A1950s Morris Commercial LC5 Royal Mail van has been donated to Maltapost by the Postal Heritage Trust of the UK.
The vintage vehicle had a chequered history having started its mail service in Market Drayton and ending its operational life at Shrewsbury. The van was then sold and used on a farm where it was abandoned in a field and left to rust.
It was taken into care by R H Cambidge (Storage) Ltd who in 1990 donated it to Royal Mail. The vehicle was restored at the Royal Mail London workshops and later passed on to the Postal Heritage Trust, which displayed it at various exhibitions in the UK.
This van is based on the 1943 Morris Commercial LC chassis and is typical of the vehicles used to carry mailbags between railway stations and sorting offices and also on short-distance journeys. This petrol-driven van is also one of the last Morris models built to a postal service specification.
The vehicle was first registered in 1956 and weighs around 3.5 tonnes and is around 5m in length. It bears the classical Royal Mail red and black livery with a ‘light straw’ and black interior.
The Postal Heritage Trust has also presented MaltaPost with an iconic Royal Mail pillar-type post box, a Victorian wall box and also selections of uniforms previously used by postal staff in the 1940s and 1950s and are similar to the ones worn in those years by Malta’s postal staff.
The donations are set to form part of the MaltaPost collection to be exhibited at the Malta Postal Museum, which will be in Valletta.