Social history can slip through the cracks of the floorboards and, if we are not careful, be easily lost. Such, I fear, is the case with the lives and times of the rural posties who were phased out by Royal Mail in the late 1960s and early 1970s without any fanfare or proper thank you for how they had served their communities for over 100 years. Their walking (and sometimes cycling) routes which reached the most remote rural cottages and farms gave way to deliveries by van – bicycles were stopped even for town deliveries in 2014. The good work of the rural posties has quickly been forgotten even though they played a vital role in keeping people connected, boosting literacy by encouraging letter-writing, and greatly increasing UK trade. A few dozen are still alive but little has been done to record the details of their work and the routes they walked six days a week in all weathers.
I stumbled across the untold story of the rural posties by accident. I have always enjoyed walking and, in particular, walking footpaths with a tale to tell. It was while chatting with a farmer in Caldbeck, Cumbria about a corpse road that possibly crossed his farm (corpse roads were used in medieval times to carry the dead to the mother church for burial) that he suggested I return to the village via the Postman’s Path. I had not heard of the term before but he explained that the rural postman used to short-cut across fields between farms encompassing the village and these paths had, perhaps by virtue of them being walked by a government official, become public footpaths. He even pointed out the stone steps added to the nearby drystone wall by a previous farmer who had despaired at repeatedly having to repair the wall damaged by the postie clambering over it.
A quick Google search revealed Postman’s Paths were ‘a thing’. Many villages in Britain tell of a local path known simply as the postman’s path – although most do not realise how the name came about. I decided to research further the routes opting to seek out the whole ‘Walk’ (as posties called them) rather than just the short-cuts they created or made popular. These Walks could be up to 20 miles long. I thought it would be an easy project: Visit the Royal Mail Archive in London, photocopy some of the Route Cards which detailed house by house the routes of the rural posties, then choose a dozen or so that meandered through the most beautiful parts of Britain. However, the Route Cards had not been kept – there goes another bit of history through the cracks in the floorboards – so there was no easy way to rediscover the routes. I eventually found some newspaper articles detailing some Walks. I also found some rural posties still alive who could help me. And I did find a few Route Cards tucked away in the archives of local history societies or kept by postal historians. The paths were indeed glorious but so too were the stories of the lives of the men and women who had walked them. Take for example the Walk of Edward McLoughlin of Ripon. His 21-mile route started in Ripon, Yorkshire and stretched out to two or three villages to the south of the city. He joined the post office in 1877 at the age of 19 and from Day One he began fighting for better conditions for the rural posties. At that time they received no recompense for clothing or the expensive boots they wore out trudging the many miles, and they had no holiday. McLoughlin was a founding member of the postman’s union and frequently spoke to MPs about their plight. He retired due to ill health in 1913 but that didn’t stop him continuing his campaigning work. Indeed, my last documented reference to him is in 1953 when he was still writing letters to his local paper fighting for better rights for postmen; he was then aged 95.
His story – like so many rural posties – has been all but forgotten and that is a great pity as he has a remarkable story to tell. There is no plaque or statue to Edward McLoughlin. Indeed, the only permanent tributes to rural posties are a couple of memorials in Scotland to postmen who lost their lives attempting to deliver mail during heavy snowstorms. Fortunately, I am not the only one to recognise that we need to honour these unsung heroes. In Shropshire for example the 12-mile route over Stiperstones that was once walked by Elsie Rowson is now marked out as a tourist trail known as Elsie’s Walk. It would be hard to find a better memorial. The trail was established by her family after her death and takes in some stunning views from the Stiperstones hill over the border to Wales. One stretch I particularly enjoyed was a narrow path – called The Rack – which straddles the top of a dingle (valley) and where Elsie would ‘lie on the wind’. Sadly, the wind wasn’t strong enough on the day I walked, but I could imagine what fun it must have been.
These posties provided a vital service but they were doing more than delivering mail. They were delivering medicine, newspapers, occasional groceries – and news or gossip. For rural folks, news from neighbouring farms could be vital. Take Thomas Thompson for example (known locally as Tommy Postie) who served the Cumbrian community of Calthwaite. He advised farmers on when the local thresher was due to visit, he would tell them of sheep that had strayed, he delivered turnip seed for them and he even swept away snow or brought in coals for his older customers.
Author Evan Davies tells the tale of a son who asked his mother what she though of the new postman who started work in her rural Welsh community. “This new postman is good for nothing except delivering letters,” she moaned. And that was the point Post Office bosses frequently forgot: the postmen and women were much more than just deliverers of letters.
In the late 1960s, the post office realised they could save some money by giving the rural posties a van (and often expanding their route of course). Over the next decade the posties who walked (and sometimes cycled) were all given vans. I asked one surviving postie, Stuart Lewis, how he greeted the news of being given a van (this was in June 1976): “It broke my heart. I loved the walk and went out in all weathers. There wasn’t a day when we didn’t complete the round even in mist, snow and ice.”
Britain’s last rural postman was almost certainly Steve McCombe who hung up his boots in 1989. He walked seven miles, three days a week from the port of Tarbert on the Isle of Harris to the remote community of Rhenigidale. His route survived that long because there was no road to Rhenigidale so walking it was the only means of access. But in early 1990, a road was finally built and the last rural postman had to find a new job. Like Stuart, Steve was heart-broken as he loved the job and loved serving the people of Rhenigidale. His story and that of all the other rural posties needs to be recorded and preserved – hopefully along with the paths. I am hoping my book, The Postal Paths, will encourage historians in communities around Britain to seek out their rural postal routes and perhaps preserve them in the same way that Elsie Rowson’s family did with a tourist trail. Now, that would be something to write home about.
Alan Cleaver is an author living in Whitehaven, Cumbria. He has published a number of books on the stories behind the country’s footpaths. His latest book, The Postal Paths, (published by Monoray) looks at the routes walked by rural postmen and women until van deliveries replaced their routes in the late 1960s.