1516 Henry VII established the 'Master of the Posts' which was later to become the office of 'Postmaster General' 1635 Charles I made the postal service available to the general public on 31st July. The cost of the delivery was paid by the recipient. 1654 Oliver Cromwell granted a monopoly on mail delivery in England to the 'Office of Postage'. 1657 Fixed postal rates were introduced. 1660 Charles II established the General Post Office. 1661 The first 'Postmaster General' was appointed and a postage date stamp (post mark) was first used. 1784 The first mail coach was introduced which ran between Bristol and London. 1793 Postmen in uniforms were seen for the first time. 1830 The first mail train deliveries were made, running from Liverpool to Manchester. 1837 The adhesive postage stamp was invented by Rowland Hill, for which he was knighted. 1838 The Post Office money order system was introduced. 1840 The 'penny black', the first adhesive postage stamp, was introduced and the uniform 'penny post' was established. 1852 The first Post Office pillar box was erected in Jersey, in the Channel Islands. 1853 The first post boxes were erected in mainland Britain at Botchergate, Carlisle. 1857 The first wall post boxes were installed at Market Drayton and Shrewsbury. 1863 The first trials were made by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, sending mail by underground rail between postal depots. 1870 The Post Office launched its telegraph service. In the same year, the Post Office Act banned the sending of 'indecent or obscene' items. 1870 The first postcards were introduced with the ½d postal rate and provision was made for the issue of newspaper wrappers. 1880 Postmen started to deliver mail on bicycles.

The Post Office Act 1969 In 1969 the GPO was abolished and its assets transferred to The Post Office when it changed from being a Royal Chartered Government Department to a statutory corporation. Responsibility for telecommunications was awarded to Post Office Telecommunications, which had succeeded the GPO Telegraph and Telephones department, with a separate budget and management. Rebranding saw the word 'General' being dropped from the name. The office of 'Postmaster General' was abolished, being replaced with the positions of chairman and chief executive officer. The striped 'Post Office' lettering currently in use by Royal Mail was introduced in 1975. Jersey Post and Guernsey Post also became independent in 1969 with the Isle of Man Post purchasing GPO assets on the island and operating independently from 5th July 1973.

Post Office Savings and Postal Orders

The number of post-war Crown post offices peaked at just over 1,800 in the middle of the Sixties and had been reduced to fewer than 400 by 2011. The UK was the first country to operate a postal savings system, in 1861, to provide for poorer depositors who did not have access to banks which catered for wealthy customers. The system was championed by Sir Rowland Hill, and Chancellor of the Exchequer William Ewart Gladstone viewed it as a way of financing the public debt. The original scheme was limited to deposits of £30 a year and a maximum balance of £150, with interest being paid at the rate of two and a half percent per year on whole pounds. This was later raised to a maximum annual deposit of £500 with no limit on the total. Within five years there were more than 600,000 accounts and £8 million on deposit. By 1927 this had grown to twelve million accounts with £283 million on deposit. Initially the UK system offered only savings accounts, but in 1880 it also started to sell government bonds and, in 1916, introduced war savings certificates. These were renamed National Savings Certificates in 1920. The lottery bond, or 'Premium Bond' was launched in 1956 and soon became its most popular savings certificate. The Post Office Savings Bank became The National Savings Bank in 1969, later being renamed National Savings and Investments. While still continuing to offer National Savings services, the General Post Office also created the National Giro in 1968, later privatised as Girobank and acquired by the Alliance & Leicester in 1989.

An engraver called Arthur Bull queued up for three hours in 1881 to purchase the first postal order, serial number 000001, for one shilling. The original was later sold at auction for almost £4,500. Only five other 1881 postal orders bearing the same 000001 number are known to have survived but this was the first one ever produced by the main Lombard Street post office. Ten post offices were issued with books starting with the number 000001 in 1881, but only half of these have currently been identified as still being in existence. Postal orders were invented in the Victorian era as a safe and secure method of sending money through the post. The first ones contained the watermark 'Postal order / One shilling' as a device to combat potential forgery. The postal order measured 21cm (8.5in) by 9cm (3.5in), smaller than modern versions, and was not issued with any counterfoil or stub for the teller to retain as a transaction record. The postal order idea was formalised from a money order that had already been established by a private company in 1792 and was created as a means of allowing 'poor' people to buy goods via mail without a bank account. During both world wars they were used as a substitute for cash to save both paper and labour.

