The Friday Post

These days the Friday Post can drop onto my doormat as early as Saturday afternoon…

You see how things go?  A couple of posts whingeing about whingeing posts: a couple of days with nothing to say before it occurs to me that a) the actual physical post has just been delivered and, for once, it includes something that is not advertising material.  It is a bill.  It is for somebody else.  They live in Somerset, and b) other than it is not what it once was, I know very little about the British Postal system.  So I had a little dig…

It would appear that Henry VIII was the founder of the Postal Service in 1516 and declared himself Master of the Posts.  However it is not clear who might have used this service and it may well have been simply for the use of the King himself, who found himself sending out so many Christmas cards by the time he had tied himself to his sixth tribe of in-laws, that members of his own court could no longer cope.

In 1635, Charles I made the system available to the public for the first time.  The postage was, at this time paid for by the recipient, which led to a mini financial crisis as nobody ever had the change required to pay the postage on Final Demands.  The state Monopoly was farmed out first to Thomas Witherings and later Edmund Prideux who, despite the fact that the vast majority of the country was illiterate, managed to make himself very rich, presumably by allowing men to mistakenly send pencil sketches of their genitalia to every woman in the village who hadn’t already seen them e.g. the cobbler’s blind daughter and the blacksmith’s tattooed assistant who, it was rumoured, performed satanistic rituals with a variety of root vegetables.

In 1660, following the Restoration of the Monarchy, Charles II re-branded the service as the General Post Office and the British love of queuing was born.

1784 saw the introduction of the first Mail Coach followed, later that year, by the first bag of post being ‘eaten by the horse’.

1830 saw the introduction of the first Mail Train, between Manchester and Liverpool and is, incidentally the first recorded instance of all of yesterday’s mail being redirected through Crewe.

Rowland Hill proposed (1840) that mail should be paid for by the sender rather than the recipient – meaning that no-one ever again could be accused of being ignorant of the Co-op’s latest BOGOF offer.  The uniform fee was one penny (approximately thirty eight million pounds in today’s currency) and in May of that year the first stamp, the Penny Black, was introduced to show that the fee had been paid.  An early example of this system has just been found at the bottom of our local postman’s bag.

As Britain was the first country to issue postage stamps, it is the only country that does not show the country name on its stamps, which rather leaves me wondering why I have to specify ‘English (UK)’ on every Microsoft product I attempt to use, in order to stop the spellcheck facility automatically changing ‘aubergine’ to ‘eggplant’. 

Britain’s first Post Box was erected in 1852 and went almost a week before somebody ‘posted’ dog shit in it.

A two-tier postal system was introduced in 1968 which meant that the Royal Family and members of the aristocracy could have their mail delivered the next day, whilst the rest of the country, paying for the Second Class, might as well deliver it themselves quite frankly.

2004 the Second Daily Delivery was abolished meaning that anything not delivered in the morning post would not arrive until a week next Tuesday, having been redirected through the Falkland Islands.

2007 saw the end of post box collections on Sunday so that postal workers would be able to observe the Sabbath by watching the football with a curry and half a dozen tins of lukewarm Stella.

2010 Royal Mail was privatised, at which time it signed a Universal Service Guarantee that expired in 2021 – the last time it was known for any mail to be delivered on time.

The current Postmaster General (now known as Chairman) is Simon Thompson, who was also managing director of the NHS Test and Trace programme in the UK, which offers me great assurance every time I drop something precious into the post box…