Alan Johnson: The Post Office and Me

Well, I can't do that, they need to send me an e-mail.

OK, fine.

Thanks, bye.

'I've been an MP for nearly 20 years.'

I can't do that meeting for 9.30.

'In that time, communication has changed beyond all recognition.'

'I remember receiving my very first e-mail.'

It felt like a revolution.

But people do still send me letters.

And I'm pleased to say that most of them are delivered

by the Royal Mail.

# Wait, oh, yes, wait a minute, Mr Postman... #

Back in 1968, at the age of 18, I had the privilege

of joining that great British institution as a postman.

I never imagined that one day I'd become General Secretary

of the Postal Workers Union and ultimately be elected to Parliament.

So the Post Office changed my life.

But throughout history, it also changed Britain.

Now, nearly 40 years after I delivered my last letter,

I'm going back in time to find out how this happened.

It's a part of the Post Office that I never saw.

How the first revolution in mass communication was created here.

The first day cover to end all first day covers.

How the British Post Office became the envy of the world.

This is the kind of speed I used to sort it.

It was the perfect job for a bigamist.

LAUGHTER

And how even in the age of e-mail,

our postmen and women still bind the country together.

Someone could come here from any part of the world,

they know they're in this country when they see a red pillar box.

# Give me a ticket for an aeroplane

# Ain't got time to take a fast train... #

Imagine for a moment that it's 1968.

I'm an 18-year-old postman on my way to work.

Six days a week, I'd cycle from Notting Hill, where I lived,

across Hammersmith Bridge to the sorting office on Barnes Green.

We had to report for duty at 5.30am.

And I'm sorry to say that I struggled with the early mornings.

But I loved the job.

My old sorting office has since closed down.

Today, the mail for my old walks in Barnes is sorted down the road,

here in Mortlake.

I've come to see what else has changed for the local London postie.

I sometimes have dreams about being back as a postman in Barnes.

I was only here for a year.

The ethos of being a postman meant something.

When I joined the General Post Office,

or GPO, as it was called,

it was actually a department of Government.

And us employees were uniformed civil servants.

The GPO had the monopoly on delivering mail

and it was also responsible for parcels, telephones,

broadcasting and a bank.

Today, all that has changed.

But I wonder, is the actual job of delivering the mail any different?

-Nadine, how are you?

-Hello, hi.

-Good to see you.

I've got you just as you are getting a bundle together. Good to see you.

You've got a lot of bulky stuff here.

-Do you still...?

-Yes, this one is quite heavy.

-Is it?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

We used to have all the bundles and we had to number them

because they went into a sack, something like this.

And then you put it across your back and you'd tie it,

you'd have a penny piece there, so the string could wrap around it,

and tie it round there.

And off you'd go and step on the bus.

That would be your whole walk? Just that bit in the sack?

-Just that.

-OK.

-See, you think we had an easy time, didn't you?

-Yeah.

-It was... It was awful, it was really hard.

You've got all this.

You've got all this.

And here, you've got another...

a pouch, on there as well.

That is incredible. You wouldn't get that lot on a bicycle.

Nadine is every bit a 21st-century postwoman.

But she delivers to most of the streets on my old round.

She's agreed to take me along.

-Is it difficult to push?

-Um...

-Can I have a go?

-Yeah, of course.

-Let me have a go.

Oh, right, yeah.

Good morning.

Hi.

Good morning.

These are exactly the same. No change whatsoever.

-Can I deliver these?

-Yeah.

It'll be my first time for, I don't know, 50 years.

When we had an address where there was a packet,

we used to turn it over that way, so it would tell you there's a packet.

-Yeah, that's what I do.

-You still do that?

-Everyone does that.

-Hey, something that's survived.

All right, you're going in here, we'll see you in a few minutes.

This has been absolutely wonderful.

It just connects... 47 years have just disappeared.

You're a piece of continuity in this community

and they like to see Nadine walking along every morning,

just as I hope they liked to see me when I was doing the deliveries.

But continuity isn't the whole story.

Since I joined, the business has been transformed.

The Royal Mail Group is now a private company

operating in a highly competitive global market.

The sale was controversial, particularly with me.

But it was part of a much longer story.

One that has seen the post

and its role in British society go through many transformations.

Because, believe it or not, the Royal Mail is now 500 years old.

Henry VIII founded the Royal Mail as long ago as 1516.

And in the centuries that followed,

it grew into a network that was the envy of the world.

By the late 18th century,

the postal system worked well for the upper crust.

But for ordinary people,

sending a simple letter was completely unaffordable.

And there was another,

perhaps even more serious problem with the system.

The price of postage wasn't paid by the person sending a letter,

but by the unfortunate recipient.

Historian Dominic Sandbrook is an expert in British social history.

At that point, in the sort of 1830s,

you know, you got a letter, you had to pay for it.

You had to pay so much per sheet.

Yeah, so people dreaded the arrival of the postman.

Particularly people further down the social scale

because the postman pitches up with a letter five pages long,

from your point of view, that's a nightmare.

You've got to find the money from somewhere.

There are stories of people who'd refuse to have letters

or would communicate with one another with a code on the envelope.

So you'd look at the envelope, you'd see the code and say,

"No, thank you, I don't want to pay for it."

