Page 426 - The Secret Museum

SOMETIMES I DO, EVER SINCE I found out he was the man who introduced post boxes to

England. Before that, if you wanted to post a letter, you had to queue up at the post
office and ask them to do it for you.

Trollope wrote 47 novels, plus umpteen short stories and travel books. He always
wrote in the morning, before setting off to work as a surveyor for the Post Office. He
devoted 33 years to the Post Office, and said his greatest desire was that ‘the public
in little villages should be enabled to buy postage-stamps; that they should have their
letters delivered free and at an early hour; that pillar letterboxes should be put up for
them’, and that letter carriers should earn their pay and that their working conditions

should be improved.

His dream for pillar letterboxes for all came true. He suggested to his boss,
George Creswell, Surveyor of the Western District, in November 1851 that he try out
the idea in St Helier, Jersey. He thought that was a good place to trial them, as you
could buy stamps all over town, and ‘all that is wanted is a safe receptacle for
letters.’

He suggested putting a box on an iron post, or sticking it on to a wall, but in the
end a freestanding letterbox was chosen. It was sage green so that it would blend into
the landscape. Four prototypes were tried out in Jersey, three more in St Peter Port,

Guernsey (one of which is in Union Street), and another in Sherborne, Dorset, which
is still in use.

One of these green boxes lives in the collection of the British Postal Museum and
Archive (BPMA). They store it with their larger objects in a big warehouse in
Debden, Essex. It is one of 50 differently designed post boxes they own – from this
early, hexagonal one from Guernsey, to modern designs and prototypes. They are
stored in two lines, facing each other. The green box is first in the line. Once
everyone had got used to these funny green boxes, got the hang of posting letters and

realized they would be delivered safely, letterboxes were rolled out across Great
Britain. In 1855, the first ones were put up in London. There were five green
rectangular boxes: in Fleet Street, the Strand, Pall Mall, Piccadilly and Kensington.

Not everyone trusted them. Trollope mentioned this in his 1869 novel, He Knew
He Was Right. One character, Jemima Stanbury, carried her letters to Exeter’s post
office. She didn’t believe in ‘the iron pillar boxes which had been erected for the
receipt of letters… she had not the faintest belief that any letter put into them would
ever reach its destination … Positive orders had been given that no letter from her

house should ever be put into the iron post.’
He reassured readers that the letterboxes worked well in another novel of his, The

Eustace Diamonds. The protagonist, Frank Greystock, proposes to Lucy Morris by
post, putting his proposal in a letterbox in Fleet Street. Trollope wrote that it stayed
there on Sunday, but appeared at the breakfast table on Monday, ‘thanks to the
accuracy in the performance of its duties for which [the Post Office] is conspicuous
among all offices’.