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2013 Royal Mail Archive openings: bring on the 20-year rule
The start of the year has traditionally been the time we’ve made batches of material available to public research for the first time based on the long-standing ’30-year rule’. This year things are...
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Postal Vehicles
When people come on one of our Museum Store tours they often remark on the wide range of postal vehicles we have in our collection. The vehicles we care for range from bicycles and motorcycles to large...
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The first drive-in post office in the United Kingdom
On 11 December 1959, the United Kingdom’s first drive-in post office opened. It was situated at the new Wharf Street Branch Post Office under the centre archway of the Wharf Street Telephone Exchange...
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Valentines Greetings Telegrams
At this time of the year the postal service is kept busy delivering love letters and cards on Valentine’s Day, but in the 20th Century cards and letters weren’t the only ways to send a romantic...
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The Great Train Robbery – The untold story from the closed investigation files
2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Train Robbery – one of the most notorious robberies of the 20th century, which has proved to have enduring public appeal, particularly via books, films...
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Horse-drawn mail
Horses have been used to carry messages from the very early days, when post boys would deliver messages by horse. In the 18th Century horse-drawn mail coaches were introduced, which cut mail delivery...
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Oh, Doctor Beeching!
2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Dr Richard Beeching’s The Reshaping of British Railways which led to a major reduction and restructuring of the country’s railway route network...
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The Bloomsbury Group and the Post Office
The British Postal Museum & Archive’s poster collection holds designs by many giants of 20th century graphic design, including Edward McKnight Kauffer, Tom Eckersley, and Jan Lewitt and George Him....
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Maejima Hisoka, The First Postmaster General of Japan
We recently had a film crew in the search room from the production company, Freepit Inc, who are making a documentary about Maejima Hisoka, the first Postmaster General of Japan. Mr Maejima visited...
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The Last Straw: a brief look at complaints
Whilst I was working on some uncatalogued documents, I came across a file regarding the gumming of postage stamps. Not necessarily the most engaging of topics, you might think, but what attracted my...
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Introducing our new cataloguing updates
I’m Matt Tantony, and I joined the BPMA as Project Archivist in February this year. Since then, I’ve been spending almost every day underground in our repository, delving into boxes to uncover records...
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A Curious Culture of Letter Writing
In December 2011, as some of you may remember, BPMA and the BBC produced a collaborative radio series entitled the People’s Post. One episode of that series focussed on the culture of letter writing....
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Stock-take 2013
Our more regular users may have noticed that we have been closed for two weeks during May for our annual stock-take; an important housekeeping exercise that allows us to focus on tasks we find...
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Suffragette “human letters”
This week there have been a number of commemorations and memorial events marking the 100th anniversary of the death of Emily Wilding Davison, the suffrage campaigner who famously ran on to the course...
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GPO Britain in pictures
The BPMA is the custodian of a photographic collection which includes about 100,000 individual photographs; the earliest is from the late 19th century and the latest ones date from the 1990s. In a...
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Discovering a Slice of London Life
After last month’s archive stocktake, I’ve returned to my ongoing cataloguing project. Today I’ll tell you about a terrific discovery I made on the repository shelves. Matt inspects the record books in...
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Book now to tour our Archives or Museum Store
Bookings are now open for our ever popular tours of the Royal Mail Archive and the British Postal Museum Store. Led by our archivists and curators these tours offer a unique opportunity to see behind...
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On the map, the History Pin map
Hello, I’m Nicola and I’ve been volunteering for the BPMA since the end of January. It has been such a fantastic experience for me so I wanted to write a little blog to share what I have been working...
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192,000 postmen’s inside legs, and other measurements in the Archive
In last month’s cataloguing update I wrote about the London sub-post office record books I’d discovered in the Archive. Since then I’ve been cataloguing records from the area of our collections devoted...
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Pre-decimal QEII stamp artwork added to our online catalogue
Recently we made a substantial update to our online catalogue. Some 2,450 QEII pre-decimal stamp artwork items, complete with images, have been added to the database, along with 248 pre-decimal GB...
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