In his 1941 wartime essay ‘England, Your England’, George Orwell attempted to define the components of national character. ‘There is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization,’ he maintained, and ‘[i]t is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes’ (Orwell 1961 [1941]: 11, emphasis in original). Orwell’s turn to the red pillar-boxes of the General Post Office (GPO) as an emblem of the nation, as integral to the fabric of everyday life as breakfast, was a sentiment widely echoed throughout early twentieth-century Britain. W. H. Auden’s 1937 travelogue to Iceland, written in rhyme royal as a Letter to Lord Byron, notes that ‘confession is a human want, / So Englishmen must make theirs now by post’, reflecting on the affective intimacies circulated by the post office’s ‘modern methods of communication: / New roads, new rails, new contacts, as we know / From documentaries by the G.P.O’ (1977a [1937]: 169). When Cambridge University Press commissioned a series of books on ‘English Institutions’, the first monograph was E. T. Crutchley’s G.P.O. (1938), and a review in The Observer declared, ‘No one can read this excellent book without a sense of pride at a great national achievement’ (‘G.P.O.’ 1938: 21). Ivor Halstead’s best-selling wartime account Post Haste (1944) evoked the continuous presence of the GPO through the lifespan of citizens from their cradles to their graves – anticipating the post-war Welfare State to come – with the ‘young tak[ing] their earliest savings to the Post Office, [and] the old go[ing] to it for their pensions’ (qtd in Robinson 1948: 415).

These expressed attachments to the post office as an institution at once ordinary and iconic, embedded into the daily rhythms of national life, are unsurprising, given the range of infrastructural and technological services under the purview of the GPO at this time. Although the nineteenth century is often seen as the moment of the institution’s modernisation – with the establishment of the Penny Post in 1840, the Savings Bank in 1861 and exclusive rights to telegraph services in 1869 – the early twentieth century saw a radical expansion of the GPO’s responsibilities. By the outbreak of the First World War, the GPO was the largest employer of labour in the country, with nearly a quarter of a million men and women in its workforce.