But you'd have got the message anyway.

But by the early 19th century, change was coming.

In 1835, a man by the name of Rowland Hill took it upon himself

to revolutionise the British postal system.

Duncan Campbell-Smith has written an official history of the Royal Mail.

He's come to know Rowland Hill well.

I've heard him described as a very early special adviser,

-what we would call a special adviser.

-Yeah.

He wasn't part of the Post Office.

Not at all, the Post Office loathed him, they thought he was mad.

And they were only half wrong.

He was a man of fierce self-belief...

..and utter conviction that he was going to change the world.

He just didn't know in what way.

The Old Post Office, as it was always referred to,

was ripe for reform.

Hill set out his radical ideas in a pamphlet entitled

Post Office Reform, Its Importance And Practicability.

In it, Hill laid the foundations

for a complete revolution in mass communication.

The gist of it was three big ideas.

The first one was prepayment.

The second is one price.

This is a really radical idea.

So all these dozens, hundreds of clerks, sitting there,

poring over every individual letter to work out where its address is

and decide what the price of it should be,

all that's gone, we'll have one price.

And the third of the three big points -

a real shocker to all his contemporaries, many of whom said

look, this is rather mad - we'll have one price, it'll be one penny.

Hill's ideas didn't make him popular with the Post Office's hierarchy.

But in Victorian England,

the urge for reform often shifted the status quo.

He had this enormous amount of flak.

But what he was able to capitalise on, I think,

was the argument that this is a country which is itching

to throw itself into consumerism and into trade and this kind of thing.

And this reform, this is what will benefit.

Of course, it wasn't just ordinary people who benefited,

businesses benefited hugely from the penny post.

So, in 1839, Rowland Hill was parachuted into the Post Office

on a mission to shake things up.

And one of the first changes he introduced would turn out to be

his most famous invention of all.

It was a solution to the problem of how postage should be prepaid.

He said, well, the way we'll do it is

we'll have huge piles of prepaid stationery at post offices.

So you go in with your letter

and you can take this prepaid bit of stationery

and wrap it around your letter,

or you can write it on the prepaid stationery, and then people said,

"Well, you know, that's not going to work very well because

"what happens if the person who comes in is somebody's servant

"and they're illiterate, they won't be able to write."

In other words, you have to have a piece of prepaid literature

which is more portable than that,

so it doesn't just have to sit inside a post office,

people could have it in their homes or something.

Ah! What we'll do is we'll take a little piece of paper,

and this is where you get this famous bit of paper

covered at the back with glutinous wash

known to us as a stamp.

The world's first postage stamp,

the iconic Penny Black, has become a collectors' item.

They still sell for big money.

But to see the most precious examples

of this revolutionary British invention,

you need a very special invitation.

At a secret location, deep inside one of London's Royal palaces,

what is possibly the world's greatest stamp collection

is kept under lock and key.

Begun by King Edward VII,

it was expanded by avid philatelist George V.

The collection is now the private property of the Queen

and it's worth untold millions.

Its keeper, Michael Sefi, has agreed to let me take a look.

Wow.

So, this is the stamp collection to end all stamp collections, I'd think.

328 albums which consist of

around 50 pages in each album.

I think, of its kind,

it's the finest collection there is because the coverage is so wide.

In that it's Great Britain and the Commonwealth,

or Empire, as was then.

Rowland Hill might have come up with the idea of the postage stamp,

but he didn't know how it should be designed.

So he launched a competition which attracted thousands of entries.

The Royal Collection contains some fascinating examples of these

"might have been" stamp designs.

The need for reform had to be accompanied

with a different method of payment for postage,

which up until then had been done on the basis of distance,

which was a known feature, and how many sheets you had.

So, this competition was held in 1839

under the supervision of Rowland Hill, by the Treasury,

asking the public for ideas

about how the postal services could be reformed.

And one of my favourites is this.

This was an idea for a stamp booklet.

Right, by John Little.

-John Little.

-To the Treasury.

-To the Treasury.

And he said... Let's have...

But his artwork hardly has...

-Wasn't so good!

-I mean, the Queen with a moustache.

-Yes.

-That's meant to be the Queen.

But this was an idea that was, what, 70 years before its time?

-Yes, stamp books didn't arrive...

-Until 1904.

-1904. Goodness gracious.

And this was bought by the Queen.

She approved the purchase.

But only if we realised enough by selling duplicates.

And we bought this for £250,000.

It's the first day cover to end all first day covers.

Because it has a block of ten of the Penny Black used on 6 May 1840,

which was the first day of use.

And the next largest multiple on a cover is a pair.

Well, how wonderful.

Today, we take the post for granted.

Sometimes even deriding it as snail mail.

We think of it as something old-fashioned.

But the creation of the uniform penny post was one of

the most transformative innovations in all of British history.

At a stroke, Rowland Hill had laid the foundations

for mass communication. He had democratised the mail.

You could compare it with the impact of e-mails in the 1990s.

I think it was even more of a momentous event, actually,

-in the history of communication, writ large, than e-mails.

-Yes.

Suddenly, for the first time in history,

people with no money at all, or next to no money,

can communicate with their relatives on the other side of the country.

It was a huge breakthrough.

