A Mid-Victorian Travelling Post Office van. (A travelling clerk, complete with carpetbag, is standing at the door). Source: Routledge, Robert. Discoveries & Inventions of the Nineteenth Century, 13th Edition, London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd, 1900, p 111 Dr Augustus Waller Lewis, Chief Medical Officer to the Post Office, made an unexpected journey to the… Read More
Category: Uncategorised
Doug Brown (1977-2021)
Doug Brown: Historian, colleague, and friend We’re a project that deals with a lot of death. It’s something woven into the fabric of our working lives, a well-rehearsed routine: find the death certificates of historic postal workers, order them, download them, transcribe them, codify, analyse. We’ve done this all in a year with death surrounding… Read More
Addressing Health and Zooniverse: crowd-sourcing the pension records
At the end of May 1895 James Edward Buck applied for a Post Office pension. He was just 30 years old and had worked for the Post Office for nearly 15 years as a sorter in London. His pension application form reveals someone who took little time off for sickness. In the ten years before… Read More
Dr Edith Shove: “She-Doctor” to the General Post Office
The Central Telegraph Office, General Post Office, London, 1874 Source: Illustrated London News, 12 December 1874 “The practical absurdity of directing a female medical inspector to inquire into and report upon the minute of every ailment which may temporarily incapacitate the rougher sex from a performance of their duties in the Telegraph department.”[1] This excerpt… Read More
‘Always at Work’: The Post Office Horse
‘He begins his week’s work at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon; he ends it at half-past ten on Sunday morning; and at any time during that long week he is liable for instant service, and has only five and a half hours’ undisturbed rest…that is the only respite he is sure of—just enough, as it… Read More
George Fardo: the legacy of a Victorian Postmaster Poet (and my great grandfather)
I can’t remember exactly when I first became aware of my great-great grandfather George Fardo, or that he was the Postmaster of Cardiff from 1889-1898. Our family in Cardiff — where I was born and grew up before moving to London to pursue a career in music aged 19 — has always been very loving… Read More
Prescribing golf: sport, health, and the Post Office
The Isis Swimming ClubSource: St Martin’s-le-Grand, 13 (1903), 108. Courtesy of The Postal Museum Amongst the pages of St Martin’s-le-Grand – a magazine for Post Office employees which ran from 1890 to 1933 – it is difficult to miss the significance of sport to postal workers. Accounts of sporting fixtures abound, showing the variety of… Read More
Big Data and Working Lives
Letter carrier with dog, silhouette (watercolour). Courtesy of The Postal Museum, London. In the last decade or so big data has become an increasingly common phrase in all manner of academic fields. British history has been no exception. Numerous projects have produced large datasets about various issues including the legacies of slavery, British fertility decline,… Read More
‘Most people got bald’: Oral histories and the Post Office
When asked about his time as a sorter in the Post Office, Mr Charles Ward (born 1894) recalled that: ‘The senior men – I remember looking at them ‘cos most – most people got bald – more so in the Post Office than anywhere I think. They used to put it down to the –… Read More
When was a postal worker not a postman? Gender and occupation in the Post Office
The ONS Longitudinal Study (LS) contains linked census and life events data for a 1% sample of the population of England and Wales. It contains records on over 500,000 people usually resident in England and Wales at each point in time and it is largely representative of the whole population. The LS is the largest… Read More