The Post Office Railway Services

The Underground Railway By the start of the 20th century, traffic conditions and London smog meant that mail being carried between railway stations and the main Post Offices was increasingly delayed. Previously, trials had been carried out by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company in 1863, sending mail by underground rail between postal depots but, in 1909 a committee was formed to study the possible use of underground railways and, in February 1911, it recommended the construction of an electric railway using driverless trains. This was accepted and in 1913 the Post Office (London) Railway Bill was passed as an Act of Parliament. The proposed underground railway was to be about 6.5 miles in length at an average depth of 70ft, connecting East and West London, and with eight stations which were to be situated at Paddington District Office, Western Parcels, Western D.O., Western Central D.O., Mount Pleasant, King Edward Building, Eastern D.O. and Liverpool Street. Construction began in 1914 (a short experimental track with one car was also erected on Plumstead Marshes). Tunneling work was completed in 1917 but, due to war costs, the Treasury would not allow the ordering or installation of operating equipment. Not only that, but the high price of post-war materials delayed further work on the railway until 1923. It was finally opened on 5th December 1927 with parcels transported between Mount Pleasant and Paddington. Mount Pleasant to Liverpool Street opened for Christmas parcels from 19th December, moving to a full service on 28th December. Liverpool Street to the Eastern D.O. opened for parcels on 2nd January 1928 and letter transportation commenced on 13th February when the West Central D.O. opened, followed by the Western D.O. on 12th March. The trains ran in a 9ft diameter tunnel containing a double 2ft gauge track. The trains were much smaller than their passenger counterparts but the stations were much the same. During the First World War the tunnels were used to store art treasures from the Tate and National Portrait galleries. The original rolling stock consisted of 90 trains, but these had to be replaced within three years due to excessive wear. The new trains were 27ft long single cars each able to carry four mail bag containers that held about 15 bags of letters or six of parcels. Further replacements were trialed in the Sixties with a new fleet being introduced in 1980. The Western Parcels and Western D.O. stations were closed in 1965 to be replaced by a station at the new Western D.O. in Rathbone Place, opened on a new section of track on 3rd August 1965. On its 60th anniversary in 1987, the name of the service was changed to 'Mail Rail' with some of the trains being rebuilt with streamlined body work. The underground railway that ran from Paddington to the Whitechapel Office (pictured) closed in 2003. At its zenith 30,000 mailbags, containing some 4 million letters, would be transported 6.5 miles in around 26 minutes.

Rail parcels (as opposed to parcels carried on behalf of the GPO) were a specialised high value category of traffic, the volume of which was sufficient for it to warrant being carried separately from the main railway goods traffic either in guarded compartments of passenger trains or in special parcel trains. Rail companies operated dedicated fleets of vans to transport parcels between main stations while, at smaller local stations the customer usually had to deliver to, or collect from, the station themselves. These trains were a regular feature of rail traffic from about 1900. The Post Office was not originally allowed to handle parcels and the rail companies were against allowing them to do so but The Post Office Parcels Act of 1882 allowed the GPO to enter this area of the business and they were offering a parcels service from 1883. Post Office parcels very soon became a major user of the railways for transporting long distance parcels but the two services were not combined and separate rail company parcel trains continued to be used. An overnight delivery service operating between London and Glasgow started in 1967. From the late 1950's purpose-built parcel railcars were built, called DPUs. Rail parcels were booked in from an office at the passenger station and restricted in both size and weight, so not just anything could be sent. Any oversize or heavy items would only be dealt with at a goods yard. At branch line stations the parcels were loaded and unloaded from the guards compartment at the passenger platform. In urban stations there was often a platform dedicated to handling parcels. Major city stations often operated a dedicated parcel depot with longer platforms to allow access to the vans. Originally, four-wheeled trolleys were used to move mail bags and parcels around the platforms but they were really designed for luggage therefore, in the mid-Sixties, British Railways developed low floor wire cage trolleys known as BRUTE (British Railways Utility Trolley Equipment) to replace them.

