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This series consists of records relating to the supervision of the General Post Office's financial business, including correspondence relating to authorisation of expenditure, development of services and applications for pensions.

POST 1 is commonly used by researchers investigating their family history. This is because a large proportion of this class consists of documentation relating to pensions and gratuities awarded to individual Post Office employees for the years 1686-1959. Amongst the numerous bound volumes of treasury letters are the pension details of thousands of employees. Additional information is often included such as the officer's name, rank and office, date of birth, career history, last salary, cause of retirement or date of death and a statement of reference. Case statements, reports and correspondence are sometimes included where retirement was on grounds of ill-health or the cause of death under investigation. The names of these individuals can be traced through the pension and gratuity indexes, which can in turn be found in separate POST classes, usually made available on microfilm.

Researchers pursuing their own family history are advised to consult the 'Guide to Family History' which can be found in the Search Room and is available to download online. This guide provides step by step advice on how to trace pension records, as well as appointment records.

The majority of these pension records can be found in Sub-Series 1 'Treasury letters, general correspondence' and Sub-Series 6 'Pensions and gratuities applications and awards' (pp. 1-259 and 271-349 of the POST 1 printed catalogue respectively).

Sub-Series 1 'Treasury letters, general correspondence' accounts for the majority of the material held in POST 1. In addition to pension records, this series comprises a record of communications between the Treasury and Postmaster General concerning the financial management of the inland, foreign and colonial services. This includes Treasury authorisation for expenditure on salaries and allowances; new establishments, buildings, facilities and equipment; extension of postal routes, services and postage rates. Developments in transport and technology, rapid expansion of the GPO and increasing complexity of the Civil Service are reflected in the letter books from the early nineteenth century. Volumes contain correspondence concerning road surveys; conveyance of mails by steam packets and railways; contracts for building work and ship conveyance; extension of telegraphic and telephonic communications; Post Office Savings Bank; Civil Service grades and pay scales.

Many of the letters in Sub-Series 2-5 are helpfully grouped and indexed by subject, such as Sub-Series 4 containing copies of letters authorising expenditure on postal telegraphic and telephone services. However, many of these letters are in fact duplicates of the records found in Sub-Series 1.

This POST Class comprises material mainly relating to the design, manufacture and distribution of uniform, but also includes some material relating to discipline within the Post Office.

It includes reports on the manufacture and distribution of uniform, papers relating to the Committee of the Joint Working Party on Uniform and Protective Clothing, registers detailing patterns produced, contract statistics and schedules of entitlement, volumes containing decisions made by the Postmaster General which set precedents for the issue of uniform, correspondence relating to all aspects of uniform including the running of the Stores Department and photographic records of uniform garments with pattern numbers, guides to disciplinary procedures, papers relating to disciplinary cases and correspondence and memoranda relating to other aspects of discipline within the Post Office.

Documents created during the publication of Publishing News magazine. This includes a complete run of the magazine, copies of other publications by Publishing News, research files on companies and individuals associated with the book trade pulled together by the editors of the magazine, photographs used in the magazine, documents relating to the British Book Awards, reference books on the book trade, and some digital records. Publishing New's website has also been archived and can be searched at http://www.ehaus2.co.uk/pnarchive/ .

This class consists of papers spanning the period from pre-regionalisation, when the country was separated into Districts run by District Surveyors, reporting directly to the Postmaster General, up until the early 1990s.

It includes papers on Regional surveying duties and the stretching of resources in the light of an increase in work load due to rapid expansion of the Post Office in the nineteenth century.

In addition it incorporates papers from various Committees including:

-The Decentralisation Committee, appointed to consider devolution of powers in the light of mounting criticism of centralisation of Post Office administration leading to inefficiency and an inability to concentrate on development of policy.

-The Committee of Enquiry on the Post Office (Bridgeman Committee) appointed to consider change in Post Office administration, which had various wide ranging recommendations, including that of the introduction of a Regional system with powers devolved on Regional Directors.

-The Committee on Metropolitan and Regional organisation (Gardiner Committee), appointed to carry through the recommendations of the Bridgeman Report, culminating in the creation of two experimental Regions in Scotland and the North East.

-The Working Party on Regionalisation appointed to assess the progress of Regionalisation and to recommend further innovations if necessary.

It also includes papers from the experimental Regions and various Regional Conferences, as well as papers from the individual Regions. Subjects covered by this material include papers covering the civil disturbances in Northern Ireland and papers relating to the London Postal Service and the inauguration of the London Postal Region. Also included are papers concerning the input of the London and Midlands Regions into the several reviews of efficiency of the Post Office conducted by McKinsey and Company.

There are also papers relating to the split of the Post Office into two separate divisions: Postal and Telecommunications, and how this might best be carried out across the Regional structure.

The papers incorporate a wide range of material, including annual reports, meeting minutes and papers, financial paperwork, organisational diagrams, Regional Board papers, Regional publications, reviews, strategic plans and photographs of Regional representatives.

River Plate Telegraph Company Limited records comprise minutes of board meetings, including directors' annual reports and accounts and a ledger.

