Where would the world be without the trusty post? The medium of many a crank, soppy poet and aggressive coupon chancers everywhere. We take a look at one of the longest running public mail systems, a national institution (quite literally), that enabled communications far and wide across Britain and beyond for half a century. It wasn’t quite the world’s first public system, but had some notable firsts including the postmark and the stamp. Not too shabby.
[Music] hello and welcome to the Galla Morrey A hodg podged History Podcast uh thank you for joining us again uh my name is Will and I am joined here remotely by my good friend uh my good friend Nick uh yeah how are you doing today Nick um I’m good yes I won’t reg the listeners with the story I told you prior to prior to record about how I managed to get some money off a bed yeah that oh highlight of the week there for a man in his 30s yeah yeah my bed my bed has been broken for a while although not for exciting reasons okay no more questions I’m glad to hear that you’re um making full use of your time what about you have you been up to much not breaking beds no uh no um just you know plowing away doing doing the thing anyway um shall we um shall we go into what we’re talking about in this episode yes we will and and just just to point out because it’s been pointed out to me I didn’t realize it this is actually going to be um another topic uh with a focus on British history we’ve done quite a few in a row now we should um we should probably rename ourselves should we no no no I think we just accidentally fell down that hole but we will be branching out and we will hopefully deliver you a thumping good show which will leave a thorough stamp of enjoyment without further Ado let us begin yes we’re going to be talking about the postal service and we sadly I don’t mean seal nauy electronic super Duo Ben Gibbard and Jimmy tamborello oh okay um right I I might need to do a bit a bit of last minute research then okay I mean the actual UK postal service otherwise known as the Royal Male and now we’ve all had that feeling of waiting for the post to arrive you know the excitement the anticipation the eventual disappointment but you know where did it all begin why is it called the Royal Mel how long have we been using post systems I mean how many times has the Queen’s head been licked I mean these are all vital questions that we just hope to answer yeah the questions I I never knew I wanted to know the answer do but yeah every great civilization has had some form of messaging service over its you know lifetime after all communication was key to informing different parts of your Empire of impending invasions you know food deliveries and of course but most importantly taxes What would life be without taxes much less taxing I would say it’s thought that the practice of written documents being transported from one person to another by a third party actually dates back to the invention of writing the earliest known example that we know of an organized Courier Service dates back to about 2400 BCE in ancient Egypt uh the first regular Postal Service actually has its origins in ancient Persia one claim lies uh with Cyrus the Great who ruled Persia in the mid 500s B.C.E and not only did Cyrus mandate that Postal Service be provided in all of his provinces but he also arranged for the same to be done in neighboring countries Cyrus’s Persian Postal System operated in a similar fashion to the later American Pony Express where a messenger would ride from one post on a route to the next at which point another messenger would take the letter and Carry On To The Next post it’s a bit like one of those relay races you see in the Olympics is that where they come from relay events yeah just just these important questions we’re asking and not providing any answers to I know but yeah going back to the the Persians um like the Egyptians before uh the service was however restricted only to those deemed important enough the concept of a postal service was adopted by various civilizations over the centuries evolving over time become more efficient affordable and most importantly open to the general public yes so what about the average Joe and Jade when did public mail become a thing rather than the preservation of the ruling in military classes well is that rhetorical question uh no you’re right to ask because it’s not rhetorical throughout the Middle Ages there were loads of different private individuals who used local services to send messages but these are often threadbear because the most people that could actually read and write were often rich or from the elite the nobility Etc but thanks to our old friend the printing press check out episode 11y literacy and writing became way more common you had National systems being set up alongside small local systems and one of the largest systems built was by th and taxes who originally came from bergamon in Milan which is in Italy under the patronage of the haps B Emperors they became the organizers of an extensive network linking all the Imperial connections they had and this developed throughout the 16th century into what covered most of Europe and it’s actually more or less the basis of many European postal systems today however if we take it back to the first real public male systems we as the English like to claim we’re like the first in many many things when really we just take an idea and and then say it’s you know we thought it up it’s the British way it is the British way um but both the French and the English set up mail systems in the 15th and 16th centuries respectively largely not for public use but they would then develop into them but the French kind of got there first the basis of a real Public Service wasn’t created until 1627 in France when fees and timetables were fixed and post offices established in larger cities Britain it came in 1635 but let’s just take a little wind back specifically February 1512 Henry VII created the uh basically the postal system under sir Brian tuque although the the official title of postmaster would actually come to a bit later you know Henry just got sick of hiring individual corers to to carry messages from him and tuque must have done a good job because a few years later in 1516 he was knighted you know it was that he was doing a good job or he was maybe you know maybe reading all the Saucy letters Henry sent and got a bit dirt on him he had a track record that man definitely sent some very Saucy letters he definitely did I remember on a visit to Hampton Court once reading about there’s there’s actually records of his his love letters that he was sending to