Connecting the landscape, its people and its stories, Alan Cleaver’s ‘The Postal Paths’ offers an engrossing, thoroughly researched and timely insight into a history that is just about still within living memory, writes Kevin Boniface.
I can’t really remember exactly how it happened, but I tripped and fell down some steps while out on my post round. My attempt to regain my footing failed and instead propelled me forward, headlong into a pair of wheelie bins.
I’d been told to rest the injury completely so when Alan Cleaver’s new book arrived I was sitting at home with my favoured right hand in a splint. I’d become very frustrated with my enforced inertia so the idea of vicariously walking Britain’s forgotten rural postal paths was pretty appealing. I have to say I was a bit disappointed to be handed my copy of The Postal Paths by a DHL courier rather than one of my colleagues from the Royal Mail, but I can’t blame the author for that, and besides, it did at least spare another of my workmates from having to listen to a thread-to-needle account of my accident.
Alan Cleaver is a journalist and writer from Whitehaven in Cumbria with a history of exploring the forgotten paths and trails of Britain: ‘the trods, bridleways, drovers’ roads, corpse roads, lonnings, ginnels, holloways, meanderings, beggars’ walks, priests’ paths, military roads…’ From vantage points on these often long-forgotten footpaths he records both the landscapes and the compelling stories of those who have peopled them. As he says in the opening sentence of this new book, ‘Where there is a path, there is history’.
The Postal Paths charts Cleaver’s attempt to plot and walk as many as possible of Britain’s postal paths: routes originated and walked by rural postmen and women between the introduction of the penny post in 1840 and the opening of the road between Tarbert and Rhenigidale on the Isle of Harris in 1990, which resulted in the last remaining rural postman on foot being superseded by a van.
The Postal Paths offers an engrossing, thoroughly researched and timely insight into a history that is just about still within living memory. It’s a book which, like the postal paths of the title, connects the landscape, its people and its stories.
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When my own career as a postman began in 1989 the rural duties in my office had been motorised for as long as anyone could remember. I found myself covering the area around Hade Edge, a small village in the South Pennines on the Yorkshire edge of the Peak District. Even then, at the end of the twentieth century things could get quite hairy. My van once broke down on a remote moorland fell in biting weather and I had to walk half a mile to the next farm to use a phone. My manager in Huddersfield told me to wait with the van and they’d send somebody to meet me. Not being familiar with the area and having no satellite navigation or mobile phone, my Huddersfield colleague took almost three hours to find me. I was bloody freezing.
What must it have been like for Matt Bendelow, a veteran of the First World War and Northumberland postman who walked his nine-mile route six days a week in all weathers between 1921 and 1961 with only one leg? Or, Robert Drummett, the North Devon postman who served the village of Braunton in the nineteenth century ‘to the entire satisfaction of the public’ despite having been blind from birth?
Alan Cleaver has uncovered dozens of examples of extraordinary dedication to the service: postmen and women who walked long distances across difficult terrain six days a week with rarely, if ever, a day off. In 1908 Robert Cunningham tragically died in a remote part of Ayrshire when he set out to deliver the post on foot in a severe snow storm. He’d completed his deliveries and was on his return journey when he was overcome by the cold. His body was discovered by a search party a few days later.
I don’t doubt the level of commitment demonstrated by these brave postal workers; I know from my own experience that my colleagues often go above and beyond what is expected of them. Having said that, I can’t help thinking about my current situation. I’ve come under a fair bit of pressure to return to work despite being directed by medical specialists to stay at home and rest the damaged tendons of my hand. If it hadn’t been for the support of my union and my right to sick pay I might not have had the resolve to stand up for myself. Back in the early part of the twentieth century I’m not sure the levels of unionisation or rumuneration were conducive to the making of rational and informed decisions about your own welfare. With this in mind it was fascinating to read about the work of Edward McLoughlan, a rural postman from Ripon in North Yorkshire between 1877 and 1913 who spent a lifetime campaigning for postal workers’ rights. A founding member of The Postman’s Federation in 1891 and the first Yorkshire-based honorary member of the Union of Postal Workers, he was still writing campaigning letters to the press in the 1950s when he was well into his nineties.
As Alan Cleaver observes, walking the paths created by these postmen and women seems the perfect way to memorialise them and their commitment to their crucial role in society.
The Postal Paths is full of historical interest and Cleaver’s style is an engaging one; he weaves some lovely descriptions of the landscapes he encounters with the histories of the communities he passes through.
‘As you rise up from rather nondescript scrubland, suddenly the land drops away to reveal the valley below. A river slowly meanders along the valley floor and, on the far side, a single-track road hugs the valley side with a few dozen houses and outbuildings beside it. Looming menacingly on the south side of the valley is Rafland Fell and, on the north side, the softer, gentler and wooded slopes rise up to Swindale Common. In the distance are the Cumbrian fells seemingly stretching on forever but in the centre of this landscape stands one bright, white cottage which gives you a focal point and a sense of scale. I find it all quite humbling.’
Just a short walk from where Cleaver witnesses this spectacular view he comes across the the remains of Tailbert Farm and discovers that its occupier in 1956 was Miss Mary Burgess who, at the age of sixty had only ever left her isolated home on one occasion when she loaded her mother’s body into a tractor and drove it to Shap, the nearest village, to be buried. Cleaver concludes, ‘I think of Miss Burgess being able to stand here each day and suddenly I understand why she was so content and had no burning desire to visit Shap or other places further afield.’
In 1887 the post office marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee by pledging to deliver the mail to every house in the country, six days a week, no matter how remote. At the time of going to press, this level of service continues throughout the UK although trials are currently underway which may result in an easing of Royal Mail’s USO (Universal Service Obligation) for the first time in almost 140 years.
As Cleaver points out, it is the USO of the post office which ensures The Postal Paths gives us such a comprehensive picture of rural Britain. Of course the book includes the stunning views above the lakes of Cumbria and the thatched cottages of Zeal Monachorum in Devon, but it also explores some less familiar, though no less interesting, parts of the country. Cleaver follows in the footsteps of those who delivered the post around coastline at Morecambe Bay, the hedgerow-lined lanes of Little Hay near Birmingham and the dystopian post-industrial landscape of Blaenau Ffestiniog of which Cleaver says ‘It is as if someone has torn up a million piece jigsaw puzzle and now has no idea how to put it back together.’
This book makes it clear that for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the only thing linking these remote parts of the British Isles was the postal service. And, as Alan Cleaver’s research shows, postmen and women provided so much more than just the delivery of the mail. They distributed newspapers, medical supplies, information, gossip and perhaps most importantly of all, human contact. Postal workers often still perform this invaluable service; I’ve always tried to keep an eye on my more vulnerable customers. I’m aware that for those with mobility problems who live alone I might be the only person they speak to all day.
Worryingly, as Cleaver notes in the final chapter of The Postal Paths, modern working methods are steadily chipping away at this undervalued part of the service. Technology now tracks postal workers’ every move and they no longer have the time to stand around sharing news, offering their reassurance, their condolences, their congratulations, their time.
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‘The Postal Paths’ is out now and available here, published by Octopus.
Kevin Boniface is an artist, writer and postman, who lives and works in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK. He is the author of ‘Round About Town’, documenting his postal round, and a short story collection, ‘Sports and Social’.