Souvenir Post Card Celebrating the Coronation of King George V
The Admiral issue is so-named because King George V is portrayed in the ceremonial uniform of Admiral of the Fleet of the Royal Navy. The delay in producing the new design, some 18 months after the King's accession to the throne, had more to do with the process of preparing new printing contracts than with the time needed to actually produce the new stamps, although there were objections to the King appearing on the stamps at all. The Postmaster General was quick to point out that the objections were concerned primarily with poor quality portraits that had been adopted by other British possessions.
The design eventually approved was from a composite of two photographs taken by W and D Downey, and H W Barnett of London, England. The ornamental frame part of the design was supplied by Robert Savage.
The King's portrait is framed by an oval held by two clusters of maple leaves, four on each side, which are emblemic of Canada, and the words CANADA POSTAGE. Crowns adjoin the upper left and right sides of the oval frame, in areas known as spandrels, with the numeral and text inscriptions denoting the denominations appearing below.
 Figure 1 |
 Figure 2 |
 Figure 3 |
From Figures 1 and 2, it will be noted that the boxes containing the numeral denominations do not extend to the outer frame line for the single digit values, while they do for the double digit ones (because of the extra space needed). As can be seen from Figure 3, the numeral box was replaced by an oval for the one dollar value, and the numeral is significantly larger than the style used for the cent values. In addition, the text for the dollar value excludes the word version of the numeral value.
Admiral stamps were printed in English only, bilingual inscriptions not appearing on a regular basis on Canadian postage stamps until 1927.
Updated: 5 Oct 97