one of his wives uh I can’t remember which one and they they they they they come across like this slightly CD ramblings of a teenage boy well you know back then you didn’t have mobile phones you couldn’t send a dickpic um so he would send Saucy letters just sort of endearingly crap well he’d already married them so they can’t escape yeah um did those poor women if you believe Legend he did write the song Green sleeves I didn’t he is a love song yeah but it’s crap I me in this day it was it was a banger though wasn’t it green sleeve because there’s no other songs just there were if there Now That’s What I Call Music you know 1612 then be one song or maybe a remix by a local Bard I don’t know you’d have to have the um David G’s green sleeves oh yeah that that would be a banger Wouldn’t It Anyway coming back to the PO post service this post service was of course just for Henry like most of the other postal systems we’ve talked about they were for The Preserve of the elite but in 1635 Charles I famous for losing his head kicked off The Royal Male service on the 31st of July appointing Thomas witherings postmaster of foreign males and this system saw London connect as far as Edinburgh and on it there were six main post roads throughout the country and the very first post office was set up in Bishop’s Gate Street in London and it’s it’s a bit of a strange system um because there were four main post roads that ran between London DOA Plymouth and Edinburgh and then they later added Bristol and Yarmouth um but if you sent a letter from Yarmouth to Edinburgh it would still have to travel through London so it’s a bit of a weird system however letters tended to travel like basically 24/7 because they had no concept of workers rights but you know who were these brave souls giving this this long difficult incredibly important task can you guess that’s right it’s children of course oh right lovely and my God it was hard work uh although I’m being I’m being a bit uness there were men employed as well but the youngest could be 11 years old and they’re basically given a a bag of you know important documents slung on their back and said off you pop so yes they they traveled usually on foot or sometimes if they were lucky horseback um and of course you know were they rewarded for their hard work no they were paid bugger all um thankfully though over time the system that the Persians had employed like hundreds and hundreds of years ago effectively they finally figured out in medieval times that could actually work for them as well so it eventually became a relay race in the same manner that the Persians used to do it where post boys would travel up to about 20 miles then pass the leral package on to the next person so things hit a bit of a speed bump when the Civil War came along as most things did at the time however luckily Cromwell being the uh the victor of that one uh saw the advantages of the postal system uh after nicking Charles’s job and and decided to keep it uh the Royal mayor was put under direct government control overseen by a man called John thurlo uh who was Oliver cromwell’s notorious b Master General while letters between suspected conspirators had previously been blocked thurlo opted to instead read the letters in transit before delivering them to the intended recipient uh he would then pass off any juicy gossip to his mate Cromwell well I’d assume that that recipient would also get some nice torturing oh yeah yeah probably nice nice stay in the tower yeah but the uh the second protectorate government uh which was cromwell’s government that he formed eventually expanded the service to the entire Commonwealth with the first Postmaster General being appointed in 1661 this was also when the first seal appeared on the mail after the Restoration in 1660 all statute passed by the Cromwell Parliament was chucked out and a general post office was established by the new King Charles II yeah so thurlo was basically kicked out with the restoration um and he was replaced by Henry B Bishop who’s actually formerly a supporter of Charles the first uh who returned with the restoration he’d actually spent the last couple of years in Virginia sort of sitting it out although he was actually on good terms with Parliament when he returned as well um the post office act which was created in this year forly established a publicly owned Postal Service rather than simply being a private Service open to public use it’s a state sponsored state run thing and of course what happened when he took over Bishop was immediately met with complaints about delivery tbings presumably because thurlo spent all his time you know opening the mail reading it and then arresting people rather than actually delivering them um he introduced the world’s first postmark which had effectively it’s that sort of black ink stamp that you get over the actual stamp which gives you the date and the location of the Sorting office all right and he did this because he was he just got sick of people saying where’s my letter it’s late and he said well this will tell us when your letter arrived at the office so if it’s late beat your local post boy because he’s delivered it late it’s not a perfect schin though is it CU you could you could put any date you like on it when you stamp it exactly it’s beauty of it just stamp it like two days before it actually arrives and it’s like it’s not my fault mate is the boys oh genius anyway so things trundled along as they were for a bit and then 1680 um two men called William docka and Robert Murray established the London Penny post which provided a service whereby mail could be delivered within London and its immediate suburbs for one penny the London Penny post was the first service to use hand stamps to postmark the mail indicating the place and time of its posting and confirming that postage have been paid this is generally believed to have been the world’s first postage stamp though not quite as we know it today the success of the London Penny post was so great that the government actually came to see it as a threat to the general post offices Monopoly leading to its takeover a few years later and it becoming a branch of the GP essentially the penny post was Private service competing with the new state well I say new by now it been a couple you know about two decades he was actually a doer was actually found guilty of infringement in a judgment that found in favor of the Duke of York who had been the who was supposed to be the recipient of all the revenue of the post office in that area so um it was absorbed basically it was kind of bit like a MAF a family coming into saying well lovely