Under Rowland Hill, Britain's postal system

became a model for the whole world.

And since this was the time when proper government archives

were being set up, its records still exist.

Today, this extraordinary collection is looked after

by the British Postal Museum and Archive.

The objects here tell the story of how the Post Office changed Britain.

Curator Vicky Parkinson has picked out one intriguing example

for me to have a look at.

This was the first idea, 1838, of dividing London up in districts,

identifying what Greater London was.

Because if you look,

-it goes out, Croydon is down here and it goes up to Cheshunt.

-Right.

-Which is the kind of border of Greater London now.

-Yeah.

This is fascinating because it's the precursor to postcodes

-that came in 100-odd years later.

-In its infancy, yeah.

If you have a look, you can see there are two areas

that don't exist any more.

And I know exactly what those are because I had to learn

the London postal districts as part of my training.

-North Eastern and Southern.

-Indeed. Southern didn't last very long.

If you look at the areas, it's quite a rural area,

so they split that between South East and South West.

North East didn't go until 1875.

And that was only less than 25 years

since the creation of the postal districts.

But there was already that connotation of a district

denoting social status

because there were so many complaints from people,

particularly ones who didn't want to move from NE to E

because there was that snobbery there already.

So we have a letter from a doctor in Hackney who basically

complains bitterly because he thinks he's going to lose his business

-if people have to come to a doctor who is an E post.

-In east London.

Because that was the working-class,

where the less refined population of London lived.

There are still...NE road signs in Clapton to this day.

-They've still got North East?

-They've still got NE, yeah.

Between 1840 and 1920, the volume of mail being carried

rose from about 80 million items a year to almost 6 billion.

And during this period, the Post Office was becoming

more than just a useful service.

It was changing the very relationship

between the Government and the citizen.

I can't think of a comparable example so early, actually,

of the state being a kind of benign servant of the people.

Generally, when you came into contact with the state, you know,

the Post Office apart, right up to the 20th century,

the state was making your life a misery in one way or another.

It was trying to stop you having fun, or tell you what to do,

or take some of your money or all these kinds of things.

The idea that the state was there to help you was an outlandish idea.

And I think the Post Office, its image,

and the image of the postman, changed almost overnight.

Suddenly, the Post Office was woven into the fabric of daily life

in a way it simply hadn't been before then.

By the 1890s, a network of 25,000 sub post offices

had sprung up right across the country.

This was probably the most extensive communication network in the world.

At Blists Hill Museum in Shropshire,

you can visit a typical late-19th-century sub post office

and find out how it worked.

-Good morning, Postmaster.

-Good morning.

And how are you on this fine day...

-I'm very fine, thank you, sir, and yourself?

-..in 1890?

I'm very well, thank you.

Much like today, a post office like this would sell

stationery and writing supplies.

But the one thing it wouldn't sell

was something we take for granted today - an envelope.

What you've done is you've wrote your letter,

you're using the back of the letter as the envelope.

So we're leaving a tab right at the top there.

And then we fold that tab over.

Ah, cos you didn't have an envelope, in those days.

No, you're literally using the back of the letter.

Envelopes came later, yeah.

And then we're putting a dozen drops of wax on here.

Crikey, it's quite a long process.

It is, it's very slow.

-Then we would put that out in a candle snuffer.

-And then the seal.

And then we'd just drop it on there and just wait for that to dry.

Two fingers either side and pull straight off.

There's your seal. The best postal service in the world at that time.

And everybody else followed suit

-and tried to keep up with the British GPO.

-Indeed, very much so.

I think it's impossible to exaggerate what it meant

for individuals and families.

You know, in the days before the penny post,

if your aunt went off to Aberdeen, that's it, bye-bye,

you probably wouldn't hear from her.

And the transformation between that and the world where...

You know, people would go for a day trip to Blackpool

and they would send their parents a postcard before lunch

to say I'll be back home at 5.30.

And such was the post that if you lived near enough by,

they could have got it before you got home.

And this notice to the public, so this is

"by command of the Postmaster General, notice to the public.

"Rapid delivery of letters."

This is GPO, May 1849,

nine years after Rowland Hill introduced the penny post.

"The Postmaster General is desirous of calling attention

"to the greater rapidity of delivery which would obviously be consequent

"on the general adoption of street-door letterboxes, or slits,

"in private dwelling houses,

"and indeed wherever the postman is at present kept waiting."

This is the letterbox,

he is telling people to cut a hole in their front door

to make it easier for the postman to put the letters through.

I only wish he'd added on there, for the sake of poor postmen like me,

"Please, put them at an acceptable height.

"Don't put them right down near the pavement."

Which means it's the greatest cause of bad backs for postmen.

Today, the Post Office is still publicly owned,

but it's a different company from Royal Mail.

There are now post office counters

inside a wide range of high street shops.

But, for some rural communities,

that old idea of the sub post office as the hub of the village lives on.

# Wait! Oh, yes, wait a minute, Mr postman

# Wait! Wait, Mr postman... #

A few years ago, the Post Office and shop here in Dunsfold, Surrey,

was under threat of closure.

So the local people clubbed together and bought it,

and despite stiff competition from FedEx, DHL and all the rest,

it seems to be thriving.

Could I have these two newspapers, please?

You're part of the local community, you are volunteering?

