VE Day stamps made to mark 80th anniversary

A special set of stamps is being issued to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day.

A set of 10 stamps will honour men and women who made contributions during World War Two, while a mini-sheet of stamps has images of Dame Vera Lynn from different aspects of her wartime career.

Royal Mail will also be applying a special VE80 postmark on stamped mail in the week of the anniversary in May.

Emma Gilthorpe, chief executive of Royal Mail, said: “Royal Mail is proud to issue these stamps honouring the courage, sacrifice and resilience of those who fought for freedom and peace.”

People featured on the stamps include:

– George Arthur Roberts, the first black man to join the London Auxiliary Fire Service.

– Mary Morris, whose diaries described how she nursed troops returning wet and wounded from Dunkirk.

– John Harrison, who served in the Royal Navy on the destroyer HMS Belfast.

– Bhanbhagta Gurung, who fought in Operation Longcloth in Burma and was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery.

– Thomas Peirson Frank, a civil engineer and surveyor whose rapid-response teams repaired more than 100 breaches of the River Thames wall during air raids.

– William Tutte, a codebreaker whose work was key to decrypting the Lorenz cipher, the German code used for top-level communication and intelligence.