A pillar box is a type of free-standing post box. They are found in the United Kingdom and its associated Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories, and, less commonly, in several members of the Commonwealth of Nations such as Cyprus, India, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, as well as in the Republic of Ireland. Pillar boxes were provided in territories administered by the United Kingdom, such as Mandatory Palestine, and territories with agency postal services provided by the British Post Office such as Bahrain, Dubai, Kuwait and Morocco. The United Kingdom also exported pillar boxes to countries that ran their own postal services, such as Argentina, Portugal and Uruguay.
Mail is deposited in pillar boxes to be collected by the Royal Mail, An Post or the appropriate postal operator and forwarded to the addressee. The boxes have been in use since 1852, just twelve years after the introduction of the first adhesive postage stamps (Penny Black) and uniform penny post. For the first twenty years, they were found in different colours, but in 1874, they were standardized across Britain to be painted red.
Mail may also be deposited in lamp boxes or wall boxes that serve the same purpose as pillar boxes but are attached to a post or set into a wall. According to the Letter Box Study Group, there are more than 150 recognised designs and varieties of pillar boxes and wall boxes, not all of which have known surviving examples. Like the red telephone box, the red post box is regarded as a British cultural icon. , Royal Mail estimates there are over 115,000 post boxes in the United Kingdom.
Construction
Most traditional British pillar boxes produced after 1905 are made of cast iron and are cylindrical. Other shapes have been used: the hexagonal Penfolds, rectangular boxes that have not proved to be popular, and an oval shape that is used mainly for the large "double aperture" boxes most often seen in large cities like London and Dublin. In recent years boxes manufactured in glass-fibre or acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic have been produced that do not follow these general outlines. These are for use in secure indoor locations such as supermarkets.
Cast iron pillar box construction comprises three distinct main parts:
The cap sits on top of the carcass and is usually bolted down from inside. Some designs after 1965 do not have a separate cap. Caps can also be fitted with a separate bracket, normally of cast iron, which supports a Post Office Direction sign (POD) indicating the nearest Post Office.
The door contains the aperture or posting slot. It is hinged, should display the royal cypher of the monarch who was reigning at the time of installation, and may also be fitted with a collection plate showing the times of collection from that location. It is fitted with a brass security lock on the inside. The contractor for these locks has been the Chubb Locks company for many years. They are five-lever locks and each one can exhibit more than 6,500 combinations. There is no skeleton key for these locks. Each post box has its own set of keys and postal workers have to carry large bunches with them when clearing the boxes.
The carcass or body of the box supports the door and cap, and may protrude substantially down below ground level. This provides security and stability to the pillar box. There is a wirework cage inside to prevent mail falling out when the door is opened, a hinged letter chute to allow mail to fall into the collecting bag or sack, and a serrated hand-guard to prevent unauthorised tampering with the mail through the aperture.
History
Pre-history
Before the introduction of pillar boxes, in the UK, it was customary to take outgoing mail to the nearest letter-receiving house or post office. Such houses were usually coaching inns or turnpike houses where the Royal Mail coach would stop to pick up and set down mails and passengers. People took their letters, in person, to the receiver, or postmaster, purchased a stamp (after 1840) and handed over the letter.
Channel Islands problem
The advent of the British wayside letter box can be traced to Sir Rowland Hill, Secretary of the Post Office, and novelist Anthony Trollope, his Surveyor for the Western District. Hill sent Trollope to the Channel Islands to ascertain what could be done about the problem of collecting the mail on a pair of islands. The problems identified in the Channel Islands were caused by the irregular sailing times of the Royal Mail packet boats serving the islands due to weather and tides.
Trollope subsequently arrived in Jersey in the early Spring of 1852 and proceeded to survey both islands. His recommendation back to Hill was to employ a device he may have seen in use in Paris: a "letter-receiving pillar". It was to be made of cast iron, about 1.5 metres high, octagonal in design and painted olive green. Trollope estimated that four would be needed for Guernsey and five for Jersey. The foundry of Vaudin & Son in Jersey was commissioned to produce them and the first four were erected in David Place, New Street, Cheapside and St Clement's Road in Saint Helier and brought into public use on 23 November 1852. Guernsey received its first three pillar boxes on 8 February 1853.
They were an instant success, despite some obvious problems with rainwater ingress. One Vaudin box still stands in Union Street, Saint Peter Port, Guernsey whilst another is in the British Postal Museum & Archive collection in London.