I am a volunteer and a shareholder.

-Right, so, everyone who...

-As we all are.

Or at least as many of us who wanted to be.

And that was most people would put something in?

I think a fair proportion of people did, but it wasn't compulsory.

But we wanted to save the shop.

The thing is, you hear the gossip first here?

You hear the gossip here first and, yes,

if you want to know anything, you know...

-It's not so much the local newspaper, it's what you hear here.

-I love it.

But it must be great, particularly people who are elderly,

living on their own, to have this place to come to

-where it stops them feeling isolated.

-Exactly.

-Lonely.

So it's a proper community resource. Marvellous.

-There should be more of them. Thank you for my newspapers.

-Pleasure.

And the proud tradition of the sub postmistress is also being

upheld here by Annie Wace.

The Post Office came under threat of closure.

We did, and in 2008 we almost lost this Post Office.

We went out to the village and said,

"How much does this Post Office mean to you?

"How much does this little shop mean to you?"

And that quick, we signed a petition and we saved this Post Office.

-And it's fun.

-If the shop had gone,

-the Post Office would have gone as well.

-That's right.

So we work in tandem with each other

because they come in obviously to post their parcels,

but while they're here, they can get things they need,

or while they're waiting,

"I forgot milk today, I need tea, I need bread."

-This is incredible. Dry cleaning.

-Everything.

-Off-licence, newsagent.

-So yeah, it's lovely.

-But it's also the hub for this rural community.

It's what keeps everything going.

I think this place is a real inspiration.

And it reminds me of my second job with the Royal Mail

when I left London behind

and moved out to Buckinghamshire with my young family.

From there, my new delivery route took me right out

into the countryside, which for a city boy like me was heaven.

I had become a proper rural postman.

Here in Dunsfold, that tradition is alive and well.

The sorting office is a shed behind the shop.

And the daily delivery round covers miles of country lanes

and isolated addresses.

Postman Dave knows it like the back of his hand.

I have to say, Dave, these were not...

-Shorts were not part of the uniform.

-I know.

-Indeed, the collar and tie and a waistcoat.

-That's it.

-I've still got my ties.

-Have you?

I did a delivery like this, Littleworth Common,

which was a rural delivery, had about 120 drops.

-You've got about, what...?

-About 190.

-190, a bit more.

But, you know, rather than Acacia Avenue, numbers 2 to 40,

these are all rural addresses.

Friar's Cross Cottages. Wilcot. Timbers.

Hurlands.

So it's a completely different world, being a rural postman, isn't it?

-Yeah. From the town one, yeah.

-You know your customers.

-Yeah, I know their first name, second name.

-You know the families.

That's it.

# Return to sender

# Return to sender

# I gave a letter to the postman

# He put it in his sack

# By early next morning

# He brought my letter back

# She wrote upon it... #

How long did it take you to learn this route?

-Did you get a week's tuition kind of thing?

-No, one day.

-One day?!

Yeah, one day.

I had to learn this one.

# We had a quarrel... #

-Hello.

-Good morning.

How much do you rely on Royal Mail still?

-It's a very, very important service here.

-It is?

We use it for all our parcels outgoing,

so we use the Post Office as well in the village.

You can't send parcels through the internet, that's for sure.

-That's right.

-It strikes me that Dave is the person

that kind of holds all this together.

We couldn't survive without him.

-See you.

-Cheers, Dave, see you tomorrow.

# She wrote upon it

# Return to sender

# Address unknown... #

I had an Irish wolfhound on the delivery I did.

And it was huge, up to there, looked you in the eye as you went in.

And it insisted on taking you by the elbow

and just guiding you to the front door.

That's what it wanted to do.

# And if it comes back the very next day

# Then I'll understand... #

It looked to me like you had a narrow escape there.

-No, no, he's all right.

-Was he all right?

-Yeah.

Cos tiny dogs nip just as hard as the big ones.

I was just letting him sniff me first and then he was fine.

# No such zone... #

It's another "Beware of the dog".

-Yeah, they haven't even got a dog.

-Haven't they?

-No.

-So this is another small business?

-Yeah.

Operating in the middle of the countryside.

-Yeah, Magnum Enterprises.

-Right.

-I'm Alan Johnson.

-Nice to meet you.

I'm just following Dave on his round.

Thank you very much.

To see how important the Post Office is

to communities out in rural areas like this.

You need the post to run the business?

We couldn't live without the Post Office really.

Really, not even with the internet? And new technologies?

Well, we have changed a little bit,

but, look, we still have post here

-early in the morning.

-Cheques and orders. Right.

-And this is a clothing company.

-Industry, yes, that's right.

We supply schools and private businesses.

Does he collect your letters to go out as well?

Not now, but we're working on that

because now we are trying to make selling through the internet.

So now we are starting to do that.

-So he can take...

-So he can take all the packages and the rest.

-It was lovely to meet you, thank you very much.

-And you, bye-bye.

# Return to sender... #

These businesses won't just be using Royal Mail.

Since its monopoly ended in 2000,

plenty of other companies have started delivering here.

But Dave and Annie do seem to be part of this community.

Maybe they've got history to thank for that.

Because throughout the 20th century,

the Post Office grew into a monumental

and ubiquitous feature of British society.

