Today we are looking at a set of postcards, issued by the Royal Mail back in 1983 to accompany a set of stamps charting the history of the British Army. The set of five postcards each replicates one of these stamps and each stamp has an illustration of soldiery of the British Army at different points in its history:

It is much easier to make out the details of the designs on a postcard when compared to the small size of a stamp. The images on the stamps depict soldiers of the seventeenth century at the time of the Civil War, the eighteenth century with American Revolutionary War era fusiliers, the nineteenth century with Napoleonic riflemen, the dawn of the twentieth century with Boer War era guardsmen and finally the 1980s with a paratrooper.

As was popular with these postcards, each has had the matching stamp attached to the rear and sent through the post on the first day of issue:

This is but one set of military related philately issued by the Royal Mail over the last fifty years and an interesting small focus would be collecting postal related items that have a military angle to them- inexpensive and interesting with lots of variations to hunt for.