First mainland and Isle of Wight boxes
The very first boxes erected in Great Britain and Ireland are not recorded, but the designs varied from area to area, as each district surveyor issued their own specifications and tendered to their own chosen foundries. The earliest ones were essentially experimental, including octagonal pillars or fluted columns, vertical slits instead of horizontal ones, and other unusual features.
The Post Office archives record that the first box in mainland Britain was erected in Botchergate, Carlisle, in 1853. This fact is commemorated today with a replica Penfold box, located outside the Old Town Hall in Carlisle city centre. The first six in London were installed on 11 April 1855. The earliest surviving British designs are four Butt boxes made in Gloucester for the Western Area. These are at Barnes Cross, near Sherborne, Dorset, inside the former Royal Naval Hospital, Stonehouse, Plymouth, in the Haverfordwest town museum (formerly at Merlin's Bridge) and in the British Postal Museum & Archive store at Debden (formerly at Ventnor railway station, Isle of Wight). All date from 1853 to 1859, with Barnes Cross being one of the later batch. The oldest pillar boxes still in use by the Royal Mail are at Framlingham in Suffolk; this pair were founded by Andrew Handyside and Company of Derby in 1856 and are at Double Street and College Road. A third octagonal pillar of this type was at Gosberton in Lincolnshire and is now in the Museum of Lincolnshire Life in Lincoln. 1856 also saw various designs introduced in Scotland and the Midlands. The postbox believed to be the oldest in Scotland, is a wall box which sits on the front of the Golspie Inn (formerly the Sutherland Arms Hotel); it carries the royal cypher of Queen Victoria and dates back to 1861.
Design problems The first design for London, by Grissel & Son of Hoxton Ironworks was rather stubby and rectangular, although surmounted by a decorative ball. Erected in 1855, they were replaced because people complained that they were ugly. One survived and was earmarked for preservation in the early part of the 20th century. It was stored in a contractor's yard in London which was subject to a direct hit from a German bomb during the Blitz, thus destroying forever some important boxes. A photograph of this Grissel box together with a Giant Fluted box and a Penfold in the contractor's yard appeared in The Letter Box by Jean Young Farrugia.
Moving towards a standard design
Standardisation of sorts came in 1857 with the deliberations of the Committee for Science & Art of the House of Lords. The committee designed a very ornate box festooned with Grecian-style decoration but, in a major oversight, devoid of any posting aperture, which meant they were hewn out of the cast iron locally, destroying the aesthetic of the box. Fifty were made for London and the big cities and three survive. One is in Salford Museum, Greater Manchester and the other two are at the BPMA in London. A similar, much-simplified version has survived painted green by An Post at the Cork Kent railway station, Ireland. Also to be found only in Ireland is one of the early boxes, now at the An Post exhibit on the history of the Irish postal service in the General Post Office, O'Connell Street, Dublin. It is the sole surviving "Ashworth" box of 1855 for the Northern District, that included all of the island of Ireland.
Prior to 1859 there was no standard colour, although there is evidence that the lettering and royal cypher were sometimes picked out in gold. In 1859, a bronze green colour became standard until 1874. Initially, it was thought that the green colour would be unobtrusive. Too unobtrusive, as it turned out – people kept walking into them. Red became the standard colour in 1874, although ten more years elapsed before every box in the UK had been repainted.
First National Standard boxes
The first real standard design came in 1859 with the First National Standard box. These were also cast in two sizes for the first time to allow for heavier usage in big metropolitan areas. A number have survived across the UK, including Aberdeen, Brighton, Stoke, Worthing, London, World's End Hambledon, Bristol, Congresbury, and Newport, Isle of Wight. Similar boxes have also survived in Mauritius.
In the busy city of Liverpool, even these boxes could not provide the capacity and security required, so a special design was commissioned from the foundry of Cochrane Grove & Co of Dudley. Known as "Liverpool Specials", three survive from a batch of six. Two of these are in Liverpool and the other is in the BPMA collection in London. Cochrane became the foundry that made all the Penfold boxes from 1866 to 1879.
Penfolds
The most famous of the early designs is that named after the architect who designed it, John Penfold. Penfold boxes come in three sizes and altogether there are nine different types. They are very widespread, with the biggest accumulations in London and Cheltenham. Others are spread across England, Ireland, India (including locally made copies), British Guyana, Australia and New Zealand. An export order from the postal service of the Republic of Uruguay resulted in nine boxes of the Penfold design being exported there in 1879, of which six are believed extant, including one in the philatelic department of the central Post Office in Montevideo. In 1993 the Correo Uruguayo commemorated Penfold post boxes with a set of stamps of various denominations.