By 1934, it employed a quarter of a million people.

It offered a promising career path.

And workers were represented by

one of the best organised unions in the country,

the Post Office Workers Union,

later the Union of Communication Workers,

of which I was General Secretary.

And it didn't just deliver letters,

it ran the telegraph and telephone systems as well.

This recruitment film, called A Job In A Million, from 1934,

shows how school leavers as young as 14

were keen to join up as telegram boys.

We take boys in from all types of homes.

For some boys, it is not so easy to study at home in the evenings.

Others are more fortunate.

But in the Post Office, each boy is given an equal chance.

Now, we want our boys to be happy

and we want to help them out of their difficulties.

So come up and see me if ever you are in that position.

Above all, the Post Office was beginning to embody a new idea -

the spirit of public service.

This spirit was often at its strongest not out on delivery,

but where I started off working, in the sorting office.

Conditions weren't great - it was dusty, stuffy,

and you worked standing up.

But there was a sense of teamwork, of camaraderie,

and the satisfaction of getting the job done against the clock.

There was a huge network of these offices right across the country.

And some of them actually crossed the country.

Starting in 1858, travelling post offices began crisscrossing

the nation through the night, their staff sorting the mail as they went.

These were the men commemorated in the famous film Night Mail.

This is the night mail crossing the Border

Bringing the cheque and the postal order

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor

The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb

The gradient's against her, but she's on time...

Here at the Nene Valley Railway,

they've got one of the best surviving examples of the TPO,

or Travelling Post Office.

They've also got a chap who worked on one - Brian White.

I love this.

I'd forgotten about this.

-So, as they pulled into each station, you could post a letter.

-Oh, yes.

Why were they sorting as they travelled along?

Was that because they'd been posted so late?

-Yeah, it allowed them to get a later posting.

-Right.

But you remember the old days in the Post Office, with the evening rush.

-Yeah, yeah.

-To get that clear,

these were very handy

because they could bung the last knockings on here

and get it delivered first thing next morning.

-And that was the element of it that was really crucial.

-Yeah.

First division coming over.

-And again, Bill.

-Second division.

Wow, goodness gracious!

This is that great Grierson documentary -

"This is the night mail crossing the border." This is it exactly.

How that looked.

Each sorter has 48 pigeonholes, each representing a town.

The packets are sorted separately.

As the train progresses,

the names, scribbled in chalk over the pigeonholes, have to be changed.

Every frame was like this.

No mechanisation, everything was dealt with manually.

You'd manually sort.

And you'd know the frame really well,

this is the kind of speed I used to sort at.

And I used to love starting with a stack of mail

and ending up clearing the whole lot.

There was a satisfaction in that.

When a pigeonhole is filled, the letters are tied in a bundle.

The bundles are put into the labelled bags

hanging behind the sorters.

So, you started on the TPOs in 1960,

-you started in the Post Office in '52.

-Yeah.

I did hear a few stories, they were perhaps myths going around,

about TPO men, particularly on the Up Special,

-who had one life in Glasgow and another life down here.

-Oh, yeah!

Yeah, yeah.

-Including whole families.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah,

oh, yeah, that's absolutely true.

It was the perfect job for a bigamist.

THEY LAUGH

Key to the success and speed of the TPO was a cunning piece of kit,

known as the apparatus.

This allowed mailbags to be dropped off,

and others simultaneously picked up,

without the train stopping or even slowing down.

MAN SHOUTING

The Nene Valley Railway has one of these historical devices

in full working order.

Right, now I feel the part.

'So I'm going to give it a go.'

# Hey, look yonder comin'

# Comin' down that railroad track

# Hey, look yonder comin'

# Comin' down that railroad track

# It's that Orange Blossom special

# Bringin' my baby back... #

INDISTINCT SPEECH

-Hang her out now?

-No, no.

You want two bridges and 45 beats.

One, two...

Now!

Perfect.

One off, one back.

I'm quite proud of myself for that.

One dropped off, one picked up.

That great John Grierson film,

with the WH Auden poem, "This is the night mail crossing the border

"Bringing the cheque and the post in order,"

for many people,

that sums up everything we've been talking about

with the Post Office and its long history and...

and its importance in people's lives.

I just wish I'd spent one night working as part of the team

on a TPO, just one night.

Cos anyone watching the Grierson film has to realise,

that was early '30s, it was exactly like that...

..at the Millennium, which was the last time these TPOs ran...

nothing had changed.

But in the early 1900s,

the Post Office was facing another transport headache.

London to Glasgow was a cinch.

But getting across London itself was becoming a nightmare.

So in 1927, the Post Office drew up some plans

for a system of tunnels and began to dig.

Here, under Mount Pleasant sorting office, the remains of this

secret underground are maintained by engineer Ray Middlesworth.

-So, Ray, this has been your workplace for the last 28 years.

-Yeah.

For the last 12 years, nothing much has happened on it.

But this was a great innovation, wasn't it?

-The Post Office's own underground railway system.

-It was.

They were concerned in 1909 about the congestion in London's streets

and the Post Office proposed the idea of an electric railway

to connect their district offices in central London

to deal with that problem.

Skinner KB, ready to start up at ten o'clock.

