Post Office: Army Postal History

This series deals with the administration of the Royal Engineers Postal Section both in Great Britain and abroad, including recruitment and staffing, emergency postal arrangements, financial matters, mobilisation and manoeuvres training and postal war diaries.

Please see The Postal Museum's online catalogue for descriptions of individual records within this series.

Topics

Army

Communications

Diaries

Armed Forces (General Administration)

The First Army Post Office was founded in 1808 during the Peninsular War. By 1882 Queen Victoria had authorised the creation of the Post Office Corps, a Reserve Force who were swiftly followed by a second Army Postal Corps known as The Royal Engineers Telegraph Reserve. Both companies were later reorganised into two supplementary companies providing proficient postal and telegraph services throughout the South African War in 1889.

By 1908 the two reserve companies had been incorporated into the Royal Engineers Postal Section (REPS). When war broke out in 1914 the postal services personnel for the Expeditionary Force, composed entirely of General Post Office staff and employees, were recruited from the Royal Engineers Postal Section. The REPS served in France, Belgium, the Dardanelles, Egypt, Palestine, East Africa, Greece, Italy and Northern Russia in the First World War. However, by the time of the Second World War the REPS served all over the world.

As the size of the Army increased and fresh wars broke out, the need for a Home Postal Depot became more pressing. Eventually in 1914 the Home Postal Depot was formed in London to act both as a central sorting and distribution point for all the Forces mails and as a training centre for REPS personnel.

Towards the end of 1924 the War Office decided to form a new branch of the Army Reserve, known as the 'Supplementary Reserve' to provide all the necessary technical units required for the Army on mobilisation. Several units of the Royal Corps or signals were included in this new reserve and the Post Office raised the whole of the technical personnel for the units, including some 40 officers and 850 men, as well as some 35 officers for the pool of officers (not allocated to units) in this reserve.