History of the British Army postal service

A public mail service was developed through Witherings' organization, with post offices connected by regular routes built across the nation along the lines of communication utilized by the Tudor troops.

In the Commonwealth period this control was extended nationwide, as soldiers of the New Model Army were appointed Postmasters and were required to submit monthly reports on the activities of the communities that their post office served.

This affected the mail service and the postal operations were moved from Lisbon to the port of Pasajes (east of San Sebastian), the British Post Office Agent there was Charles Sevright, who had spent ten years as a Prisoner of War after his arrest in Holland on spying charges.

Wellington became dissatisfied and rebuked Lieutenant-Colonel Sturgeon, who took it very much to heart and deliberately rode too close to the enemy lines at Vic en Bigorre (France) and was shot in the head.

Initially it was decided that the normal civilian postal service to Turkey and the Black Sea was sufficient and therefore no British Post Office representative was sent to handle the Army's mails.

For the last 3 months I have not heard from England ...By May 1854, a new deal over the transit cost was struck with the French postal authorities and this partly solved the problem of holding unpaid mail.

Matters came to a head when the following report appeared in the Daily News dated 13 January 1855 (Balaklava): Whenever complaints become inconveniently local, the London Post Office is in the habit of requesting the Postmaster here the state of the case.

In response to demands made by Florence Nightingale, a method of transmitting money was devised to allow troops to transfer monies back to their families at home in the United Kingdom.

During the invasion phase of the war, in accordance with orders from Lord Kitchener's instructions mail from the Base Army Post Offices was forwarded to troops through the rail network, it accumulated at stations awaiting onward carriage.

After six hours of bitter fighting and the death of the station commander, Captain Gale – Railway Pioneer Corps, the defenders were forced to surrender to General De Wet.

As late as 1909 attempts were made in Britain to cash postal orders looted from the station and when De Wet's house was search in 1914 over 3,000 unused British stamps, souvenirs of the attack, were found there.

Working the TPOs could be dangerous as an APOC sergeant's report of 19 June 1901 illustrates: ... after leaving Machavie en route for Kokemoer and Klerkdrop [on a branch line running out of and to the west of Johannesburg], the mail train was derailed and attacked by the Boers.

I was ordered out of the coach...[12]By the end of the war the Army Post Office Corps was providing the mail service to both military and civilians alike in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony.

A Dominions Army Letter Office (DALO), tasked with handling Australian and New Zealand troops mail, opened in the space vacated by the ALO2 on its move to Regent's Park.

Volumes of letter mails continued to grow (see Fig 1) so in 1917 it was deemed appropriate to outsource some of the work to provincial offices (Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield).

The transport requirements of the Depot were met at first by the London Postal Service through the existing Civil Post Office contract but owing to labour shortages in the autumn of 1915 the contractor could no longer carry on.

[26] After the success of the Allies at the battles of Marne and Aisne which thwarted the Germans' intentions to capture Paris, the BEF was redeployed north to the Ypres area and in its wake followed the formations FPOs.

In the cases where the addressee had been killed in action or was reported missing, extreme care was taken to ensure that returned mail did not arrive at the sender's address before the official notification had been issued.

In the dark months that following the fall of France and the debacle in Norway, Britain, with its shattered armies freshly snatched from mainland Europe, started to build its defences in preparation for an invasion by Nazi Germany.

All this time we carried with us our cumbersome cash box which was our stock of several hundred pounds worth of stamps and Postal Orders ... Cheerfully we attached ourselves to a crowd of RE's who were forming their own company into several parties of fifty.

Meanwhile, British troops left on French soil west of the river Seine had their own problems, Captain (later Lieutenant Colonel) E. G. Hucker RE, OC 2nd Line of Communications (L of C) Postal Unit RE, was among them and kept a private diary (held in the RE Library).

I saw Col [John] Evans [DADAPS BEF] there who stated he had no knowledge of [APO] S9 staff and that if they had not already been evacuated to a place south of the river [Seine] they would go to England directly from Le Havre.

Surface mail routes through the Mediterranean became extremely vulnerable once Italy entered the war in June 1940 and by mid-1941, after Germany had conquered the Balkan regions, the direct air service to Cairo was cut.

The situation was aggravated by the uncertainty and casualties caused by the German bombing of the major cities of Britain and the enemy U-boat action against the convoy ships carrying mails and supplies.

In 1940 the Minister of Transport, Lieutenant Colonel Moore-Brabazon MC RFC, put forward the idea that airgraphs be used to reduce both the bulk and weight of mail travelling between the MEF and the UK.

[38] Lieutenant Colonel R. E. Evans RE, ADAPS MEF, proposed that a lightweight self-sealing letter card that weighed only 1⁄10 oz be adopted by the British Army for air mail purposes.

In July 1942 Captain Border RE was appointed Assistant Camp Commandant 18 Div, but by November he was ordered, with Spr Joslin, to Bampong Thailand where the POWs were engaged in the construction of the Bangkok–Moulmein railway.

The GPO circulated "APO England" mail to the HPC RE, where it was sorted and forwarded under military control to the correct destination thereby providing the necessary security to mask troop movements and locations.

The APS planners were among the very few staffs that were entrusted with knowledge of the full battle plan, with such information, the ADAPS Second Army, Lieutenant Colonel C. R. Smith RE conceived a pre-location scheme that enabled mail to be delivered to the various 'serials' of each unit as they landed in Normandy.

As the British Army advanced along the north coast of France into Belgium and finally into Germany, these airlifts continued and were augmented by an elaborate system of road service schedules that linked the airstrips with the Base APO and A/FPOs.