operation you’ve got here we’ll be taking over from now on um so he kind of got over so while this was a bit crap for dcra uh a few years later in 1688 when James II had uh been removed from Power uh his Replacements decided to uh at least Grant him a pension of £500 a year for his efforts so the Royal Male kept expanding kept growing and by 1784 it was effectively known as as a royal Mel across the country having been you know referred to as a Parcel Service or a package service or post service whatever you want to be royal Mel became the standardized name um and this was partly in thanks to the creation of the stage coat service in 1782 formulated by theater owner John Palmer who got the idea of transporting packages and in in a sort of a big Carriage after he used them to sort of whisk his ax between his theaters that he owned in bar and Bristol when you think of a big sort of traditional car that’s what they look like big rent things with Library all over them they were manned by an arm guard rather than a defenseless little boy so that was a bit of a step up you know it’s very hard for like an 11-year-old to hold a big blunder bus it’s just difficult William pit gave approval for a trial for them in 1784 between Bristol and London and they were massively successful the current record was a day without a coach with the coach it went down to 16 hours and they used to carry around little horns with them that they would blow when they approached a gate which basically signaled get the hell out of the way we’re a post we’re Post Service open the gate and they they couldn’t really stop they could take um they could take passengers actually with them and charge them a fee for traveling with them but if the passenger got off they wouldn’t wait for them oh okay so there are a few stories of few stories of couples traveling and like one gets out to you know use facilities and then the coach has already left they’re just like stuck somewhere for his efforts Palmer was actually later later appointed comp troller of the post office in 1786 I bet as a man who ran theaters he was really pleased to be suddenly find himself as a sort of civil servant so the guards themselves are quite interesting um they wore a Scarlet Red Coat which had blue lapels gold braid and a nice proper black hat so they look respectable you had to you had to look respectable if you were a Royal Male post Postman basically the coaches themselves weirdly not owned by the Roy they were privately hired when did they um their little shorts come in uh I’m not I think that’s more of a us thing no are UK Postman they wear little shorts I don’t know doesn’t feel very answering the um asking the important questions here when did the little shorts come in I’m afraid I I can’t answer that oh no no actually I no I refuse to answer that what about the the trolleys that they carry the parcels in Oh you mean those big sort of big plasticky things yeah yeah those I think those are re they always tie them to like lamp posts with like the weakest amount of lock I do yeah I think they’re kind of hoping someone steals it so they can go home by 1792 there were 16 coaches that left Lombard Street in London Daily with as many inbound uh in addition there were 15 CrossCountry male coaches delivering post around the country but by 1811 there were some Moses knobs stop stop sniggering it’s it’s a great name Moses Moses knobs uh was the most famous guard even appearing on cigarette cards having served 55 years retiring at the age of 71 in 1891 this service ran until 1846 when the railways finally killed it off and some of the guards jumped over to the trains including old Moses if anyone’s interested there’s there’s a free book you can find on the internet just by Googling Moses knobs uh just just be careful with this surname it interviews him and it details his life story he describes some pretty horrific accidents he witnessed on a pretty regular basis but one of the interesting thing was like we all think of like carriages as being held up by high women constantly in his you know 55 years of service he only got attacked once and that was basically when he started and then he just fired a shot into the air and they ran away you you don’t mess with Moses knobs no you don’t you you really don’t no but mail uh was actually also sent by boats um which were called packets with a permanent transatlantic Service established in 1763 if you thought the land ones were for a rough time at least you couldn’t drown the elements were a lot more unkind to those in the water in addition to Pirates and numerous European Wars that plagued deliver gradually the network expanded across the country utilizing new technology and far off destinations it wasn’t until the year Victoria ascended the throne that waves of change were to come yes so uh as we all know Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837 that remarkable year her first year on the throne which had nothing to do with her just a lot lot things seem to happen in Victoria’s reign because she reigned for so long but she just had what has had no bearing on on them but yeah her first year on the throne saw the postal system completely transformed and overhauled into more or less the system we sort of recognize today so previously if you sent a letter you as the receiver had to pay for it bit like placing a collect call so imagine that you you get a letter and it’s it could be anything it could be like if you get a random letter from I know someone you don’t like and they call you an in it you’ve had to pay for that so you’d have to pay to receive your gas bill I mean f full full disclosure they didn’t have gas in in 1837 but yeah you’d have to pay for things I mean if you if you really had it in for someone could you just post them like War and Peace Page by Page you sir are a genius I love that the cost of sending a letter was really expensive so just one single page could cost 12 loaves of bread which put it a bit Out Of Reach of the everyday person because that’s quite a lot of hover to get through so letters were charged based on pages in distance so enter Roland Hill he was a teacher a reformer and an inventor as most victorians they had multiple jobs um bit like our parliamentarians today although less contributing to society and more to their own wealth and he was from kidderminster and he saw the system needed massive reform and he argued that by making it cheaper and easier to use more people would use the system thus increasing profits and the most major reform h was of course will stamps I mean you you couldn’t really talk about Royal m without talking about stamps could you