15-20 Phoenix Place,
London WC1X 0DA
Thursday February 15 2018
On reflection half-term may not have
been the best time to visit such a new, popular and very child centred museum but we did have fun.
I had expected a somewhat tedious
display of endless cabinets of ‘special stamps’ or maybe a serried rank of
conserved pillar boxes, rather as we had seen them when they (the pillar boxes)
were on holiday at Bruce Castle while this building was being converted and
expanded. . But the designers have come up with an attraction that
offers information in a very accessible way – plenty of interaction for younger
visitors and bright legible information boards, so none of that grovelling to
read tiny captions. It is very clear why they have chosen the exhibits they have
and like many museums nowadays have also focused in on the ‘individual’
stories of key personnel.
Not that historical context is forgotten
– there is a well-illustrated electronic time line (except it’s more like a
flip book) with all the key dates from Henry VIII decreeing that towns should
have three horses available to convey the royal letters. It would take Charles
II to ‘allow’ the public to share his mail coaches and deliveries. Without
quite being the ‘Wild West’ the exhibition makes clear that transporting the
mail whether by road, sea or later by rail was a dangerous pursuit and the weapons
for defending the mail deliveries are all on display. Pirates were not unknown
and in 1793 the ‘Antelope’ was attacked. Did you know there were post officials
aboard the ‘Titanic’ who vainly tried to save the bags from the incoming
waters?
Most extraordinary was the well
documented occasion when an escaped circus lioness attacked the Exeter mail
coach. The horse Pomegranate was hurt but fortunately no-one else was harmed –
the lion recaptured, and the horse once restored was looked after by the circus
proprietor and the mail of course remained intact. In 1963 (well within the
living memory of today’s three visitors) was the daring but more violent great
Train Robbery when it was perfectly clear the criminals knew which train and
carriages to target and when to do it.
But back to the time-line – red had by
now become the accepted colour scheme (not a Pantone shade I have just discovered)
and can be seen in several models of post and pillar boxes (one free standing
the other attached to a post or in a wall), the uniforms that were introduced
at an early stage for the mail coachmen and the vehicles themselves which are
dotted, but in a chronological order throughout the museum.
Some richer merchants and business had
also introduced private mail services but the uniform practice was for the post
men to collect the fee at the point of delivery – and this was time consuming.
It took Rowland Hill to introduce a payment at the point of postage, verified
by a ‘stamp’ to revolutionise and speed up the system, and once the Penny Post
came in there was no looking back. By 1850 the service was dealing with 347
million letters per year. (This museum is about the Post and not about stationery
but I couldn’t help thinking that this would have been a good time to be in the
paper and envelope trade…) The main means of local delivery was by foot or
later by bicycle – Jo was entranced with an ‘experimental’ vehicle introduced
in the Horsham area: a kind of penny farthing with stabilisers which allowed
the postmen to carry letters and parcels in the robust baskets nicknamed the ‘hen
and chicks.’ Often the innovator, the
Post Office bought the first van in 1904.
A rather lovely classic motor cycle
reminds us that Royal Mail took on both telegrams and telegraphing (very
important during the wars) and telephones as early as 1912. So the phone boxes
were red too. The ones on show here have
recorded voices recalling some war-time memories, and as we nostalgically
pressed Button A (to get through) and then Button B (to get the change) we
remarked that the phone booth did not smell of pee…The importance of mail to
communicate between home and the various fronts is well illustrated with the
rather interesting anecdote of a German soldier who wrote to the widow of the
English man who had just fallen at his feet – he found a letter in the pocket –
and there are other examples. The
postmen had their own 'pals' regiment.
Called the Post Office Rifles. The story of the VC winner is there too. In 1914 the Post
Office was the largest employer in the country so when the men enlisted it was
an opportunity for women to take over.
As someone who worked five Christmas
shifts in the NW11 sorting office I loved every minute of it; the smell of wet
sacking, the special knot for the piles of letters and cards (this was before
the ubiquitous and altogether less reliable elastic band), the upside down card
alerting you to a parcel or RD special, and trudging the streets before it even
got light.