This Tube has 6.5 miles of track,

stretching from Paddington in the west

to Liverpool Street in the east,

linking with six other major sorting offices en route.

This was a completely... Post Office system.

It was isolated from the other networks,

there was no physical connection

other than chutes connecting us to the railway stations.

While central London's road traffic crawls overhead at an average 12mph,

these fully automatic miniature trains speed

300 tonnes of mail across the capital every day without interruption.

There's very few people who know this exists.

This used to be called the Post Office's best-kept secret.

And for a long time it was.

Cos the Royal Mail would get on with their business

and wouldn't really advertise what they'd done to achieve their ends,

although it was very innovative and they were pioneers in lots of ways.

What's the future for Mail Rail?

Well, Mount Pleasant Station is going to become a museum

and a theme ride for the public, so they can come down,

ride on a modified train

and experience a mail bag's view of Mail Rail.

'The museum won't open until 2017,

'but today I'm getting a free preview ride.'

Right, so I can get in anywhere?

Yeah, you can take your pick of seats.

-I recommend this one.

-Yeah? In the middle there, OK.

Wonderful.

Wow.

This is terrific.

Any mail travelling between Whitechapel and Paddington

had probably made this route.

It's a bit like a ghost railway, like one of those things at the funfair.

You go on a ghost train.

But it's a part of the Post Office that I never saw.

People who worked in Mount Pleasant all their working lives,

40 years, and never came down here.

The Mail Rail might have been hidden from public view,

but the rest of Royal Mail's kit certainly isn't.

For 100 years, its bright red bikes, vans and pillar boxes

have been a defining feature of the British landscape.

Here at the British Postal Museum storage facility,

an incredible archive of objects,

tracing the physical history of the Royal Mail,

is lovingly maintained by curator Julian Stray.

-It's British social history, isn't it?

-Absolutely. In artefacts.

The Post Office has touched everyone's life

and continues to do so even today.

This is very familiar to me because that's the moped that I rode.

Runabout, was it? A Raleigh Runabout?

-That's the one, the Raleigh Runabout.

-There you go.

Usually, cos I had the heaviest delivery in Europe, obviously,

two bags on the back,

so each one 40 pounds, so 80 pounds of mail on the back,

but what I used to do

was leave this behind some old people's flats

in Dropmore Road in Burnham,

take one of the sacks and walk around

and leave the other one there.

And, you know, nothing ever got nicked.

-A Morris Commercial.

-Gorgeous, aren't they?

-Yeah.

I never drove that. I drove the Leyland.

I drove the 240 Austin.

I drove the...the one on the end.

-It's easier to say which you never drove, isn't it?

-It is, yeah.

It makes me feel very old.

I never went on a horse and cart.

But taking pride of place in this collection

is the most iconic item of all - the pillar box,

in all its many variations.

The first pillar boxes were erected in London in 1855.

None of those survive now.

What does survive is one of the original collection plates.

If you look, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven

-eight, nine, ten collections of mail...

-Yeah.

..and the same number of deliveries the same day.

You could post a letter first thing in the morning,

-have it delivered perhaps a couple of hours later...

-Yeah.

-..have a reply sent to you...

-Yeah.

..post a reply to that.

Almost the equivalent of an e-mail these days, isn't it?

Yeah, and this was before the telephone.

-Each one of these was bespoke to the box it was on.

-Yeah.

Cos it actually said the distance you are

-from the head post office as well.

-Yeah.

George Orwell wrote a famous essay,

The Lion And The Unicorn,

about England and talking about cricket and warm beer

and red postboxes, he said.

And it is...Britain.

It's interwoven into our history.

Someone could come here from any part of the world,

just like they know they're in London

when they see a double-decker red bus,

they know they're in this country when they see a red pillar box.

It's an amazing bit of continuity.

Orwell wrote that love letter to England and the pillar box

in the 1940s.

By the time I joined the Post Office in the late '60s,

that image was only half the story because, after decades of stability,

some would say stagnation,

the Royal Mail was once again feeling the winds of change.

In many ways, by the 1960s,

it's become a lot like it was in the 1830s.

Remember we talked about in the 1830s,

people were going round saying,

"It's nice, the Post Office,

"it's a wonderful, historic institution,

"but it's backward-looking, it's too conservative,

"it's not open-minded, it doesn't embrace new ideas.

"Society's moved on.

"And the Post Office needs to be given a really good shake."

And Rowland Hill did it.

Well, in the 1960s, that feeling is growing -

it has to be given a really good shake.

And then they got a really good shaker.

MUSIC: You Really Got Me by The Kinks

In 1964, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, better known as Tony,

was appointed Postmaster General by Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Just 39 at the time, he was determined to modernise

what he thought was an institution firmly stuck in a rut.

'Tony's son Hillary remembers the period well.'

Your father came in as a young man into an institution

that had hardly changed since 1840, I guess.

It was a big job to take on as Postmaster General.

He walked through the door and discovered the Post Office

employed nearly 400,000 people,

it ran a bank, it was responsible for broadcasting, telecoms,

satellites, and of course the Post Office

and its very own railway.

Dad started by saying, "I want to meet all of the director generals

"and I want to hear about what they do."

So he was restless, he was energetic,

he had a lot of ideas, but I think the senior officials

and the permanent secretary just didn't know what had hit them.