by the mid 19th century the post office was suffering from a series of steady Financial losses and seeking to steady the ship a number of reforms were proposed one of which was the introduction of a flat rate for letters sent anywhere in the country in 1840 two new stamps were introduced to the public the Penny Black for items of up to half an ounce in weight and the 2 Penny blue for items of up to 1 o unlike previous stamps the new ones would be sold directly to the public who would then attach it to the letter themselves as proof of payment to encourage their uptake any letters with insufficient postage or prepaid at the post office would be subject to double postage when delivered that’s right so in just a space of a few short years it completely turned the m St said so it went from as we mentioned pages in distance to wait it went from the receiver having to pay to the sender having to pay and introduced the stamp as proof of postage to facilitate this now what I find really fascinating was that the adoption of the stamp itself came from a very British tradition of a postal competition people wrote into chest how they could prepay for letters and the winner was James Dundee a man from Scotland who floated the idea of a self a deive stamp that could then also be stamped using a postmark as in what we mentioned earlier with the DAT and the time of the Sorting office obviously uh Roland loved the idea and decided to use the image of the of Queen Victoria from 1838 when she just ascended the throne and this one would actually go on to be used for the entirety of her Reign even when you know she was getting a bit long in the tooth and looked nothing like her stamp um 1840 saw the first penny black and it spawned a revolution effectively as well as spawning fatalists everywhere oh oh it’s oh stamp collector is it yeah there we are yeah um I mean I I’m I’m a delist which are far superior you collect uh old PCS no I collect postcards I don’t know which is which is the I don’t know which interests me less thanks I I feel not sh you my postcard collection no you have I think postcard is so much more interesting than a stamp I mean they only started introducing different stamps not the 60s but postcards that been around for ages oh near near where my parents live there’s the um the the Saucy postcard Museum go on your your eyes would be out on stalks if you went there is it is this you telling me you want me to send you more postcards when I go on holiday well you used to send me postcards but they would always there would always be specific types of postcards well the I used to um I used to put it in the post box and laugh at the idea of your your Postman handing it over to you it’s amazing some of those made it through it’s it’s amazing that you stopped uh please stop um anyway the the black Penny stamp actually itself only lasted a year but in that year over six 68 million were printed of which 6 million survive today in some form apparently they estimate they can’t really be sure it was replaced by the penny red in 1841 it was it was actually replaced because it was quite easy to sort of reuse them and they didn’t want people to reuse them oh okay but this coupled with the rise of literacy in part thanks to the Industrial Revolution which saw you know people move from the country to working jobs where they needed a bit of education and literacy helped increase letter writing mely so you know by um I think around 1839 you had about 67 million letters scent by 1844 it was 242 million and by 1875 it was over a billion that’s a lot of ink and paper those poor trees what’s most interesting about this all of it wasn’t just friendly letters of business stuff you have uh some of the first early fishing attempts from con men sending out letters so you know that you get those like I’m a Nigerian prince I need £500 to oh yes yeah was was the prince of Nigeria was was he sending letters to people in the 19th century then no he wasn’t um so there were a couply different actual tricks comies to use some would pretend to be like stranded uh expats in like Spain which was just far enough the way to be exotic and unknowable because of the ignorance of the English much like Nigeria is today when you think about it no one really knows what ner is like unless they’ve been there which is why it was often a common trick CU it’s like it’s far enough away for you to not really know anything but to recognize it if brought up I always thought with the Nigerian scam that there was a certain element of Presumed racism that you were exning out that’s that’s the point like you’re like oh wow I get all this money for helping this like yeah this person what a fool this Prince what does he know I’ll show him so that’s why it was Spain is that that was one trick similar thing would be like can you send me this money to get me out of stook and I’ll send you all this back basically and then there were actual like lodging houses across London home to hundreds of professional begging letter writers that’s what they were called and most of these used to be like you know clerks or Fallen priests or dodgy doctors sorry that had fallen out of favor um and thousands of these were sent daily and like all around the country to different people uh and they defrauded the public of around 50 Grand a year which is about 2 million in today’s terms and in 1840 the number of begging letters doubled with the penny postage so you know it had a negative side effect um there’s one famous person called Henry Henry perfect he was the son of a Le clergyman who was eventually indicted for basically conning all these people and he got money out of the Earl of Carrington Lord Willoughby du broke my favorite lady Littleton lady Howard and a bunch of different Bishops and stuff he owned himself 488s which he was sentenced to 7 years in botney Bay oh that really was the Nigerian prince scam off its day then this actually led to the establishment of the London mity society which uh was a sort of vigilante group that went around trying to track down people who was writing all these letters so stamps carried on uh until really the present day each time being updated with the presid Monarch’s head as we swapped one for another 1965 actually saw the stamps overhauled by the current postmaster at the time Tony Ben to Mark events and National symbols every year there are about 15 new ones issued and the Monarch has to approve all of them initially the queen uh Queen Elizabeth II objected to removing her head entirely which is why uh has always appeared in the corner uh prompting Ben to ponder whether the Monarch interfering with State matters