was more sought after - odd cards of series A were 3d each whilst the odds of series B were 6d each. When it came to sets, the cheapest were the large cards of series A, at 8/6d a set, followed by the small cards of series A at 10/- a set, then the large cards of series B were 15/- a set, and most expensively, the small cards of series B at 22/6d.
A curious thing has come to light, as it turns out these cards also appear in our original British Trade Index under the Walsall Lithographic Company, who made them, and who offered them to the trade. I do not know if any trade issuers took them, but this would be the reason for the "cards" being blank and the information being on the much easier to reproduce cellophane envelopes. The company also made other "cards" but none are titled, so presumably they too were only identified by their envelopes, one was a set of 20 Famous Buildings and Monuments of the British Empire and the other was a set of circular plaques thought to be Portraits of Musicians, of which only three are known, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. They measure 89 m/m in diameter, and I feel that there must be more out there, so if you know of any circular plaques which fit this description do let us know - also let us know if you have any of these three, and would be willing to scan them so we can show a comparison picture to aid their discovery!