In Focus: The Imperial Penny Post
Roger Hudson considers a photogaph showing London postmen as part of a vast, global mail network.
It is December 1898 and the inaugural dispatch of the first letters to be sent via the new Imperial Penny Post is soon to leave the General Post Office in London EC1. A sack of imperial mail is about to be slid down into a horse-drawn van via its roof from an upper sorting office. A London postman, with his empty sack over his shoulder, stands in front. The previous rate for a letter up to half an ounce in weight going abroad was tuppence halfpenny, but a successful campaign mounted by Sir John Henneker Heaton MP has brought about this reduction, although for the moment Australia, New Zealand and the Cape (South Africa) are excluded. Henneker Heaton had gone out to Australia in 1864, aged 16, and became a journalist and public figure in Sydney before he returned to England in 1884 and later set about agitating for a special imperial postal rate for the 22 million letters and postcards that were being sent to the colonies each year by the 1890s.
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