# See, don't ever set me free

# I always want to be by your side... #

One Christmas Day evening, he said to me,

"H, do you want to come with me?

-"I'm going to the two post offices that are open."

-Did he call you H?

-Were you H?

-I was H, that's me.

And we went to Trafalgar Square and, I think, King Edward Street

and he took two bottles of whisky,

which he handed across the counter to the staff in there.

I think they were slightly bemused to see this bloke turning up

on Christmas Day evening, claiming to be the Postmaster General.

But he went to say, "Look, thanks very much for working

"cos we've got the day off and you haven't and thanks for what you do."

He decided the Post Office must break away from the civil service

where it had been virtually since 1516

and should split between post and telecoms

and that was something that, if he hadn't been Postmaster General,

would never have happened because the Treasury disapproved.

Callaghan, as the Chancellor, disapproved and normally,

that would have been the end of the matter, but he fought it through.

He did and he had a lot of battles.

This is the middle of the 1960s,

this is a time of extraordinary change.

I mean, Wilson had talked in '63 about the white heat of technology

and Dad was really keen on all of this

and of course the Post Office Tower,

which put Britain at the leading edge of technological innovation.

The Post Office Tower became a symbol of modern, hi-tech Britain.

This was a time before Canary Wharf and the Shard,

before private money swept into London

and started changing the skyline beyond recognition.

A time when it was taken for granted

that a service could be both publicly owned

and right at the cutting edge of progress.

This new spirit of optimism was expressed in another

of Tony Benn's many innovations -

he decided that the Great British postage stamp

was in need of a revamp.

'To help him do this, he enlisted

'one of Britain's most creative young artists, David Gentleman.

'David began designing stamps in 1962

'when the idea of a commemorative issue was first introduced.

'He would go on to become

'one of the most prolific stamp designers in the country.'

When I started work,

what I most wanted to do was for my work to be seen.

I didn't mind what it was, as long as it was seen.

The excitement of knowing that there were millions in circulation

was quite heady for a while.

One day, Tony Benn rang up and said, "Come and visit me,"

in his very grand office.

It was like the private being called in to see the field marshal.

I was terrified, but he was unbelievably, as you can imagine,

charming and easy to get on with.

Britain was the only country in the world

that wasn't named on its stamps.

It was the unmistakable image of the Queen's head

that told you where the stamp was from,

but Benn asked David to do the unthinkable -

design a range of stamps that left the head out altogether.

Beheading the Queen here, you are!

And the Post Office top brass were really amazingly appalled.

And Tony didn't stop there.

As a privy councillor, he had access to Her Majesty herself

so he simply went round to show her the new designs - in person.

And he got down on his knees

because he laid the books out in front of him

and his diary records how he handed them to the Queen

-so she could examine them.

-So the Queen says,

"Well, the trouble is I've never seen anything like this,"

and your dad says, "Well, it just so happens I have some with me."

-And he's on his...

-He's on his knees.

On the carpet, in front of Her Majesty.

In front of the Queen, passing these designs

so she could have a look at them.

So it must have been quite a spectacle,

but the Palace was not amused.

In the back of my mind, I had a kind of fallback position,

which was that it would be much easier to fit in alongside

the other elements in a pictorial or emblematic design

if it was a little emblem itself.

So I suggested it should be made into a silhouette.

-Right, and every subsequent issue had the silhouette head.

-That's correct.

-Rather than the photograph of Her Majesty.

-Correct.

David still has the original woodcut he made

that became the new-style Queen's head silhouette -

a very British compromise.

The changes to the Post Office ushered in by Benn

might have seemed radical, but they were really

just the beginning of the biggest revolution the service had ever seen.

Automatic sorting systems kept getting better,

which in turn transformed the job and reduced the workforce.

Mechanical handling and sorting for letters

is the real postal revolution.

The first machine separates the fat and oversized letters

from those the equipment can handle.

The next machine sizes them into long and short

and then divides the stream into first- and second-class mail.

This is code sorting.

The postman types the postal code onto the letter

in two lines of phosphor dots.

The postal code, if fully used, cuts out all hand-sorting.

The electronic translator does the whole operation.

Then in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher,

the telephone part of the business was privatised as British Telecom.

# Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane

# Ain't got time to take a fast train... #

It was around this time

that I started getting seriously involved in union work

until I finally left the Post Office

to become a full-time officer of the Communication Workers Union.

I delivered my last letter in 1987 from this sorting office

in Slough, just west of London, where I had worked for almost 20 years.

Nothing has changed at all. All of this is exactly as I remember it.

I'd put my name forward for branch chairman,

and if I hadn't become branch chairman in '76,

I wouldn't have become an executive council member,

I wouldn't have become general secretary,

I wouldn't have gone into Parliament.

I'd have been a postman, just now thinking about retirement, probably.

Er, and that would have suited me fine!

What I couldn't have predicted was that a revolution even bigger

than Rowland Hill's penny black was on the way - e-mail.

For a while, it seemed that the postman's days were numbered,

but today, things seem to be looking up.

And it's parcels, not letters, that look set to define

the future of the Royal Mail and to take the business global.

This state-of-the-art facility on the edge of Heathrow Airport

is where the future of my old employer is to be found.

