Stay Signed In
Do you want to access your site more quickly on this computer? Check this box, and your username and password will be remembered for two weeks. Click logout to turn this off.
Stay Safe
Do not check this box if you are using a public computer. You don't want anyone seeing your personal info or messing with your site.
'The GPO Heroes who left their post' article appeared in the Northern Echo of Saturday November 8, 2008.
Locally, the Post Office Rolls of Honour for Barnard Castle and Darlington can be found on the British Postal Museum and Archive database RefNo Mem10 and Mem42 repectively.
November 7, 2008. The first full register of more than 300 war memorials honouring the sacrifices of Royal Mail employees who lost their lives to war has been published.
Compiled by The British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA), the Royal Mail War Memorial Database is the result of a year of painstaking research by expert historians, with help from members of the public and Royal Mail employees who alerted researchers to previously unrecorded memorials throughout the UK. In one case a member of the public discovered a stone memorial honouring war heroes from South Kensington in the unlikely location of a local housing estate.
As a starting point the database sets out to record the existence and location of each memorial and, where it is possible to source it, an image. However, researchers at the BPMA hope to build the information base so that it includes the names listed on the monument, the inscription, the date and, if possible, the personal stories of some of those honoured.
Royal Mail today remains one of the largest custodians of war memorials in the country, second only to the Church of England. This reflects the heavy involvement in each war by employees of the then General Post Office. An estimated 85,000 GPO people fought in the Great War and 8,500 lost their lives. More than 12,000 employees fought with the Post Office Rifles, a regiment that stood out for its bravery and whose members were awarded 40 gallantry medals, including a Victoria Cross awarded to Sergeant AJ Knight.
BPMA Curator Chris Taft said: "Identifying and recording Royal Mail’s war memorials had brought home the terrible impact that the First and Second World Wars had on communities. Some memorials list the names of more than a hundred people from just one office who were killed in battle. The memorial that was placed in Birmingham General Post Office, for example, listed the names of 134 people. Losing that many colleagues over such a short time was just as devastating then as it would be to us now. It is only when you gather this information together that you can really imagine the effect that these conflicts must have had."
The database lists a rich array of monuments, from the more traditional bronze statues and stained glass windows to scrolls of honour and large hillside chalk images. It is expected that the information will be used by schools and local or family historians, as well as providing Royal Mail with the information it needs to maintain the memorials for future generations.
