A Victorian post office was much more than a place to buy stamps, drop off a parcel or post a letter. It was a place to meet and talk with others, to see and be seen. For many it acted as a social hub and pillar of the community – a place routinely visited for advice from the counter clerk, or to hear the gossip of fellow customers. When the first Crown Post Offices were springing up in the 1850s, they came to be regarded as emblems of civic orderliness and even symbols of the state. They connected you not just with a national institution, but with the millions of other people who also used them too. The services they provided increased the security and wellbeing of every part of the community.

Following the introduction of the penny black in 1840, mail volumes grew massively. In the 1850s surveyors visited every rural village and commissioned thousands of new offices. While in 1854 there were about 9,000 rural sub-post offices, this grew to 16,000 by the turn of the century. Those who were appointed as Sub-Postmasters had two identities as both a civil servant and local trader. As employees of a national institution they were figures of civic responsibility, but their place of work was often also the local shop or some other small family businesses. In providing jobs in the local community as counter clerks or letter carriers, they were also figures of authority, seen by many in similar terms to a vicar or a doctor.

This episode of The People's Post revealed how people felt about their local post office 150 years ago and brought to life the stories of employees and customers. It also made the link between the spread of sub-post offices and another great social reform of the Victorian period: the Post Office Savings Bank. This for the first time opened up a banking facility for the poorest classes of society by providing anyone who applied with a depositors' book for small-savings as well as a local office, easy to reach and open at convenient hours, to make deposits and withdrawals. In this and other ways, we heard in this episode of how post offices took on vital roles in local communities and became a provider of public service to the nation.

Further Reading

For further reading on the history of post offices, their architecture and changing social roles, including photographs, see Julian Stray, Post Offices (2010). For those interested in the life of Sub-Postmasters, the BPMA holds contemporary volumes of relevant newspapers and journals in the Royal Mail Archive such as POST 115/600, The Sub-Postmaster: The Official Organ of the National Federation of Sub-Postmasters, 1899-1900. Chris Taft's blog The Post Office in the Community gives further information on this topic.

Illustrations

'A Country Post Office', 1837

'The Village Post Office', 1853

'Portrait of a Postman', 1900-12