was a good thing or not um interesting note this is breaking news actually uh today they actually announced the new King Charles II stamps I don’t think it’s wise to use the word today give I then cut this oh but suff suffice to say we’re recording this around February yeah which should give you a clue and uh yes just um the the the controversy is that he’s not wearing his Crown he’s not wearing his crown no no yeah it’s quite a simple s the we he looks quite vulnerable actually the the one of George the six um he actually looks like he’s he’s just had a surprise you know stamp stampa you know that was mocking fatalists earlier but they’re quite interesting they’re boring but they sort of represent points in history you see the Monarch and and and after he sort of bends reforms commemorating important events people of the time yeah I guess I I just also like the idea of him and his designer going to the queen here’s some ideas for stamps and she’s like where am I I’m not on these stamps that’s a little exchange I imagine in my head anyway I think it was more like o o what you playing at Ben get out of my Palace sling your ook um just before we touch on another important aspect of the postal system and one of which is also very iconic Roland would also go on to have a number of other achievements he would go on to solve the growing problem of postal confusion in London by sorting it into districts but he he basically drew a 12m radius around central London divided it into 10 in 1857 uh which essentially meant you now had local sorting offices who could now more easily sort and deliver mail across the different districts and this system would last well well into the 20th century and it would be replicated in other cities across the UK and just one other innovation of of his cuz this the man was a genius apparently was to open the first sort of public Savings Bank in 1861 so I I I I don’t know if we still have it I always remember my grand talking about oh just going to go and get my savings from the post office it basically just meant ordinary folk could could give their money it was secured by the government and uh they could you could earn a bit in terms of Interest so by 1866 you know little over like 5 years after opening 600,000 people had signed up and it was worth it a total of 8.2 million I think um from what I remember it eventually got wound up and uh sold off to Alliance and Leicester the post office has always had this I guess not So Much Anymore which is kind of sad but it was like the center of a lot of communities it makes a lot of sense it’s a it’s a state-owned shop front essentially and there’s one in in every town it made a lot of sense for that to be sort of the center of how you know people’s lives are administered how they can do things like savings and sending letters and applying for driving licenses all that sort of thing but gu it also shows that how important communication is but of course one of the major Innovations to enable better communication was of course the post box so as delivery became faster people installed holes in their doors for the letters to be to be popped through without them even having to open it it was quite a wild time and then it got even Wilder uh it was another creative that solved the issue of the long post office queue and that was Anthony trollop uh we just full of funny surnames in this episode aren’t we have you never read an chop I have not what did he write Chronicles of biter I think sound like something I would but I’m sure it’s great yeah so anony TR author of Chronicles of of barit sh he was also a surveyor CL Clark and he proposed the concept of the postal box to solve the issue of making people have to travel to the post office to post their letters in September of 1853 carile got the first ever post box in Britain after they Tri them on the Channel Islands in the year before the first post box was a hexagonal pillar painted green and with the Monarch Cipher red became the universal color in 1874 as green was a bit dreary in the countryside probably also um kind of inadvertently camouflaged if you put it next to a bush as well yes quite quite difficult to spot yeah uh there have been quite a few iterations since including the wall box which was used in rural areas as it was cheaper that’s that sort of flat iron box you see sort of lodged into some post offices so rather than you have it as a separate thing but the um the last design commissioned was the cigar box which fell out of use in 2000s after running from 1980 post boxes are funny that they you you sort of ignore them because they’re part of the Street Furniture but when you actually look at them there’s a lot of different styles out there I actually I live near a very rare post box my one says um Edward the E on it the one who who the one who handed in his notice after was it a few months yeah he fell in love with uh Willis Simpson yeah that was the one he was an American he was he was on the throne just long enough for them to make a few post boxes with his name on and one of them uh landed up near me yeah so the the boxes which were most familiar is the classic Victorian type 8 which was uh developed in 1879 we actually have one of those where I live in in stratum with the original VR Cipher but ciphers themselves are interesting they they’re kind of there to denote it as an official post box but also give it a sort of construction date and a cipher as you said is like just they sort of the the the Monarch’s initial IAL yeah I mean also on slightly less breaking news I think they announced um Charles I thir Cipher uh a couple months ago didn’t they and it’s a very it’s very simple compared to the his predecessors I guess well he’s always talked about being a a streamlined Monarch and I guess from as we mentioned the stamp earlier it’s quite laid-back quite simplistic thing so I think that’s just his style he’s cheap cheerful or rather not cheerful he looks quite miserable in the St cheap cheap and miserable I like it cheap and miserable yeah there’s a monarch I can get behind cheap and miserable um but the uh the oldest post box is actually from 1853 the it’s the uh original design and it’s located at Barnes cross in hallwell near Sherborn in Dorset blue airil post boxes were introduced in 1930 with the service having begun in 1919 you don’t see many blue post boxes anymore transporting packages itself though that’s that’s obviously a key key part of the royal bill so long before Jeff Bezos and his army of Amazon postal delivery workers there was parcel post conceived in 1883 in conjunction with the railways which had obviously been growing