Induction & Training Resources

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The Royal Mail employed just 45 staff in central London... and then 30 of them died of the plague! After that there was the Great Fire of London to look forward to...

John Palmer, a theatre manager from Bath, introduced speedier, lightweight carriages to transport the mail. He demonstrated that mail could be carried between Bath and London in a mere 16 hours! The Post Office took on Palmer's idea and gave him a job.

Mail security has always been a priority – the Post Office Investigation Department was founded in 1793. This was the first official team of criminal investigators in Britain.

All aboard for the mail! A prototype Travelling Post Office railway carriage made its first journey with mail being sorted en route. The very first carriage of mail by railway actually took place on 8 years earlier, between Manchester and Liverpool, less than two months after that railway opened.

The Penny Black – the world’s first-ever postage stamp – was introduced on 6 May 1840. This little paper label changed the face of communications across the world.

When it was replaced by the Penny Red less than a year later, over 68 million Penny Blacks had been printed, reflecting the huge rise in use of the post.

'Every household, every day'. This formal promise of mail delivery was made for the first time in 1897, in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

The world's first regularly scheduled airmail service flew between Hendon and Windsor as part of the coronation celebrations for King George V.

Tragedy at sea: Two British Post Clerks perished along with 1,500 others when the RMS (Royal Mail Steamer) Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg.

The Royal Mail Archive holds chilling telegrams from 14 and 15 April, informing the Post Office of the news from the North Atlantic.

During the First World War, systems were put in place so that a letter would reach the front in just two days.

In 1918, an early overseas air mail service flew between Folkestone and Cologne, organised by the Royal Air Force and the British Army Post Office.

1939 - 1945

73,000 men and women from the General Post Office joined the services on the outbreak of the Second World War. Of these some 3,800 never returned. Another 413 people lost their lives whilst on civilian Post Office service.

Post Office engineers built the first ever electronic computer ‘Colossus’, which helped to decipher the Nazi Enigma and Lorenz codes.

At the height of the Blitz in September 1940, 23 London post offices were bombed in a single night.