Royal Mail doing permanent marker cancellation

The marker might have been applied by the receiving post office or letter carrier. That is often the case in the U.S. when stamps have not been cancelled.

Never seen that in my part of the Country (Canada) except a few Small Queens having been cancelled with some marker

You would think that they would properly cancel everything. Philatelists keep them alive. Doing that only makes me want to give up!

I've used the plastic over stamps trick many times, but only on boxes. I didn't want to put the stamps on the cardboard, so I put them on paper, then taped the paper to the box, had it cancelled, then taped a heavy plastic over the whole shebang. I never had a complaint from the USPS clerks.

It seems that if a package can't be cancelled by machine, it doesn't get a cancel. I will ask for a hand cancel at the town post office on most letters that I send, although with the lock down we are still in, I try to avoid going during normal working hours.

A box about to be mail is too expensive to lick & stick 4 dozen stamps, so it'll just get a printed label instead. No need for cancelling something like that.

Not to mention Her Majesty, whom I assume will be joining him?

Hi all, Just a few details about marker/pen cancels. I worked for R.M. for over 20 years, (retired 15+ years ago), so the sorting machinery is quite different today than it was then. Some of the same principles should still apply when mail is being sorted/machined & cancelled. Imagine a conveyor belt loaded with letter feeding them into a machine which cancels them. Volume of mail plays a part here. If an item (for example) gets positioned underneath another then the bottom item will miss the cancelling process. Some machines still read the address/code & forward the item to the receiving office. We used old culler facer machines in my day, which at peak times would jam up with the amount of items passing between the belts. These items were then placed back on the "facing table" by hand, to be put back onto the belts facing the correct way up, before reaching the cancellation dies. A slower system but it worked. If items like covers, special deliveries were found in the normal mail stream they were removed and dealt with correctly & hand stamped as required. Speed rather than accuracy seems to dominate these days. Even before I retired we were told by Managers to ink out uncancelled stamps so that they could not be re-used. Some years ago R.M. in their wisdom (cost cutting), decided to turn most distribution offices into merely delivery offices. So if you can imagine all mail collected from different locations being sent to certain bigger mail centers, how much mail capacity is now dealt with by them, instead of local distribution offices sending most of it for direct delivery. The pen/marker scribbles are usually carried out at the delivery offices. I also notice from some of the uploaded envelope examples that some stamps are not positioned top right of the envelope (as recommended by R.M.), these would be missed by the machines cancelling them.

I believe, in bygone days that defacing images/effigies of the reining monarch was deemed as treason!! Maybe we won't boldly go there.

When I do any philatelic mailing I go to my (very) friendly local sub post office and ask for proof of posting.

Carole and Craig are like old friends now , chat as they carefully hand stamp my items with the counter canceller before dropping in the mailbag.

I guess a lot of it will pick up a machine cancel as well in their travel but there should be no need for biro or indelible marker.

drblade ‘s item above being special delivery (used to be called registered) is manually sorted rather than machined.

2 more items I received today. The 1st scan with 2 ruined "collectables".  The 2nd uncancelled, making it another possible source of lost revenue to R.M., as the envelope could quite easily be re-used.

Not me penning them, just received them today's delivery???

Oh, I will accept Canadian stamps as well!  Not quite as tough to get as GB, but still a challenge.  I don't collect Israel, but if it's interesting I'll find a home for it.  Of course, I do collect USA.