Volume Handling

Post Boxes One of the iconic 'British' symbols, the first red pillar post box was seen in 1852 when it was erected in Jersey, Channel Islands. A cheaper and more convenient alternative, the roadside 'wall' box, followed in 1857. The first pillar box on the mainland was installed at Botchergate, Carlisle in 1853. In 1856, Richard Redgrave designed a more ornate pillar box for use in London and other major cities. The design was improved in 1859 and this became the national 'standard' pillar box. Initially, green was used as the standard colour for early Victorian post boxes, being changed to red in July 1874, starting in London. Between 1866 and 1879 the hexagonal 'Penfold' box became the standard design for a while. All post boxes have the Royal Cipher of the reigning monarch at the time the box was manufactured, so any new post boxes made in the Sixties, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth ll, have EIIR on them Post Codes With an increase in mail volume after the Second World War, a national post coding scheme became a requirement in order to enable mail to be sorted automatically by machine. By the early 1960s, the Post Office had implemented a major programme of mechanisation intended to reduce the need for labour-intensive sorting. The first postcodes were introduced in 1959, on a trial basis, in Norwich where the first three characters of the code (NOR) represented the name of the city and the last three characters a particular street or location, with large companies and businesses having their own individual codes. Norwich possessed eight sorting machines that had been adapted to allow operators to simply key in the postcode to sort letters into postmen's delivery rounds. This experiment was not as successful as had been hoped as less than half of the letters posted actually bore post codes, and it was also established that a much greater division of the last three characters was needed. A new postcode system was developed from the Norwich trials and the currently-used system was introduced in 1966, in Croydon, with technological advancements allowing sorting machines to 'read' codes which were put into a machine-readable form by printing phosphor dots on the letters. The coding for the whole country was carried out in stages, finally being completed in 1974 with, ironically, the recoding of Norwich.

Postage Prices

Periods of deflation in the nineteenth century raised the real cost of the Victorian 'penny post' but, by retaining the penny rate for most of the First World War during high inflation, the real cost was cut back again. Failing to keep postage rates in line with inflation had much the same effect between 1945 and 1965, which contributed to the financial crisis faced by the new Post Office Corporation in the 1970s.

*There was a 2s 0d concessionary 'printed papers rate' for second class mail up to 2lb applied to items that would have qualified as printed papers under the pre-two tier system.
**Due to the postal strike in that year, rates were in force on 'Decimalisation Day' only at offices with enough non-striking staff for local deliveries, but were not in general use until after the strike, on 8th March.

Post Marks, First Day Covers and Commemorative Issues

First used in 1661, a post mark (also known as 'cancels', 'cancellations', 'obliterations' or 'hand stamps') is an official mark applied by a post service provider to mail items, mainly to ensure that postage stamps are not re-used. They may also be applied to indicate that franked mail (pre-printed postal stationery) has an appropriate rate of postage. Postmarks used by Royal Mail may contain additional text or designs, but always include a date and post town to indicate where and when any particular mail item was posted or sorted. As with stamp issues, there have been a variety of 'special' and commemorative post marks used over the years and are just as collectable. The most notable post marks are probably those applied by hand to 'first day covers' which have specially designed envelopes carrying postage stamps and have been postmarked on the day the stamps were issued by the Post Office. The first recognised 'first day cover' was the 'penny black' issued on the 6th May 1840. Since then most UK stamps have had a known First Day Of Issue date. For a lot of earlier issues (mostly Victorian) the exact issue date is unclear so the earliest used date known applies. When Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952, new stamps were produced in variations on a theme that became known as the 'Wilding issues', based on a portrait by photographer Dorothy Wilding. 'Wildings' were used until 5th June 1967 when they were superseded by the 'Machin' issues which consisted of a profile of the Queen on a solid colour background, which is still the standard definitive British stamp design. It was in the Sixties that the revenue potential of commemorative postage stamps started to be exploited. Prior to 1961 very few commemorative issues had been released so Tony Benn and Postmaster General Reginald Bevins persuaded the Post Office to issue 'special' stamps at more regular intervals. In 1965, The Right Honourable Tony Benn, who became the Postmaster General after Labour's election win that year, worked with designer David Gentleman to develop the criteria for stamp creation which was to be based on celebrating events of national and international importance, important anniversaries and the British contribution to the world in arts, science and technology. It was also intended to increase public patronage to the arts by encouraging the development of 'minuscule art'. The first stamp to be issued under Benn's administration, and the first to feature a contemporary individual, was the Sir Winston Churchill set which was designed by Gentleman and issued in July 1965. The 'Christmas stamp' tradition began in 1966 when pictures, designed by children, of a snowman and a wise man were issued. In most years, from 1965 onwards, between six and ten sets were issued every year, on different themes. For serious collectors, slight variations in production processes plus the addition of phosphor bands to some issues make the possible actual number of variations issued number in the thousands, therefore the images presented here show only the basic design elements for each issue of significance and not all variations.