in power and um and were just better than you know sending sending a carriage around the country um so they sort of brokered a deal with the train companies to sort of Transport packages across the country this meant a substantial change for the Post Office because now they suddenly had a lot more volume and they were delivering a lot bigger items so it meant they needed to redesign post offices establish sourcing centers and introduce weighing scales in all their offices and this covered more than 15,000 districts um the increase in weight of course of the sacks themselves also led to some of the first sort of sort of Union action because it introduced the minimum wage of 18 Shillings a week for post office workers after they basically demanded higher pay saying my back hurts this is too heavy um this is also actually the first time they became referred to as postmen um you know puberty after all these years of finally struck so yes so trains had actually been carrying maale from way before this in the 1830s but you know we still used other methods of Transport or rather they still used it was the trusty horse which lasted well into the 20th century uh bikes started being tried in the 1880s but they didn’t really take off until the 20th century um so about about 1933 you had about 200 million miles a year traveled by post office bike until they were sort of phased out a little later but yeah there’s there’s so many different forms of travel you have motorbikes and cars that came along in the 20th century as well and other exciting Innovations which I believe you’re going to talk talk to us about yeah so the Postal Service also helped to build new infrastructure and communication across Britain uh so in 1912 it opened a national Tel phone service uh in 1919 it developed the first International Air Mail Service developed by the Royal engineers and the Royal Air Force and uh the London post office Railway was opened in 1927 so the London post office Railway otherwise known as mail rail uh was open and operational from 1927 until 2003 it operated 22 hours a day for 286 days a year and carried around 4 million letters a day it ran from Paddington to Mount Pleasant to uh the oh it ran from Paddington to Mount Pleasant to the eastern district office near White Chapel uh it sadly closed in 2003 due to running costs as Road and rail mail was quicker and cheaper I believe you can still ride on it though can’t you oh and by the way uh it’s also entirely underground yes I’ve actually had the pleasure of riding on the rail maill oh do I say pleasure you you kind of feel like a package sort of crammed into this they haven’t adjusted the train size obviously because the tunnels are quite narrow so you just sort of crammed into this little it sounds like phobics nightmare yeah I wouldn’t go in it if you areic but it is interesting because they take you through the sort of narrative Journey where you stop at some of the stations and then a couple of monotone postal workers start telling you about their past I don’t know about you but as a kid getting post was always quite exciting yeah but when you become an adult it’s all becomes less exciting but as a kid I used to like send off for those like free samples in the post and we get all signs of crap free like the free the free like uh dosing ball from the back of the personal packet or something I no idea what that is don’t no you you put your you you pour your your washing detergent into it and you put it in the drum and it no I I use um they probably very environmentally bad I use the tabs I just Chuck it in the washing machine use tap like a heaven moving on though uh in 1907 the first motor vehicle entered the Postal Service the 2 and 1/2 ton lorri covered 300,000 mil in its 18 years of service and we never really looked back as uh motorized vehicles have become the standard form of transport for uh for moving the mail around the country as seen in in Postman Pat he was always in his van wasn’t he he was he was polluting the countryside with his partner in crime Jess um just just one interesting thing to know about the the the Mel it’s actually kind of mothballed they’ve not closed it down completely because there’s a possibility they might end up using it again and the reason they closed it down because it was it was cheaper to use vans on the road even though everyone said at the time if you close this down you’re just going to add to the traffic and Roy M was like I don’t care it’s cheaper you’d be quite good for deliveroo one thing I want to talk about is actually uh we talked a lot about men and boys and obviously we we as as with that sort of Casal sexism we or ingrained sexism rather we tend to talk about men being in the positions of roles but women in the post office have been a vital part of it for centuries um since 1870s women have worked in the offices as sub poost Mistresses Clarks and telegraphists obviously telegraphs appeared around the 1830s um and became something of a hit you know by 1900 more were sent from within Britain than any other country and uh women were a vital part of of making this all come together and work um there’s actually one postwoman called Elizabeth Dixon who retired in 1908 and over the course of her career clocked up just under 130,000 miles she must have had good legs she like a cart horse in 1901 you have the association of post office women clerks founded it’s the first Association in the UK civil service to actually represent female clerical workers in any form so a bit ahead of their curb there however married women were barred from serving in the post office so if you got married you lose your job uh this happened in 1876 with the ban temporarily lifted in 1914 because of the war effort foot and all the men were sent off to die um so obviously women were expected to pick up the flag interesting enough telegrams became the preferred way I say preferred way became the only way really of informing family of soldiers deaths due to the speed of them um so these kind of got the association attached them of being bad news so you got a telegram it’s like oh Christ who’s died it’s like a phone call in the middle of the night yeah you’re like oh no something bad’s happened where is a letter a nice lovely letter that’s fine that’s that can’t harm me apart from a paper cut to counteract this in 1935 they introduced greetings telegrams in fact that one of the first was the king mailing a happy birthday to the Postmaster General to Mark the birthday of the post office and the last telegram I believe was sent in 1982 which is incredible that is yeah relatively recent isn’t it anyway just coming back