Page 427 - The Secret Museum

I liked Trollope’s green letterbox: it was a little piece of history. As I walked

through the corridor of boxes, I saw lots of different designs. At first it was a bit of a
free-for-all: every local Post Office surveyor could design a letterbox they fancied.
The Scottish Suttie letterbox was my favourite; it has a gold and red crown on top. A
lot of them were exported for use in India as soon as they were made. In 1883, the
round box became the norm, although since then there have been lots of variations in
design as the Post Office adapted the boxes to the wants and needs of the public. The

only colours that seem to have been used were chocolate brown, sage green, bright
sky blue for airmail letters and, of course, pillarbox red. After 1874, all were
produced in that familiar colour.

There are some letterboxes that were tried out and rejected. I saw one of these
experiments in the store: it is called K4 and is a huge, red telephone box, with a
letterbox and a stamp-vending machine on the sides. The idea of K4 was that it
would be a complete post office in one box. However, people using the phone found
that if someone came to buy stamps, the clinking of the coins meant that they couldn’t

hear the conversation they were having, so only 50 were made.
They have shelves full of post boxes that were attached to lampposts and pigeon

holes used to sort letters on board a moving train, known as Travelling Post Offices
(TPOs). They also have a control panel and a driverless train (like a big green bin on
wheels), remnants of the Post Office Underground Railway, latterly known as Mail
Rail, which ran through a system of tunnels beneath the tube network in London. The
driverless trains carried letters between the London sorting offices and railway
stations.

I’d first heard about the underground mail train when I went to the London
Transport Museum Depot at Acton and saw a model of Oxford Street tube station’s

ticket hall. Underneath the tube tunnels were some smaller tunnels, used by the Royal
Mail until 2003. Funny to think that for so many years this network of trains carried
letters and postcards I worte to friends, across London, even though I had no idea the
system existed at the time.

Over 160 years after Trollope first wrote a letter suggesting that post boxes be
used in Britain, they are still in use. I wonder what he would have made of the Royal
Mail’s Olympics initiative: a gold post box in the home town of every gold medallist
who represented Great Britain in the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. I

suspect he would have been very pleased.