UK Postage Stamp Issues

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1960 'Wilding' Definitives Definitive British Stamps
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7th July 1960 Tercentenary of Establishment of General Letter Office
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19th September 1960 1st Anniversary of European Postal & Telecommunications Conference
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28th August 1961 Centenary of Post Office Savings Bank
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18th September 1961 European Postal & Telecommunications (C.E.P.T.) Conference, Torquay
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25th September 1961 7th Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference
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14th November 1962 National Productivity Year (also issued in Phosphor)
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21st March 1963 Freedom From Hunger (Introduction of First Day Issue postmark) (also issued in Phosphor)
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7th May 1963 Paris Postal Conference Centenary (also issued in Phosphor)
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16th May 1963 National Nature Week (also issued in Phosphor)
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31st May 1963 Ninth International Lifeboat Conference (also issued in Phosphor)
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15th August 1963 Red Cross Centenary Congress (also issued in Phosphor)
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3rd December 1963 Opening of COMPAC Trans-Pacific Telephone Cable (also issued in Phosphor)
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23rd April 1964 Shakespeare Festival (Introduction of GPO presentation pack also issued in Phosphor)
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1st July 1964 20th International Geographical Congress (also issued in Phosphor)
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5th August 1964 10th International Botanical Congress (also issued in Phosphor)
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4th September 1964 Opening of Forth Road Bridge (also issued in Phosphor)
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8th July 1965 Winston Churchill Commemoration (also issued in Phosphor)
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19th July 1965 700th Anniversary of Parliament (also issued in Phosphor)
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9th August 1965 Salvation Army Centenary (also issued in Phosphor)
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1st September 1965 Centenary of Joseph Lister's Discovery of Antiseptic Surgery (also issued in Phosphor)
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1st September 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival (also issued in Phosphor)
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13th September 1965 25th Anniversary of Battle of Britain (6 different 4d stamps, also issued in Phosphor)
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13th September 1965 25th Anniversary of Battle of Britain (9d & 1s3d, also issued in Phosphor)
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8th October 1965 Post Office Tower (also issued in Phosphor)
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25th October 1965 20th Anniversary of U.N.O. and International Co-Operation Year (also issued in Phosphor)
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15th November 1965 International Telecommunication Union Centenary (also issued in Phosphor)
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25th January 1966 Robert Burns Commemoration (also issued in Phosphor)
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28th February 1966 900th Anniversary of Westminster Abbey (also issued in Phosphor)
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2nd May 1966 Landscapes (also issued in Phosphor)
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1st June 1966 World Cup Football Championship
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8th August 1966 British Birds
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18th August 1966 England's World Cup Football Victory (4d from June, with 'England Winners' added)
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19th September 1966 British Technology
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14th October 1966 900th Anniversary of Battle of Hastings (6 different 4d stamps)
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14th October 1966 900th Anniversary of Battle of Hastings (6d & 1s3d)
1st December 1966 Christmas
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20th February 1967 European Free Trade Association (EFTA)
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1967 Regional Definitives Wales, Scotland, Ireland
24th April 1967 British Wild Flowers
1967 Pre-Decimal 'Machin' Definitive
10th July 1967 British Painters
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24th July 1967 Sir Francis Chichester's Round the World Voyage
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19th September 1967 British Discoveries and Inventions
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18th October 1967 Christmas (4d value) 27th November 1967 (3d & 1s6d values)
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29th April 1968 British Bridges
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29th May 1968 British Anniversaries
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12th August 1968 British Paintings
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4th September 1968 Regional Definitives Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland
25th November 1968 Christmas
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15th January 1969 British Ships
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3rd March 1969 First Flight of Concorde
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5th March 1969 High Value 'Machin' Definitives
2nd April 1969 Anniversaries
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28th May 1969 British Architecture, Cathedrals
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1st July 1969 Investiture of HRH The Prince of Wales
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13th August 1969 Gandhi Centenary Year
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1st October 1969 Post Office Technology Commemoration
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26th November 1969 Christmas

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