The British Army postal system of the Great War was the communication super highway

that linked the soldier on the battlefield with his family at home.

It was such a vital part of a soldier's experience that at one point something like 12 million letters a week were being sent.

So what's the story of those letters from the trenches?

During the Great War, millions of men and women served in the British and Commonwealth forces on the Western Front.

In a world before mobile phones

and email and WhatsApp, this was a generation that still needed to be connected to home, and for

them it was through the written letter. At its peak, something like 12 million letters a week were being delivered to those on the battlefield,

a vital link for them to family and friends, and an essential factor in the morale of those away on active service.

We often speak about layers of the Great War on this podcast,

and the postal history is certainly one of them,

and more than a century later, we find much evidence of it

through surviving letters, in collections, at auctions,

online, and in many family papers, as well as filled postcards, green envelopes and so much more. But how did it all work and who was

responsible for all those letters to and from the trenches.

That's what we'll hope to answer in this podcast.

When we look at the history of the postal services in the Great War,

we need to look at the post office, really, on the eve of that war.

In 1914, the General Post Office, or GPO, as it was then called,

employed a quarter of a million people, with a revenue of over 32 million pounds in old money,

a staggering amount of funds. That made it the largest enterprise in Britain at that time

and the biggest single employer in the world.

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