Learn more about how you can make use of our Archive with this first-hand experience from volunteer Cyril

During the summer of 2024, the Travelling Post Office group at Buckinghamshire Railway Centre, a working steam museum and heritage railway, received a donation of a Sorting Carriage nameplate bearing the name ‘M G Berry’. In order to find out more about this mystery object, volunteer Cyril did some digging in our Archive

Nameplate reading ‘M G Berry’ (c) Robert Frise and Buckinghamshire Railway Centre

Travelling Post Offices 

Mail was first carried by train in November 1830 on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Trains travelled at least three times faster than horse-drawn mail coaches.

In 1838, the transit time for letters going on long journeys was decreased when they began to be sorted in specially-adapted moving carriages. Trains including such carriages were subsequently called Travelling Post Offices (TPOs). Of the nearly 100 TPO Sorting Carriages that British Rail built for Royal Mail in the 1960s and 1970s, about a dozen have been ‘named’. These names were often in dedication to a member of staff. 

A postwoman loads mail onto a Travelling Post Office at Crewe Station, 1988.
A Travelling Post Office on the move, taken in the 1980s

Finding M G Berry 

I am a volunteer both at The Postal Museum and with the TPO Group at Buckinghamshire Railway Centre, so I asked colleagues in both organisations for their help in tracing background information about Mr Berry. 

From records maintained by TPO Group enthusiasts, I quickly found that in 1993 the nameplate had been attached to the Sorting Carriage number 80367. With this information, I was able to get in touch with The Postal Museum’s Archive. They supported me by searching through issues of Courier, the Post Office’s monthly staff newspaper, looking for a report of the official naming. We found it in the May 1993 issue and this told us that Michael Berry had recently retired from his role as Distributions Director. 

Other sources we were able to use during this research were the Establishment Books. These were a Post Office annual publication that included listings of senior staff organised by department, with a summary of their past positions and dates.

The entries for Mr Berry revealed that he joined the Post Office as a junior postman in Liverpool in 1953. In 1985, Mr Berry was Senior Mails Inspector and was later promoted to Head of Network Transport, where he planned the delivery and collection service. By the time he retired in 1993, he had risen through the ranks to become Distributions Director, where he had overall responsibility for moving the mail by air, rail and road at a time when railways carried the majority of the mail.

In the last four years before he retired, Mr Berry saw the quality of the service rise from 78% to 92%. He would have also been involved in the early stages of planning Railnet, the fully-integrated national mail distribution system that went live in September 1996. Therefore, British Rail’s renaming of the TPO Sorting Carriage 80367 with ‘M. G. Berry’ nameplate recognised his dedication in overseeing the improvements in the service and the movement of mail by rail. 

The Archive team also traced a photograph of Mr Berry dating from the 1980s. We were able to compare that image with the rather grainy photograph published with the report of his retirement and the naming of TPO Sorting Carriage 80367. We were happy that the two images were of the same man, albeit taken some ten years apart!  

Article in the April edition of The Courier, 1993

The Archive is a free-of-charge service provided by The Postal Museum. It hosts the Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd archives and is open to all.