Post early for Christmas ...... to a place in the 1950s

Now I think the Post Office must do things differently from when I was growing up in the 1950s.

Back then delightful and innovative posters appeared every year in the run up to Christmas.

And this is one I like.  

It comes from the collection of David Harrop who collects all things posty and thinks it dates from the 1950s.

A trawl of GPO sites didn’t advance my research and so the 1950s it is.

Today a quick flick through the internet will offer up the details of the last dates to send letters, cards and parcels to every part of the globe.

But back in the 1950s we did indeed do things differently, and posters like this were on display in Post Offices and probably other public places.

And I seem to recall as the 1950s slid into the next decade that information began appearing on the telly, with a mix of serious public announcements with rather silly ones delivered in the form of a cartoon.

And that is all I am going to say.

Location; the 1950s

Picture; Post Early, circa 1950s, from the collection of David Harrop

What you find in your cellar …………

 Never throw anything away is by and large a lifestyle choice I have followed for my entire life.

It allows me to rediscover odd ephemera, which have lain for decades in “safe places”, so safe I had forgotten they were there.

And so, it is with the Newsletter of The British Postal Museum and Archive, from February 2014. 

Just why I had signed up for the publication is now lost in time, nor do I have other copies and this one has sat in the cellar for I guess nine years, along with a heap of books, and lots of photocopied sheets of newspapers, and archive material.

I had gone looking for my collection of school history textbooks, which proved elusive, but I turned up this solitary newsletter, and what a good read it was.

Included in the sixteen pages were articles about the Museum, lists of up-and-coming talks, stories from the history of the Post Office and dips into the archive.

So all in all a good find, but one which perhaps needs a new home, and so I will offer it up to my “posty” friend, David Harrop, whose collection of Postal History memorabilia must rank as one of the largest and interesting in the country.

And that is that other than to say the article by Emma Harper who was the curator back in 2014 on a truncheon issued to GPO staff in 1848, is a gem.

Location; our cellar

Pictures; Interior of Travelling Post Office, 1935, framed artwork for a poster. Artist Charlton, George, Post Office 109/375, and Mt Favourite Object, Emma, Harper, from Newsletter of The British Postal Museum and Archive, from February 2014

*The British Postal Museum and Archive, https://www.postalmuseum.org/

A Lifeboat procession ......... a collection of postal workers ...... and something new

So, I wonder what these men of the Post Office thought about dressing up in the summer of 1907 for the procession to mark Lifeboat Saturday. *

Or just who got to choose who dressed up as a Post Mistress through the ages.

The chap imitating a post box seems happy enough but the onerous task of pretending to be the Postmaster General seems too much for his colleague who looks into the far distance.  He may well have felt the part with the embroidered lettering PMG and walking stick, but there is a hint that he is either very uncomfortable playing the part or such a role is below his dignity.

Of course, we will never know but together the team seem a bit abashed at their contribution which celebrates the history of the Postal Service.

And so they should, because my old friend David Harrop, he of all things postal, informs me that behind them is one of the first mechanised postal vans, marking that transition from horse to petrol.

To this I can add from my Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, "that around 1904 the Royal mail introduced their Rapid Transit Mail Delivery using a motorised tricycle and in 1907,  the first motor vehicle entered Royal Mail service - this was a 2.5 tonne lorry called the Maudslay Stores Number 1 (the first vehicles were stores vehicles rather than mail vehicles). The vehicle was in service for 18 years during which it covered over 300,000 miles”.

All of which means that this picture postcard is quite a find.

And that is all I have to say, except that the first Lifeboat collection happened here in Manchester in 1891, following a disaster when five years earlier, 27 men from Southport and St Anne’s died while trying to rescue sailors from the stricken vessel the Mexico.**

Location; Ipswich, 1907

Picture; Lifeboat Saturday, Ipswich, 1907, from the collection of David Harrop

*1891 First Street Collection, RNLI, https://rnli.org/about-us/our-history/timeline/1891-first-street-collection

** Royal Mail Graces Guide to British Industrial History https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Royal_Mail#:~:text=1907%20The%20first%20motor%20vehicle,it%20covered%20over%20300%2C000%20miles