Postal history and postage stamps of Denmark
Postal History and Postage Stamps of Denmark covers the history of the Danish Post Office since it was founded in 1624 and the history of Danish postage stamps.
history
From royal courier to state postal monopoly (1624–1711)
The Danish postal system was founded with King Christian IV's postal regulations of April 24, 1624. Before that, letters from the court were carried by royal messengers. Individual cities and foreign merchants also operated postal connections. Above all, the king hoped that the bundling into a nationwide postal system would lead to cost reductions. In 1647 a postal system was also established in the Norwegian part of the kingdom; in 1689 it was organizationally incorporated into the Danish postal service.
Nine main postal routes were set up on which walking or mounted postmen traveled. The inns on the routes transported mail to recipients living off the routes. The most important postal route ran between Copenhagen and Hamburg . In the first few years other routes ran to Kristianopel (Christanopel) in Blekinge, to Varberg in Halland, to Aalborg in North Jutland and to Ribe in West Jutland. The Danish Post geographically encompassed the Kingdom of Denmark in the narrower sense, which until 1658 also included the Skåne , Blekinge and Halland provinces , the Duchy of Schleswig (as a Danish Imperial Fief) and the Duchy of Holstein (as a German Imperial Fief in Danish personal union). However, with the Peace of Brömsebro in August 1645 and finally the Peace of Roskilde in February 1658, the Danish postal system lost the postal routes east of the Öresund in Halland, Schonen and Blekinge and with it the post houses in Malmö (Malmø), Lund , Ystad (Ysted) , Simrishamn (Cimbrishavn), Helsingborg , Kristianstad (Christiansstad), Sölvesborg (Sølvesborg), Ronneby (Rundeby) and Kristianopel (Christianopel). Post delivery east of the Öresund was then taken over by the Swedish Post. In 1776, the Danish king decreed the establishment of a postal system in time for the Danish state associated with Iceland . For a short time in the 18th century, the Gottorf parts of the duchies had their own Gottorfish post office.
At the beginning, the post was administered by a council of four merchants , who were called postal administrators. In 1653, Friedrich III leased the building . Finally, the postal system went to the Hamburg-based merchant Poul Klingenberg, who expanded the line network, increased the number of post houses to 22 nationwide and had a mobile post set up for the transport of parcels in addition to outgoing and mounted mail. Klingenberg remained postmaster general until 1685, when he had to cede the postal system for 12,000 Reichstaler to Christian V's 11-year-old son from a morganatic marriage, Christian Gyldenløve. The main reason behind this decision was the desire to tie the postal system more closely to the Crown.
From state monopoly to privatization (1711 to 2002)
During the Great Northern War , the postal system was finally nationalized by Frederik IV in 1711. The widow Gyldenløves, Dorothea Krag, which until now was the leader of the postal service, was with an annual pension of 4,000 Danish Reichstalern compensated. Christian Christopher Erlund has been appointed Inspector General of the Danish Post. Erlund became known, among other things, for spying on the contents of letters that provided the government with crucial information in the Northern War. In 1712 it was decided that the surpluses generated by the post office should be paid into a fund from which, among other things, pensions for former postal employees should be paid. However, government expenditure was also offset from the fund. In 1746, for example, the fund paid for the construction and operation of the Copenhagen orphanage .
A not insignificant aspect of the postal system was the dissemination of information. This was done through the distribution of newspapers as well as exchanges between locals and travelers in the post offices and during the trip. In 1806 a local distribution of letters was established in Copenhagen. In 1861, seventeen more cities followed, with more than 6,000 inhabitants, and in 1865 local mail distribution was finally introduced in all cities in the country. Around the same time, the first rural postal routes were established in 1860. As early as October 1859, an ordinance stipulated that all houses in Copenhagen be given house numbers . The cumbersome descriptions in the address fields of the letters were thus eliminated.
On March 21, 1851, the first postage stamps were issued on April 1 . In the same year, mailboxes were set up for the first time . On the initiative of Joseph Michaelson was 1859 passage fee for letters and printed matter and has imposed a uniform tariff by mutual traffic in fees for letters. In 1924 Denmark had 1,368 post offices (including 253 post offices), 4,340 postage stamp sales outlets and 10,500 post boxes. The headquarters of the Danish Post Office in Købmagergade in Copenhagen, which had existed since 1780, was given up in 1912 in favor of the new Central Post Office ( Centralpostbygningen ). Postal codes were only introduced nationwide in 1967. The background to this was greater rationalization of the work in the distribution centers.
After the March Revolution of 1848, the postal service was placed under the Danish Ministry of Finance. In November 1873 the General Postal Directorate finally fell to the Ministry of the Interior. In 1927 the postal system was combined with the telegraph system and now appeared under the name Post- og Telegrafvæsenet (P&T) . The areas were later separated from each other again, so that in 1991 Post Danmark, Tele Danmark (now TDC ) and GiroBank (later BG Bank ) emerged from the postal and telegraph systems. However, GiroBank still used the branch network of the Danish Post until it was taken over by Danske Bank in 2000.
Binational stock corporation (since 2002)
Post Danmark became a public company in 1995, wholly owned by the Ministry of Transport. In 2002, the Folketing finally decided to privatize Post Danmark and transform it into a private joint-stock company. Three years later, 22 percent of the shares of CVC Capital Partners were bought, but they were sold back to the Danish state in 2009. Three percent of the shares were bought by Swiss Post employees. On June 24, 2009, Post Danmark and Swedish Post ( Posten AB ) merged into a joint stock company. The new joint post office continues to appear externally in Denmark and Sweden with its subsidiaries Post Danmark and Posten . The joint stock company was initially called Posten Norden , since 2011 PostNord . The Swedish state holds 60 percent of the shares, the Danish 40.