Here, the job that used to require thousands of workers - sorting -

can be done by a handful of staff with the help of technology.

I've seen some equipment and I've seen some pretty jazzy stuff.

I've not seen anything like this. This is HUGE!

This site is the one site

through which all the international letter mail leaves the country,

and this machine actually automatically

sorts parcels for us through hybrid coding systems.

Somewhere in there are human beings looking at the parcel,

-saying, "Zimbabwe."

-Correct.

-Just as simple as that.

And there shouldn't be any further intervention,

anyone touching that item, until it gets to Zimbabwe.

When this site was built, letter was king, parcel was not as great

and I think what we're seeing in the current era is parcel,

through e-commerce and internet shopping,

is huge, and of course letter mail is beginning to diminish a bit.

And in this vast emporium here, is there no-one in some little corner,

standing in front of a sorting frame, manually sorting letters?

-Yes, it still has to happen.

-Does it?

There are still some items that we can't sort by machine

so we do have oversizes and that sort of thing

and there are still items that cannot,

in this day and age, be read automatically.

Visiting this futuristic sorting office really brings home to me

just how much things have moved on since my day.

I wonder if I would have been happy

to be delivering more parcels than letters.

There was something about delivering a letter that felt personal

and there was a satisfaction in that for me.

With the shift to e-mail, not to mention texts and tweets,

I can't help thinking we're in danger of losing something precious.

'Author Simon Garfield has written about letters

'and their power to change lives.'

Simon, I loved your description of letters

as "the lubricant of human interaction".

I delivered these letters at a time

without really thinking about it profoundly,

when they were still that crucial link between people.

Do you think, looking at the history of it,

that somehow e-mails can replace them or text messages can replace them?

-No...

-Is it not just a new form of transmission?

No, there's a kind of irony

that we communicate more now than we ever did.

I don't think we write with as much depth as we used to write letters.

Researching a recent book, Simon stumbled across a treasure trove

of correspondence that really shows the power of the humble letter.

These letters were adapted for the stage,

performed by Sherlock's Benedict Cumberbatch and Louise Brealey.

I mean, who can't relate to this? It's so lovely.

"11th of December 1944.

"Dearest Christopher, it is not easy to surrender myself so completely

"as I am doing at my age,

"a much more tender age to be in love than at 20.

"You have caused an upheaval within -

"an upheaval that contains so much sweetness, ecstasy and pain,

"something I didn't think I was going to know,

"something that I thought did not exist

"because I had not known it.

"It is new to me.

"You are new to me."

The correspondence was from a man called Chris Barker,

who was a career postman,

but when he was called up

and obviously reserved occupation for a bit

and then called up finally in 1943, he wrote to everyone -

his family and all of his friends

and he wrote to a woman called Bessie Moore.

And Bessie Moore was someone he used to work with.

They'd went away on a sort of training camp for the Post Office,

they were sort of friends, but not intimate.

Within about three months, there was this incredibly passionate affair,

just conducted through the mail.

They couldn't really remember what they looked like, even,

but they were falling in love with their words and the post.

Oh, this is lovely!

"Oh, for the time when I might awaken during the night,

"hear you breathing beside me, feel the warmth from your body

"and snuggle down in sheer happiness

"and comfort in the knowledge of your presence."

I mean, of course he was going to fall in love with her.

She's amazing.

I think one of the most extraordinary things about it

is they would never have the courage to say those words to each other.

There's a moment where he describes kissing,

he kisses his own signature - this is Chris,

this sort of funny, stiff, little sort of lovely bloke -

and he's a little embarrassed by this,

but he still tells her that he's done it

because he thinks if she then kisses it,

that they have exchanged something physical, and I think that the sort

of physical fact of letters is worth reminding ourselves of.

The thing that I would think

is that we will never find that kind of trove.

We will not find love e-mails in the attic.

We've communicated by and through the mail

in one form or another going back 2,000 years,

but we're just happy to abandon that.

When I left the Post Office, I didn't just leave a job.

It felt like leaving a family, corny as it sounds.

Today, most of my old mates from those days

are enjoying their retirement.

I wonder what they'd make of the changes I've seen.

And look at this lot! It's as if it's 1987.

-There's a bunch I remember. Charlie!

-Pleased to meet you, Alan.

-Long time no see!

-You've filled out a little bit, but...

Only 5st, not a lot!

The great thing about this office was we had people from all over.

You transferred in from Wales, I transferred in from London

and of course you had people from Pakistan and from India.

The camaraderie then was brilliant, wasn't it?

My conclusion to you bunch of old codgers,

apart from you, cos you're still working,

is that it's a much harder job nowadays

-than it used to be in our day.

-I can't believe it.

You're not having any of that, no, no, no.

MUSIC: Please Mr Postman by The Beatles

'I'm proud I was a postman.

'I always felt I was part of a great public service.

'Whether that service will survive the 21st century, who can say?

'I guess it depends on us using it.

'So why not use it tomorrow to send someone a letter?

'You could even write to your MP.'

# There must be some word today

# From my girlfriend so far away

# Please, Mr Postman, look and see

# If there's a letter A letter for me

# I been standing here waiting, Mr Postman

# So patiently

# For just a card or just a letter... #