Bunty & Gordon Pitz
remembering the Post Office in the 1950/60s

In 1953 the Whittington postmaster, Mr. Blewitt, died, and our father applied for the position.  He was duly appointed, perhaps because of his previous military experience, and our mother’s years of experience as a bank clerk.  It didn’t hurt that the Holt was ideally situated to house the post office, located as it was on Main Street, in the center of the village, close to most of the shops.  Our father decided to convert the formal dining room into the post office itself.  He was a good carpenter and enjoyed building counters and cupboards, and even a small lockable box attached to the counter top for the various denominations of postal orders. Normal access to the dining room would have been through the front door, into the main hall, and turn left, and for a few years that’s what people did. Later he knocked a hole through the wall directly into the street, providing access directly to the post office.

For several years a group of Fazeley-based doctors had held their daily surgery at the Holt, using the ‘dining room’ as their surgery and our old ‘nursery’ as the waiting room. Installing the post office meant the doctors (Piper, Thurston, Swindell are the names we remember) moved into the nursery and the patients waited in the hall.

Day-to-day operations of the post office were handled by our mother.  Although we closed the green grocery shortly after the post office opened, our father took another permanent job at Gills Cables.  I think our mother really enjoyed the interactions with the steady stream of customers.  She had a lot of book keeping experience from her time as a bank teller during the war, so she was very adept at handling the accounts.  And handling even heavy parcels was not as grueling as schlepping fish and vegetables.

We had a budgerigar (Perky) at the time and he apparently got quite lonely when mum was not around the house all day. So she moved him into the post office, where he enjoyed ‘chatting’ with customers and, even more, nibbling the edge of official papers that got too close to his cage. There was some real sorrow when he died after years of socializing and nibbling.

Gordon: I did not have much experience working in the post office itself, but for two years, until I left Whittington, I worked as the assistant postman during the Christmas rush.  The regular postman was Jack Smith, and he did not seem to mind my intrusion on his territory.  Of course, I was assigned most of the distant farm houses as part of my delivery route, but I enjoyed the daily bike rides into territory much of which was unfamiliar to me.  I also had to be careful not to appear to be poaching on Jack’s Christmas bonuses.  Most people were sensible enough to hold onto them until Jack resumed his route after Christmas.

Bunty: I frequently helped out on the counter and inherited the Christmas job for a couple of years—and never got a sniff of a bonus! I did get cups of tea though—I planned my route carefully: cup of tea, cup of tea, cup of tea, visit the loo. Mrs Young’s, on Burton Road, was a favourite stop; she never seemed to have less than four or five visitors and a bottomless tea pot whose strong and long-matured contents stayed with you all day.
As well as enjoying the post office work, our mother also had a small ‘stationery’ shop on the side (giving another opportunity to ‘dress’ the window with some of its contents). She sold cards, pens and notepads and all the usual things, including crackers and wrap, decorations etc at Christmas, and for a while had a sale-or-return deal on ‘modern’ clothes.  She also struck a deal with Friths to get some postcards of the village produced.

Our father seemed to be pleased with the professional status implied by being a postmaster.  Both parents visited us in Pittsburgh, PA in 1963, and our father arranged a visit to the main post office in Pittsburgh for a tour of the facilities and an inspection of operations there.

They retired in 1968 and moved to Malta shortly after that.  The post office moved on, and half of The Holt, including the former dining room cum post office, was torn down.  But the post office has returned, to occupy a building of much less historical or architectural interest, but not far from the spot where it once stood for more than a dozen years.