Masters of the Post: The Authorized History of the Royal Mail

The origins of the Royal Mail go back to the early years of the Tudor monarchy: Brian Tuke, a former King's Bailiff in Sandwich, was acknowledged as the first 'Master of the Posts' by Cardinal Wolsey in 1512, and went on to build up a network of 'postmasters' across England for Henry VIII. Over the following five hundred years the Royal Mail expanded to a degree that would have been unimaginable then, transformed by coaches, trains, ocean steamships and then modern aviation to become the largest employer in the country, and the face of the British state for most people in their everyday lives.

In the twentieth century the Royal Mail delivered letters and parcels with extraordinary efficiency to the front-line troops in two world wars, seconding 2,500 staff to run a sorting depot in Hyde Park for the trenches of the Great War and participating in the planning of the D-Day Landings at the highest level. It managed the growth of a national telephone business, the rising expectations of a modern industrial labour force and the fiendishly difficult process of harnessing computers and automation to sorting the mails. But it also faced the demands of an increasingly commercial marketplace. Since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the possibility of privatising the Royal Mail has prompted often passionate arguments - and has added immeasurably to the difficulties of running it.

In charting the whole of this extraordinary story, Duncan Campbell-Smith brings to life many of the dominant personalities in the Royal Mail's history - from Rowland Hill, who imposed a uniform penny post and set the great Victorian expansion on its way, to Tony Benn who championed the modernisation of the service in the 1960s and Tom Jackson who led the postal workers' biggest union through fifteen frequently stormy years up to 1982. He also allows plenty of space for a series of remarkable tales - recounting how Stanley Gibbons conquered the world of stamp-collecting, how postal engineers built the first programmable computer for the wartime code-breakers of Bletchley Park and how the Royal Mail failed to avert the Great Train Robbery of 1963.

This is the first complete history of the Royal Mail up to the present day, based on its comprehensive archives. In addition to a reappraisal of many aspects of earlier centuries, it includes the first detailed account of the past half-century of Britain's postal history, made possible by privileged access to confidential records. These have allowed the inside story to be told of the background to today's debate over the future of the Royal Mail. Will its employees remain, like Brian Tuke's postmasters, servants of the Crown? This book could hardly appear at a more timely moment.