My item of the day 2oth May Home Postal Centre Nottingham

[Chris Weddell]

This is a letter and label which came in the post today. I find it very interesting and have not researched them yet.

Any thoughts or information about them would be most welcome.

                                                Cheers

                                                Chris

[Michael Dobbs]

Chris

Two very nice items of Depot postal history - I'm envious!  I would like to know what HD/G/RLB of 2 May 1945 stated - I wonder if this has survived in any archive (Postal Museum, National Archives and RE Museum will need to be researched in due course).

I presume from the wording that mail would be received at the Home Postal Centre (at that time located in Nottingham) addressed to soldiers whose location was not known / given on the envelope and therefore could not be sorted and delivered.  So such mail was sent to the appropriate Records Office for them to identify where the unit was located and then return such mail to HPC Nottingham.  If the appropriate Records Office could not identify the location of the addressee such mail was still to be returned to the HPC who would presumably return it to sender - except for BAOR mail.

At the time of your leaflet (postmarked 2 September 1946) BAOR mail was dealt with as below - Post Offices in the UK sent it direct to BAOR, not via the HPC. But what was the wording of HD/G/RLB in May 1945 - the address BAOR had not been introduced then so it related to BLA mail.

All mail for Army and RAF personnel overseas was sorted at the Home Postal Centre (HPC) in Nottingham.  However, with effect from 2 April 1946 mail previously sorted to APO No 6 Division at the Army Post Office Nottingham (i.e. all mail for closed address British Army of the Rhine (BAOR)) was forwarded direct to 101 Zone Postal Depot RE at Herford, Germany.  Such mails were then sorted and distributed to BAOR units.  The change came about due to the close proximity of the theatre to the United Kingdom.

Consequently, civil offices despatching correspondence to BAOR made up mails and despatched them labelled as follows:

• for letter mails which were forwarded by air to 101 Zone Postal Depot RE:
"Army Post Office (ZPD) London"

• for packet and parcel mails which were forwarded by surface route to 101 Zone Postal Depot RE:
"Army Post Office (ZPD) London (Gravel Lane)"
or
"Army Post Office (ZPD) Folkestone"

Mike  :)

[Chris Weddell]

Mike,

        Thank you for your help again.

                        Chris

[Michael Dobbs]

Chris - what a fool I am!!

I'm trying to catalogue the Home Depot / Home Postal Centre / Home Postal Depot / BFPO London, etc postmarks (in much the same way as I have done for FPO steel, Berlin and Hong Kong, etc postmarks in the post-war FPO book located in the draft publications category) and looking through my collection and notes I see that also have a similar leaflet - this time slightly earlier than yours (July 1946) also to the Infantry Records at Ashford.  I also have a cover addressed to the Infantry Records at Warwick (there were several Records Offices for infantry regiments which were groupedaccording to type of regiment).  This is a use of a Post Office "Returned Postal Packet" envelope although the Depot did not use that side - they used the reverse to place the address label!

Mike  :)