Our Victorian Post Box

Have you ever realised that it is someone’s birthday the next day and you haven’t sent a card? So you find one in your card collection, write it and take it to catch the 9am collection from the Post Box in the wall outside Harley Hall – and you have to fold it in two to get it in! Correspondence was generally smaller in Victorian times, and the first Christmas cards, for example, were about the size of a calling card.

Before the penny post was introduced in 1860 allowing any letter or packet up to one pound in weight to be posted for 1 old penny, the postal system was complicated and expensive. Charges were based on the number of pages and the letter either had to be taken to a ‘receiving house’ –typically an inn – or be collected by a bellman who would walk around towns ringing a bell to alert people of his presence.

Once the penny post was introduced, post boxes began to proliferate. The first, instigated by Anthony Trollope the novelist who worked as a surveying clerk for the Post Office, was on the island of Jersey on a trial basis in 1852. This was red, but as the roll out progressed on the mainland from 1853 the colour green was chosen as it ‘fit in’ better with the environment. Unfortunately the camouflage was so successful that people had difficulty finding them, so the colour was changed to red in 1874 and it took 10 years to repaint all of the boxes.

Our post-box has VR on the front, dating it back to Queen Victoria’s reign, and it is logical to assume that it is where it is because the Harley Hall was then central to the village. Out of the 115,300 post boxes in the UK, only 2,900 remaining are Victorian –so only 2.5%, so we have something fairly rare and historically important.

After the introduction of the penny post London had around 10 collections a day, so it was possible for a letter to be posted and received on the same day. However, rural areas did not fare so well and it was not until 1897 that everyone got a delivery to their own house.