This POST class comprises papers and copy minutes of the Post Office Board (1934-[1992]), the Post Office Management Board (1970-1979), and the Posts and Girobank Board (1980-1981). The signed minutes of the main Post Office Board are included, 1969-1972.

This POST class also includes papers of subsidiary boards and committees established by the board, or whose papers and minutes were received by the Board. These include the Girobank Board, Parcels Business Board, Post Office Finance Limited Board, the Post Office Board Emergency Committee, the National Joint Policy Council, the Managing Director's Committee: Posts, the Chairman's Executive Committee, the Post Office Executive Committee, the Girobank and Counters Committee, the Audit Committee, the Counters Executive Committee, the Major Projects Expenditure Committee, the Royal Mail Executive Committee, the Letters Management Committee, the Corporate Identitity and design Committee, the Counter Automation Management Committee and ad hoc committees established by the board.

This series comprises reports and papers on the establishment and operation of, and facilities and services provided by The Post Office Savings Bank. This series comprises those records that did not form part of the National Savings Department holdings in 1969.

Within this class are volumes and files that contain basic information about established Post Office staff and about the principal Post Office branches in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. This class also contains details of Post Office establishments abroad, packet boat services, deceased officers, vacancies and committee reports regarding the Post Office Establishment, amongst much else. There are 24 volumes (POST 59/1-24) covering the period 1691-1798, but the majority of the material consists of lists of salaried officers at various British Establishments for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The class is divided into eight Sub-series, a few of which should be mentioned at the outset. Sub-series 1 is the largest of these and contains the main Establishment books and lists of officers from 1691-1983, published annually from the late eighteenth century (bound copies for this series for the period 1869-1980 can be found in the BPMA search room). Sub-series 3 contains the Establishment books for provincial postal regions across Britain and so is naturally considerable in size, although the period covered for these books tends to be late nineteenth and early twentieth century only. By contrast, Sub-series 4 and 5 contain major and minor Establishment books for the London Postal Region, spanning nearly a 200-year period from 1800. The only series that does not contain lists of basic information (which is the essence of most of the Establishment books) is Sub-series 6, which contains 20 papers and committee reports for the period 1793-1923 that describe changes that have occurred and have been proposed to the Establishment system; a useful starting point for understanding the organisational development of the Establishment structure.

The sort of information included has changed over this 300-year period, but a large proportion of the information found in any particular Establishment book is likely to include an employee's name, their department or location, date of appointment, and yearly salary (or weekly wage). Similarly, the type of employee that has been included in the yearly establishment books has changed over time (and some consideration of the difference between 'established' and 'unestablished' staff will follow), but as a rule of thumb, in the main Establishment books that were published annually (which can be found in Sub-Series 1), it is staff who have been occupied in more senior positions within the Post Office hierarchy who are likely to be found. As a consequence, most of the yearly establishment books within this class will only ever list by name a modest proportion of the entire Post Office workforce for any given year. (It may be helpful for prospective researchers to note that the best starting point in searching for records relating to 'rank and file' employees are the appointments indexes and pensions indexes. A guide to these sources can be downloaded from the BPMA website and a printed version can be found in the BPMA search room, entitled 'Guide to Family History Research'.) POST 59/ 26, 28, 32, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 42 and 91 include brief summaries of duties performed by officers. POST 59/ 7, 11, 18 and 20 give complements of Packet Boats.

Records of the Union of Post Office Workers, comprising records of several local branches of the Union and an interesting variety of branch newsletters and journals. These reflect the wide range of activities which once came under the Post Office, such as the cable room branch and the telephonists branch; and also include mutual benefit societies and benevolent funds.

This Post class comprises material on how the Post Office operated during wartime and civil emergencies. The greater part of the collection relates to the vital task of maintaining communications, including handling prisoners-of-war mail, censorship and civil defence arrangements during the First World War (1914-1918) and the Second World War (1939-1945). Among the early papers are documents relating to the South African War of 1899-1902 and some nineteenth century notices and field manuals of the Post Office Rifles Association.

Some records have been transferred from POST 14.

Letter from Thomas Hoskins Webb of Camden, Maine to Joseph Hume, 11 Aug 1849. Thanking him for his 'kind attention to my inquiries relative to the important subject of Postal Reform'; sending him a copy of a pamphlet issued by 'our Free [sic] Postage Association, wherein you will find an extract from one of your letters to me, and in an Appendix the statistics by you kindly funished'; offering to send extra copies should Hume or Mr Rowland Hill desire any. Webb mentions 'another subject or project designed for the public good. I mean a "People's Library". Altho' we abound in Charitable, Literary, and Scientific Institutions, we have nothing of this description. We have Athenaeums, Social Libraries, Circulating Do., Mercantile Do., Apprentices' Do., Historical Do., but not one People's Library... The great mass of the community, the People, emphatically so called, have no right of admission to any of these places...'.

Autograph, with signature. A note in another hand states that a reply was made on 28 Aug 1849; initialled: 'D'.

West African Telegraph Company Limited records comprise minutes and agendas of board meetings, and of annual general meetings, directors' annual reports and accounts, balance sheets, journal, ledgers and a map showing telegraphic communication lines around the coast of Africa.