During the Second World War the risks
were greater with bombs disrupting deliveries – but never for long after all
they were dealing with 4 million pieces of post per week, and communication
from prisoners of war went ‘free’. Although the solitariness of the distinct
delivery ‘walks’ tends to attract loners the Post Office had a strong Union
ethic. In 1933 they took on their first PR appointment and while the
aptly-named Stephen Tallents did not brand the Post Office quite as
strongly as Johnson and Pick were doing for London Transport he still brought a
wealth of ideas to promote the GPO, as it was known then. Key amongst them was
Philip Grierson, the documentary film maker to set up the GPO Film Unit and
sure enough you can sit down and watch some of its productions, including ‘Night
Mail’ (admittedly a rather grainy print) which counted WH Auden and Benjamin
Britten as co creatives on this magic account of how the mail is sorted aboard
the train as it speeds overnight to Scotland. (Little did we know that half an
hour later we would be doing it ourselves). All the charming posters are
displayed and you can even browse the (typically parochial) in-house magazine
with its small ads for strong boots and help for ‘itchy toes’. Tallents also
introduced a gym at Mount Pleasant.
The post-war period looks at the further
significant modernisations – mechanical sorting came in during the Sixties and
the first post codes were trialled in Norwich in 1959 – who would have guessed
that they would become so useful for satnavs and other forms of web-based route
finding? I would have liked more on post codes and though one of the
interactives offered it as a possibility for some reason this of all ‘buttons’
would not respond on the screen. There were generous supplies of child sized
postal uniforms, several opportunities to ‘write notes’ and post them – very
popular was the overhead zooming pneumatic tubes, which while novel were not
really a Post Office thing; you could also listen and decode a Morse message
and insert your ‘selfie‘ (with added features from an attractive range of
crowns, moustaches and ears) onto a stamp design of your choice. Rather like
Postman Pat you can choose your route, with or without good deeds en route, to collect mail and still be in time for the
right train.
‘Novelty stamps, otherwise known to
collectors as ‘First day Covers’, were very big through the second half of the
20th century but the Museum restricts its doubtless vast collection
to displaying some key items – the Machin model which served for the Queen’s
head which is still on stamps, the talents of David Gentlemen David Gentlemen our most prolific designer of stamps and some children’s
favourites featuring Beatrix Potter characters and Paddington Bear.
This kind of brought us to the end of
the substantive collection, though one room is set aside for special
exhibitions and the current one was about ‘keeping in touch’ stressing the
importance of mail for separated families. The examples here included a young
girl trafficked for sex and eventually given asylum in the UK, a divorced
father not able to see his children but who wrote regularly on the most
beautifully hand drawn envelopes, a Chilean political prisoner eventually freed
by the pressure of a letter campaign and a Caribbean nurse who came over in the
early Sixties to work in the NHS. All of the recipients of the letters
treasured the regular deliveries of ‘news from home or distant family’ and we
often forget in this day of instant texting/phoning and email how precious a
proper letter can still be. The Post Office must know this more than anyone as
with the exception of birthdays most post today consists of bills or
advertising and is very impersonal. The decline of the letter post is not really
alluded to.
So now it was across the road for our
appointment with ‘Rail Mail’, the newly restored stretch of the 23 miles (37
kms) of underground railway which was built in the early 20th
Century to collect and distribute mail bags between the mainline railway
stations, the central sorting office at Mount Pleasant and other points. The
line was constructed to be a faster alternative to road transport, and it seems
a little odd given today’s volume of traffic around Mount Pleasant that it was
decided in 2003 that this argument no longer applied…
This trip may not be for claustrophobes
– the tunnels are narrower than the ‘proper’ underground, just 2 metres in
diameter, and the trains are small because they were originally only meant to
carry mailbags, not passengers or drivers. These days, your train has a driver
and the carriages have seats and (for obvious safety reasons) Perspex roofs, but
it is undeniably cramped and at times noisy and dark. However, it is well worth
the discomfort. Your ride lasts 15 minutes and takes you on a loop, stopping at
various stages for a recorded explanation by Ray Middlesworth, an engineer on
the system up to its closure who has obviously been very involved in the
restoration. Stops include two stations
(it would have been nice to be told exactly where we were at these points)
where the walls are used for computer-generated animations of how the system
worked and how three sample letters would have reached their destinations; you
also get a glimpse down into a lower tunnel which serves as a rather sad
graveyard for redundant rolling stock.
