The Expert Committee of the Philatelic Society London (which became the Royal Philatelic Society, London in 1906) was proposed by the members in 1894.
In 1983, when the Royal Philatelic Society London became a charity, the expertising service was transferred to a limited liability company, RPSL Limited, which now appoints the Expert Committee.
Forgeries had been a problem since the beginning of stamp collecting in the early 1860s. However these early, crude, reproductions had been replaced by forgeries of much greater sophistication, many of which were extremely deceptive. The celebrated case of the prosecution of Alfred Benjamin, Benjamin Sarpy and George Kirke Jeffryes, who were arrested in December 1891, had revealed a number of extremely dangerous forgeries, notably those of New South Wales and Ceylon.