THE BRITISH ARMY POST OFFICE The history of the British army post office goes back to the Napoleonic wars; and post office records contain a vivid account of the experiences of a postal official who was despatched in i 792 to supervise the postal arrangements for the British troops then in Holland. A post office staff was also sent out in 1854 to con duct the postal business of the troops in Turkey and the Crimea; but an army post office on modern lines was first established in the Egyptian campaign in 1882, and was continued and developed in the South African War.
In the reorganization of the army after the South African War the War Office adopted the sound principle of having a definite military unit (technically known as the Royal Engineers, postal section, special reserve) recruited entirely from the staff of the post office and destined to apply to conditions in the field the expert knowledge they possessed of postal organization. This unit is kept in constant touch with active service conditions, so far as possible, by carrying on the postal service for the troops on manoeuvres; and thus a trained force of some 30o men was at once available at the outbreak of war and was despatched with the British Expeditionary Force. The great expansion of the army however called for continuous increases in the personnel, and by the end of the war the strength overseas numbered nearly four thousand. Each new expedition took out its postal comple ment and the Dardanelles, Egypt and Palestine, Salonica, East Africa, Italy and North Russia were in turn provided with a com plete army postal service.
At the outset all mails were sent in bulk to the overseas base post office, and there sorted for the various units in the field. This system was however soon abandoned, and the home depot of the army postal service, originally intended mainly for the provision of recruits for the overseas establishments, gradually developed into a large central sorting office for all the Expedi tionary Forces. A system was built up under which the home depot made up a separate mail for every unit, down to the small est, in all the overseas armies wherever they were stationed. Full and detailed information was received either from the War Office or from the army post offices overseas as to the location of each unit; each bag of the many thousands made up was suitably labelled with a code denoting the field or other post office to which it was to be forwarded ; and the result was a service of remarkable expedition and completeness.
The volume of the mail handled by the army post office was enormous, and when it was at its maximum some 12,000,000 letters and a million parcels a week were sent out. In the later stages a substantial number of parcels for prisoners of war in Allied hands was forwarded through the home depot from Ger many; and the whole of this traffic rose at Christmas to a level which it taxed the whole resources of the service, both in person nel and in transport, to handle successfully. The effect on the morale of the troops at the front of being in such close and constant communication with their families at home must be left to military historians to estimate. For the work at home it gradually became impossible to provide sufficient men, and at a fairly early stage recourse was had to the services of women, of whom about 1,200 were employed in London alone. Their work proved to be successful beyond all expectations ; they combined genuine enthusiasm with remarkable aptitude for postal work.
The staff problem, however, was not the only one which the army post office had to meet. For traffic on so large a scale there was no adequate accommodation on post office premises ; and a temporary building covering five acres was put up in Regent's park to house the parcel work alone. Even this proved scarcely sufficient and a system of decentralization was set up by which certain large provincial post offices acted as subsidiary army sorting offices and thereby relieved the London offices of a sub stantial part of the work. The organization of the postal system was carried out by the militarized personnel of the civil post office; its successful execution depended entirely on the pro vision of adequate transport. In this respect unstinted assistance was given by both naval and military authorities. A daily service was provided across the Channel to France; for more distant theatres ships of every kind which could convey mails carried their full complement ; and on land the organization of both railway and road transport almost reached the level of an efficient postal service in times of peace.