The first postboxes were erected in the Cape on 8 June 1860. To this day, one of these postboxes can be used in Worcester Street, Grahamstown.
This postbox was one of five such boxes brought to Cape Town in 1860, four of which were installed in Cape Town and the fifth in Grahamstown. Painted the traditional Post Office red, it belongs to a make of pillar box manufactured in 1857 by Smith & Hawkes in Birmingham, Great Britain.
This was the fluted type, one of the earliest of nineteen very distinct types known to have been supplied to the British Post Office between 1852 and 1859, before the first national standard type replaced them from 1859 to 1866. It bore the letters “VR” in curling script, denoting the reigning monarch, Queen Victoria.
In this age where people prefer to communicate by e-mails and SMS messages, one rarely finds people dropping letters in the local post box. But the good old letter box has come along way in South Africa. In fact it has been nearly 150 years since the first post box was introduced in the Cape.
The genesis of the letter box lies in the ‘Stone Post’. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the crews of ships traveling to or from the Orient past the South coast of Africa, placed letters under postal stones, hoping that they would be found and delivered by other ships.
The necessary information such as the date, name of the ship and its captain, were carved on these stones. The letters were occasionally wrapped in waxed canvas and, apart from the address, the letters DGG were written on them – for Door God geleyd, or ‘Guided by God’.
It is said that France was the first country to introduce roadside letter boxes in 1853 followed by Germany and Belgium.
In Britain, Rowland Hill first suggested installation of the roadside letter box in 1840. However, the first letter box in the British Isles was only set up in 1852 when pillar boxes were erected at St. Hellier in Jersey on the recommendation of Anthony Trollope, who was the Surveyor’s clerk for the post office.
In 1853, the first pillar type post box, called a Victorian box, was erected at Botchergate, Carlise. In 1859, the design was improved and green became the standard colour for the Victorian box.
Between 1866 and 1879, the hexagonal Penfold box with a cap decorated with acanthus leaves became the standard design for pillar boxes and red was adopted as the standard colour.
In 1879, the cylindrical type of letter box was adopted around the world. From 1887, the words “Post Office” were also placed on either side of the aperture. Later, the hours of collection also came to be indicated on the boxes. From 1857 onwards, the wall box-type letter boxes came into use which could be fixed to existing walls.
Source: South African History Online
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