Post Office Registry

The system of "minuting" papers submitted to the Postmaster General by the Secretary to the Post Office for a decision (ie numbering the papers, and separately copying a note of the paper as a "minute" into volumes indexed by subject) was introduced in 1793. It remained in use by the Post Office Headquarters registry until 1973.

Until 1921, several different major minute series were in use with telecommunications and postal issues within the same filing system for England and Wales (POST 30), Ireland (POST 31) and Scotland (POST 32).

In 1921, the several different minute series were replaced by a single all-embracing series (POST 33). This was suspended in 1941 as a wartime measure when a Decimal Filing system came into use (POST 102), but was resurrected in 1949. In 1955 the registration of Headquarters files began to be decentralised under several local registries serving particular departments, although the "minuting" of cases considered worthy of preservation, and the assimilation of later cases with earlier existing minuted bundles, continued until 1973.

Following the decentralisation of the registry in 1955, the previous minuted papers sequence was closed and a new sequence set up for the listing of both the central registry's files and the decentralised registries' files from 1955 (POST 122). In addition, there are two classes which reflect later creations of classes to accomodate papers which had, for various reasons, not been assimilated into the main classes (TCB 2 and POST 121).