For today's Danish Post see: Post Danmark
Means of transport
Since the beginning of the Danish postal service, the mail ships have played an important role in the transport of mail . Above all, the Smakker (also Børtsmakke or Bojert ) should be mentioned, which were already used under Christian IV. The shallow sailing ships could be used in the coastal postal service, and were used in the rest of Scandinavia and the Netherlands . Steamships were also used later , which eventually replaced the sailing ships entirely. The Post's first steamship sailed in 1828. Ferries operated by the Post also went to the islands . In 1793, for example, the Danish Post took over ferry traffic across the Great Belt . The last post ferry ran between Esbjerg and the island of Fanø until 1977 .
The Karriol , a single-axle mail wagon with one horsepower , has been driving the postal route between Copenhagen and Hamburg since 1781 . However, since accidents and delays often occurred, the Kugelpost (Danish Kugleposten ) was established between 1815 and 1865 . The Kugelpost was a two-axle carriage with a spherical hold for mail bags instead of a passenger cabin. The spherical mail was only available in this form in Denmark. Otherwise there were also French-style stagecoaches. They were called diligence . The first Diligence was acquired in America in 1800 and drove on the Copenhagen-Helsingør route. Diligences were introduced on a large scale in 1834 and operated on all major Danish routes across the country until 1912.
With the construction of the first railways, letters and newspapers were also transported there. The first rail mail ran in 1856 . Here, mail was processed in the rail mail car (Danish Bureauvogne ) during the journey. To further shorten delivery times, night mail trains ran between Copenhagen and Jutland from 1927. The opening of the bridges over the Little Belt in 1935 and Storstrøm in 1937 resulted in a further reduction in travel times. With the advent of the passenger car, the number of rail mail cars finally fell from 132 in 1970 to 71 in 1975. The last Danish rail mail car went to Fredericia on June 2, 1997 .
In addition to cars, postal bicycles are still used in many places in Denmark today.
Symbols
Since 1641 at the latest, the Danish postmen carried a royal coat of arms as legitimation. The clothes of the postmen can be determined from contracts of 1704 and later years. It consisted, among other things, of a red skirt and cloak and a royal monogram in yellow. The colors corresponded to the colors of the House of Oldenburg . The colors red and yellow are still used by Post Danmark to this day . The early postmen were armed to parry possible robberies. In 1716 it was decided that the post houses should identify themselves by a shield with a royal monogram and a post horn . Post ships use a post flag in the form of a double stand , which was provided with a crown and post horn.
Postage stamps
The first Danish postage stamps were issued on March 21, 1851. A second series followed on April 28th. They were worth four or two Reichsbank schillings. However, these were still regionally limited to the Copenhagen area. Soon, however, stamps were being produced in larger quantities. Since they were also used to transport parcels and valuable mail, stamps with higher values were soon produced. The stamps had a watermark and the words Kongeligt Post Frimærke . At first they had to be cut out of a sheet of paper by yourself . It was not until March 1863 that tear lines were added to the stamp sheets. After the establishment of the Scandinavian Coin Union in May 1873 and the associated replacement of Reichsbanktaler and Schilling by Krone and Øre , new stamps became necessary. From January 1, 1875, new stamps with the values of 3, 4, 8, 12, 16, 25 and 50 Øre were issued. The color codes for the various types of postage stamps initiated by the Universal Postal Union in 1882 were also adopted by the Danish Post Office, which accordingly produced postage stamps in the different color shades provided until 1953.
Danish 8 Øre stamp from 1902
Postage stamp from Danish West Indies from 1908
See also
- Postal history of Schleswig-Holstein
- Postal history of Norway
- Postal History of Iceland
- Postal history of the Faroe Islands
- Postal history of Greenland
literature
- General Directorate for Postvæsenet: Det danske postvæsen , København 1924.
- Handwortbuch des Postwesens , Ed. Bundespost, Frankfurt, 1953, pp. 199–201
- Bob Lamb: Kingdom of Denmark. In: American Philatelist February 2013 edition; from the series of articles / category Worldwide In A Nutshell
Web links
- Post Danmarks historie fra 1624 (Danish) Post Danmark
- Articles and articles (English) Post og Tele-Museum Danmark
- History of the postage stamp (Danish) Post og Tele-Museum Danmark
Individual evidence
- ↑ E. Bohn: Postvæsenet under krigene . In: Jørgen Bergsøe (ed.): Det kongelige danske postvæsen . København 1924, p. 223-278 .
- ↑ Postvæsen. The Danske store, accessed on May 29, 2015 .
- ↑ J. Bergsøe: Befordrings- og færgevæsenet gennem tiderne . In: Jørgen Bergsøe (ed.): Det kongelige danske postvæsen . København 1924, p. 279 ff .
- ↑ Postskib. The Danske store, accessed on May 29, 2015 .
- ↑ Kuglepost. The Danske store, accessed May 26, 2015 .
- ↑ Ball Post. Rundetaarn.dk, accessed May 26, 2015 .
- ↑ P. Jensen: Postbuddet i Postvæsenet . In: Jørgen Bergsøe (ed.): Det kongelige danske postvæsen . København 1924, p. 376 .
- ↑ EV Holmblad: De danske postfrimærker . In: Jørgen Bergsøe (ed.): Det kongelige danske postvæsen . København 1924, p. 455-472 .