General Post Office
The British General Post Office (GPO) was officially founded by Charles II in 1660 . It has become the state postal and telecommunications authority throughout its history. In 1969 this authority was transferred to the newly established state-owned Post Office Corporation . In 1981 there was a division into separate postal and telecommunications companies.
Originally, the General Post Office was a monopoly for shipping things from a shipper to a recipient . The definition was expanded to include these with the introduction of new communication methods. The postal service became known as the Royal Mail because it was based on the distribution system for government and official documents. The monitoring of the GPO was the responsibility of the Postmaster General, who was introduced in 1661 . In later centuries the GPO obtained the monopoly on telecommunications and tried to achieve the same for broadcasting .
Early postal services
The General Post Office set up a network of post offices where senders could post items. This was then brought to distribution centers (the so-called sorting stations). From there they went straight to the recipient. Originally, the consignment was paid for by the recipient. The latter had the right to refuse receipt if he did not want to pay. The fee was based on the distance the item had traveled. That is why it was necessary to keep separate accounts for each individual shipment. In 1840 the Penny Post was introduced. This meant the introduction of the postage stamp and a reduction in the administrative costs of the postal service.
Headquarters
In the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, the headquarters of the Authority was in changing locations within the City of London . A new building was built between 1825 and 1829 in the eastern part of St Martins-le-Grand according to the plans of Sir Robert Smirke . The building was built in the Greek style with Ionic portico and was approximately 122 meters long and 24 meters wide. Around 1870 a separate wing was added for the telegraph department. The General Post Office North was added to this in 1890 in the course of further expansion . When the building was closed in 1910, it was soon demolished. The current headquarters of the BT Group is located on the site of the old Telegraph Office.
In the mid-19th century there were four branch offices in London: one in the City on Lombard Street, two in the West End on Charing Cross and on Cavendish Street near Oxford Street and a fourth south of the Thames on Borough High Street.
New communication systems
With the emergence of new forms of communication in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, the GPO claimed monopoly rights based on the argument that it was about transports from a sender to a recipient . This was used to extend the monopoly of the postal service to all forms of electronic communication, as each sender used some sort of distribution service. These distribution services were legally classified as types of electronic post offices. This applied to all telegraph and telephone distributors. Many private telegraph companies were established in Britain in the mid-19th century. The Telegraph Act of 1868 gave the Postmaster General the right to take over domestic telegraph companies, and the Telegraph Act of 1869 gave him the monopoly on telegraphic transmission across Britain. Overseas telegraphs were not covered by this law. The private companies were bought up. The now unified telegraph service had 1,058 telegraph offices in larger and smaller towns and 1,874 offices in train stations. In 1869 6,830,812 telegrams were sent for net proceeds of £ 550,000. The last decisive step was the takeover of the National Telephone Company in 1912, after which only a few small providers existed independently of the General Post Office.
The same principles were applied to telephony, wireless telegraph services, and cellular communications . This later expansion also included all types of wireless broadcasting, although the transmission from transmitter to receiver was not specified here. The General Post Office defined all transmission systems as senders and the individual recipients as such. Just like the Post, everything was now licensed by the General Post Office under the Royal Charter .
Control of the broadcast
The applied theory began to falter with the invention of mobile communications, because the transmission masts did not address a specific receiver. Even so, this theory was accepted and became law. This extended the General Post Office's monopoly to all types of electronic communication.
In 1922, the General Post Office forced all electronics manufacturers to form the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), which was under a GPO license. This first BBC was dissolved in 1927 when the British Broadcasting Corporation , also licensed by the GPO, was founded by a Royal Charter .
From the start, the General Post Office had problems with pirate channels broadcasting without a GPO license. This competition was well aware of the fact that the General Post Office would never grant one. The General Post Office created a group of investigators with direction finders to track the pirate stations .
Before the Second World War, the General Post Office also had to contend with competition from mainland Europe using transmitters such as Radio Normandie and Radio Luxemburg to send their signals towards British receivers. After the war, Radio Luxemburg resumed the competition. From 1960, radio stations that were on ships or structures in the sea joined. The most famous were Radio Caroline and Wonderful Radio London . Radio stations also appeared in the British Isles .
The radio authority (later Ofcom ) was given control over the radio .
Dissolution of the General Post Office
In 1969 the General Post Office was transformed from a government agency with Royal Charter into the state-owned Post Office Corporation . The regulatory responsibility for telecommunications was transferred to the Post Office Telecommunications , which became the successor to the GPO Telephones Division . The British Telecommunications Act of 1981 spun off the so-called British Telecommunications Corporation and left the Post Office Telecommunications only responsible for mail and parcel services and the operation of the post offices. Post Office Corporation's operations were later transferred to Royal Mail Group plc , which was founded in 2001. British Telecommunications Corporation became British Telecommunications plc (now BT Group ) and privatized in 1984 .