to women once the war ended things basically returned to nor near 12 years married women still weren’t allowed to serve in the post office they still had their opportunities limited but thankfully I’d say thankfully then came the second world war where women were once again asked to do their part initially basically for free they actually had a sweetheart appeal which encouraged them to help out their Partners in the office by volunteering um so in 1914 you had over 4,000 women applying to volunteer but 1841 over a 100,000 women were employed and after the war in 1946 finally the marriage bar was lifted and women could you know actually have jobs and families so moving on from that the next major Innovation was the introduction of postcodes which were introduced in a trial in Norwich uh they were rolled out nationally from 1965 to 1974 giving a postcode to every British address postcodes allow male to be sorted automatically by a machine a combination of letters and numbers allows for over 48 million unique combinations making it one of the most precise postcode systems in the world they were based on Roland’s innovation of districts which by 1930 were in operation across 10 major UK cities these were based on city name followed by a number EG in London in 1856 WC stood for Western Central the reason we don’t have S or any postcodes is because of Anthony trollop who in 1866 mered mered NE with E and split s into s e and w makes perfect sense why not makes no sense to me I mean today there are I mean post codes make perfect sense but the way we name them doesn’t make sense in London but yes today there are 1.8 million postcodes in the country these cover more than 30 million individual addresses across 124 areas split into 2,979 districts 11,232 sectors and then the 1.8 million units so quite the mathematical seat interesting enough do you know what the smallest postcode in the country is that covers just one square mile I I I assume it’s going to be something really obvious it’s WC in London WC is it just really tightly packed in there’s a lot there it’s really tightly packed in and it’s rich people yeah I don’t know why it’s so small it’s just it’s just how things were carved up it’s one of those historic postcodes as well but the largest is in vanesse which covers 6,243 square miles all right that Postman must be tired well I’d imagine it’s quite a lot of Countryside however despite this incredible helpful new invention which would make postwork lives so much easier people still ignored them at first they just didn’t write them on to lessers so they had to drum up a huge PR campaign that was almost Relentless featuring these color characters one called Poco the Pink Elephant because nothing says postcodes like a massive Pink Elephant no it makes me think of postcodes controlling people into using them eventually people started to put them on and now that now you you just can’t imagine writing a letter without I mean satav is entirely based on post codes these days it’s uh it’s crazy normally postc code is the first thing you write in a lot of um when you’re ordering online you type in the post code and it just you just pick your house number because just think how confusing it was before then like oh I live on number two King Street how many King streets are there in the UK this is a mental how many King streets are there in London there um there used to be a post code in Twickenham which sadly got retired I believe uh and it was because it was something like top of my head TW w118 which uh written down looks looks a bit rude moving on so in in 1961 the general post office was changed from a government Department to a statutory Corporation meaning that the office of Postmaster General was abolished and replaced with the positions of chairman and chief executive in the new company in 1968 the two Class Postal System was introduced using first class and second class Services again another world first I I wasn’t aware that that was such a recent thing first class and second class it’s it’s if the English can find a way to divvy up things by class they will oh yeah just it’s just a way of get more money isn’t it weirdly the phone service was also post office run until 1981 uh starting in 1912 phones were in hotels and public buildings before progressing to the street in the 1920s the one we are most familiar with is the k6 designed and introduced in 1935 under George V uh British Telecom was eventually separated from the post office Corporation in 1980 and demerged as an independent business in 1981 in in 1986 the post office was organized into three separate businesses Royal mail letters parcels and counters the parcel’s business uh forms the foundation of parcel Force further changes came under the labor government of the late 90s and early 2000s with the Postal Services act 2000 where the post office became a public limited company uh the company was infamously renamed consignia in 2001 um to I I actually remember this being in the news it was not a popular change well it it was so unpopular that they had to basically re it’s bit like New Coke they just had to quietly phase it out and return to the original yeah it’s weird though isn’t it Royal Male post offices they such sort of uh iconic Brands and consignia is is not a few years later in January 2006 the Royal Male eventually lost its 350-year Monopoly and the British postal Market was opened fully to competition the competitors were allowed to collect and sort mail and also pass it onto Royal Mail for delivery uh this has led to uh online postage allowing the general public to pay for and print their own stamps without having to visit a post office yeah and and this is basically we’re coming to the end of the the Royal M as a as a state-owned company now as we know it because uh the privatization of Royal M almost began immediately after the conservatives got into Power alongside the the liberal Democrat Buddies the same year interestingly the the Royal M got its first ever CEO who was a woman and that was Moya green um following the Postal Services Act of 2011 a majority of shares in Royal M were then put on the stock exchange although that didn’t actually happen till 2013 and the UK government initially retained a 30% stake meaning it was still partly publicly owned but in 2015 it sold all of its remaining shares meaning it’s entirely privately owned ending 499 years of State ownership yeah so while raw M does continue in name as a private Corporation sort of the end of it as as sort of the national Postal Service of Britain so in that 500 year history it’s well initially started out as a something for the king