Heritage plates aim to celebrate post box history

Heritage plates are being installed on closed post boxes across Guernsey in a bid to preserve their history.

Last year the government-owned firm Guernsey Post announced the closure of more than half of its blue post boxes due to declining use.

Now 27 of the 83 closed boxes are being fitted with brown plates telling their stories, which include human parcels, brevity from Les Misérables novelist Victor Hugo and a concrete surround damaged during a World War Two air raid.

"It was never our intention to get rid of them so we thought the best way to... cement them into the history of Guernsey is to have these heritage plates," said Bridget Yabsley, head of philatelic at Guernsey Post.

She said they were very important to island history: "We were one of the first islands [to get post boxes]. It started in Jersey as trials - but then the post boxes came over to Guernsey in 1853, part of Anthony Trollope's trials."

There were initially six - one in Union Street, which is still in use, one in La Piette and one in Hauteville, but it is not clear where the other three were.

"The Hauteville one now is in the British Postal Museum and it would have been the one that Victor Hugo would have posted his many letters in," added Yabsley.

She said there was no evidence Hugo posted letters in the box, but it was in situ when he lived at Hauteville House during his 15-year exile from France and where he wrote many masterpieces and more than 100 letters, as well as manuscripts and notes.

For Rosalyne Le Huray - a philatelic assistant and Bailiwick of Guernsey Gold accredited guide - post boxes and postal history already featured in her tours so she was keen to help with the research behind the plates.

She said the blue colour of the boxes was changed from red in 1980 as the postal service moved from the Royal Mail to the Guernsey Post Office.

She discovered some quirky facts, such as the island being the place where the first and last human parcels were posted via Royal Mail, and said she was keen to find out more.

"The first person to ever be posted by Royal Mail was to Sark in 1905. The gentleman from Guernsey posted himself to Sark," Le Huray said.

"The postman had to go with him because he was a parcel he had to be delivered and the last person to be posted was in 1940 just before the occupation to Alderney and the postman had to go on the boat to Alderney with him."

She also discovered the record for the shortest telegram, which came under the post office back in the Victorian era, was set by Victor Hugo who was in the island from 1855 to 1870.

What did he send?

"It was question mark and came back exclamation mark and it was to do with the publishing of Les Misérables," said Le Huray.

More information about the heritage project is available on the Guernsey Post website.

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