Perkins Bacon - History

History

England was offering a prize of £20,000 for a note which was impossible to forge. Heath contacted Perkins and convinced him to come to England and Perkins arrived in Liverpool in 1819. They produced samples to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Commission on Forgery, and it appeared that they would win. They did not. Perkins started showing signs of financial distress and was in minor debt to the Heaths. They did manage to secure smaller contracts for smaller £1 notes, and later won more government contracts, but in the meantime they started publishing. George Heath, Charles Heath, Jacob Perkins and Gideon Fairman had multiple partnerships and individual projects going on at the same time. George Heath was a financial backer only. Charles Heath was an engraver, a book publisher. Jacob Perkins was an inventor who made steel book plates practical (but not cheaper). Fairman had produced a book with Perkins in the USA. Financial difficulties of one or the other partners had at least one of them in debt to the company at any moment in time, and the accounting records from these guys are confusing, but very businesslike. Their percentage of profits of any venture changed often.

By 1822 it was known as "Perkins & Heath", then in 1829, after a complicated transaction in which Heath gave up his shares and Joshua Butters Bacon (Perkin's son in law) bought in, as "Perkins & Bacon". Henry Petch joined in 1835, and thus the firm printing the first stamps was actually known as "Perkins, Bacon & Petch". The Penny Black printing plates are currently on display at the British Library. When Petch died in 1852, the firm became just "Perkins, Bacon".

In 1861 they (temporarily) lost the contract to print stamps as a punishment for giving copies of new issues away to friends of the management without permission from the governments involved. Although Heath had won another court battle which gave engravers the right to retain 8 impressions of any engraving, this right did not extend to currency or stamps.

They completed their printing contract for the line-engraved stamps on 31 December 1879, losing subsequent business to competitor De La Rue.

In addition to British stamps, Perkins, Bacon printed for a number of the colonies, including the first stamps of the Cape of Good Hope, which were printed in 1853.

In 1935 the firm went out of business and its records were acquired by Charles and Harry Nissen and Thomas Allen. The records were subsequently transferred to the Royal Philatelic Society London where Percy de Worms organised them for publication.