After your ride, there is a further
museum display, logically enough largely concerned with the workings of the
system you have just ridden. It ran 22 hours a day to a very tight schedule:
Post Office workers would typically only have one minute to load and unload a
train. As with the big museum across the road, there are good interactive
displays giving you the chance to wrangle the complexities of the switching
system etc. The museum also explores the wider theme of postal rail networks,
with a display of a 19th
Century pneumatic railway (think an enlarged version of those note-and-change
delivery tubes mentioned above) including a panel commemorating an intrepid
Victorian lady who rode the tube for its full length in her crinoline! There is
also a display commemorating the full-blown mail trains as seen in 'Night Mail' with an explanation of the systems for picking
up and dropping leather bags of mail at speed, and a chance to practice sorting
mail in a simulated wobbly rail carriage.
You emerge into daylight and observe
there are real live postmen criss crossing the courtyard of Mount Pleasant and
small red postal vans going off in various directions doing what they have done
for the last 500 years – delivering mail. We only tend to notice this service
when it fails and we can grumble about ‘delayed in the post’ but need to
remember that in spite of much mechanisation this is still a service delivered
by people doing a combination of physical labour in all weathers, a decoding
job and public relations when needed. This splendid museum encapsulates that
history and continuing service wonderfully.
The house is a handsome one, and it is stuffed full of interesting material about the Polish nation and its complex history, particularly but not only in the period of the Second World War. Indeed, if I have a criticism of this excellent museum, it is that the various stages in the history of Poland are not set out in chronological order, but happen somewhat randomly in the various rooms: so, for example, material related to Louis XV's Polish wife is mixed with 20th century exhibits, and so on. 
We were guided round expertly by Kris Nowakowski, who told us the story of Wojtek, the bear who joined the Polish army in 1942. Wojtek's image adorns the front hall, alongside the remains of the 178th Luftwaffe plane shot down by the amazingly successful 303 Squadron.
The history of Poland is told in several of the rooms. During the long period of Partition between the three great Empires of Russia, Prussia and Austria Hungary, the Austro-Hungarians were willing to arm Polish militias, mostly with out-dated guns. Polish troops also carried curved sabres, reminding us that they had helped to defend Vienna against the Turks
During the wars against Napoleon, the Poles sided with France (or, you might say, fought against Russia) and it was a Polish regiment of Lancers which actually broke an English Square at Albuera in Spain in 1811.
In one of the rooms at the back of the house, we saw General Sikorski's desk and other memorabilia. Poles trapped by the hand-over of their territory to Stalin escaped in their thousands, and some, including women, became carpet-makers in Afghanistan, before reaching Western Europe and joining the struggle against Fascism.
Tartar regiments had been formed in earlier years, with standards that look more oriental than European, and a Koran on which to swear allegiance.
During the 1930s, when an Anglo-Polish Treaty was being signed, ships for the Polish navy were also being built,. for example in Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. On 30 August, 1939, 5 Polish Destroyers sailed to Scotland and joined the allied navies. One of them was closely involved in the hunt for the Bismarck. On 2 September, five submarines left Gdansk, but two of them made the mistake of heading to Sweden where they were interned, since Sweden took its neutrality seriously, except when it came to supplying iron ore to Germany. Two went into Tallin, and Estonia interned them, but the Ozel (Eagle) escaped after the crew overpowered the guards, later releasing them. One of the rooms displayed the enormous battle pennant flown by Polish ships.
We saw a portrait of Paderewski, the great pianist and President of between-wars Poland, as well as some information about Copernicus who, in the 15th century, demonstrated the movement of the planets around the sun.
But then it was back to the Second World War, with plenty of material about the Italian Campaign, and especially the great battle for Monte Cassino. A bundle of letters to a soldier from his wife, stuffed into his breast pocket, stopped a bullet. And we saw the civic diploma from the City of Bologna, liberated by the Poles.
Upstairs again, there were huge war paintings, as well as signed photographs of King George VI and Churchill. Cases showed Polish war inventions, including mine detectors and anti-tank guns, though the Museum does not have a German Enigma machine, that other example of Polish skill and forethought. Information about the Polish cavalry was also here.