then moved to the public then became a completely state-owned thing then became the center of was it was the heart of many communities and gradually in the in the space of a few decades it was just sold off I mean there are arguments both way aren’t they whether it should have been carved up and sold off times are changing since more royl was privatized they’ve dished out 1.9 billion in profits to shareholders which is incredible considering that Royal M posties have been on strike over poor pay and it’s the same with a lot of things we privatized the water companies we privatized in the in the what the ‘ 80s and they were privatized because they were massively in debt they were underfunded so we thought oh let the private sector take care of them and now they’re in a worse state they’re in massive amount of debt but they’re still paying out billions to shareholders I mean somewhere down the middle probably some things have I expect been a success privatized and some things have been an abject failure I mean I think about the railways and the St State there in but they are privatized they are privatized and work very well I don’t know yeah give me one good example of privatization uh I haven’t got one I was going to say Rover and then I remember that failed okay yeah move on move on so that is a very brief Roundup of one of Britain’s most iconic and longlasting National institutions which is sadly probably in its death row yeah well that’s a nice note to the end on isn’t [Music] it right well that was as you said a jolly ending um this is actually the part where we usually talk about an interesting fact or myth but owing to audience feedback we have had a slight retooling this is exciting it’s going to be a quiz yeah yeah so every episode we will test each other on the respective topics that we talked about it’s getting very radio four isn’t it it’s very radio four I mean who doesn’t love a quiz um and as I said I prepared some special sound effects and I I don’t think I’m going to have to use this much but I have a a ping sound for every correct answer you get I like it yeah yeah good okay yeah and then a classic no not so keen on that one um I’m very much of the opinion if you don’t learn something by the end of the quiz it’s a failure as a quiz right okay obviously my quiz nights aren’t as packed as they they used to be no um no don’t worry it’s goingon to be fun uh but hopefully you will also learn something although I did once ask a quiz question I said what what famous 90s movie is about a young boy befriending a dolphin flipper it’s actually free Willie is the answer I was looking for is it killer worlds of dolphins I I I made so many people upset with that question you sound unbearable anyway here is the first of what I hope is many interesting quizzes don’t worry there’s only five questions and I’ll I’ll also put attention bed on and don’t worry they’re multiple choice I should add that as well so you’ve got a choice I’m not just going to leave you Lim question one what is Postman Pat’s surname is it a Stewart B Clifton or C maor I would love it to be Stuart but um I think it’s Clifton okay I get the good noise right yeah yeah yeah I didn’t expect you to hear that at all so you’re already winning in my you you underestimated my Postman Pat knowledge ah I did yes but you just took a punt that’s beest you didn’t know um question two whose post code is xm4 5hq is it a the Queen B Danger Mouse or C father Christmas well Father Christmas uh from what I understand does not live in the UK and D M lived in a dust bin so um the queen lived in a post box he live in a post box you Liv in the post why living in a dust bin uh you thinking about Oscar from Sesame Street I might be I think I think the Queen’s quite important she probably has her own post code she does have her own postcode but it’s actually father Christmas’s postcode is he yeah xm4 CHR Christmas xm4 question three Reginal Bray who lived in the early 20th century died in 1939 made it a lifelong habit of sending unusual things through the post these include a postcard made of shirt cuffs a rabbit skull and frying pan but what didn’t he send in the mail a a turnip B his his underwear or see himself I think it’s the turnip it get bashed around it’s not going to survive the post is it no it’s his underwear he did try and send a turnip and he did try and post himself Bray conducted a lifelong campaign of sending unusual items and he would often actually send just things without addresses but just print a photograph on on the front cover and say it’s there oh question four which book caused such a stir upon release that uh the post office obtained a warrant to open any suspected packages containing it in 1933 was that a mine Camp B lady chat’s lover will see ulyses I can’t remember when lady chat’s lover came out but I know it was controversial 1930 sounds about right for mine Campa though I’m going to go mine Camp a it’s actually ulses which was banned for a very long time yeah poor old James choice and finally I can’t remember how many how many you’ve got right I think you’ve got one so far one I got one let’s not rub it in I’m not looking forward to the next episode question five is easy though because we did talk about this in the previous episode when did the world’s first Christmas card go on sale oh that was so was it a 1842 B 1843 or C 1844 okay I think I see what you did that yeah just trying to trying to help 1842 one year out although considering the choices you were quite you you were you were close you were you were close it was 1843 1843 right well well you’ve scored one out of five well done a respectable one out of five there is no prize for that level of school no if you had gotten at least three I would have mailed you like a melin or something yeah well one of your dors balls whatever they called I’ve run better with this one than I do with only connect at [Music] least that is uh that’s the end of this episode all wrapped up like a neat little package exactly 500 years of history there a lot to cover we didn’t cover the BT Tower either well we just have there we go BT Tower tick that one off anyway uh thank you for listening um do please uh remember to subscribe we’re in all the usual places uh you can also email us at info@ the gallam mor. show if you have any feedback or questions or complaints or you’d like to see Nick’s Saucy postcard collection I’m sure he’d be willing to share it with you I I I I could upload it to our Instagram I could share some of my best my best postcards well then I think all that’s left is to leave you with um the clue for the next [Music] [Music] episode [Music]