Author: drgreen

“Behind the Scenes” : Christmas at the Post Office

‘We post our letters of good cheer/ Now that Christmas draws so near’. Early 20th century Christmas card. © Royal Mail Group Ltd, courtesy of The Postal Museum, 2005-0101/2 In 1843 Henry Cole, who had campaigned along with Rowland Hill for the introduction of the Penny Post, invented the first Christmas card. The idea soon… Read More

The Innkeeper Postmaster and the French Fugitives

Armand Philippon. By Richard Caton Woodville, Jr. – National Army Museum, London. Accessed via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philippon.jpg  On Saturday last John Hughes, innkeeper and postmaster of Rye, and William Robinson, who (with a man named William Platter) were convicted… of having aided in the escape of General Phillippon [sic] and Lieutenant Garnier, were placed in and upon… Read More

Measurements and Messengers: Growing Pains in the General Post Office

Boy messenger at Paddington Station, 1935 © Royal Mail Group Ltd [1935], courtesy of The Postal Museum, POST 118/426 In 1936 the Postmaster-General wrote in an article entitled ‘Making an A1 Nation’ that ‘the Post Office may indeed fairly claim…that it has in its employment a healthy and happy body of boys of whose conduct… Read More

Getting Hands on with Occupational Health

On 9th of April our project launched an exhibition at the Museum of Communication Burntisland entitled Hand Health in the Post Office. The exhibition traces the long history of occupational hand disorders in the workplace, from telegraphists’ cramp in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Post Office through to the “occupational epidemic” of Repetitive Strain… Read More

Blindness in the Post Office

When we think of blindness in the Post Office, one example typically comes to mind: that of Henry Fawcett, ‘the blind postmaster’. Blinded in a hunting accident at the age of twenty-five, Henry nonetheless managed to fulfil his academic and political aspirations. He oversaw a key period of modernisation in the Post Office, introducing revised… Read More

Dr Joseph Chick

Joe Chick joins the Addressing Health team as a part-time research assistant. Joe is an historian of urban society who completed an ESRC-funded PhD at the University of Warwick in 2020. His research looks into urban society from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It focuses on towns held by monastic lords, traditionally associated with… Read More