It was a time when all post was delivered by bicycle in all weathers including the blizzards of 1962/63 and the postal workers all had a tipple before delivering on Christmas day.
Cannington’s former postmaster Michael Harding has been talking to the Mercury about the early days of the Post Office in the village when his parents took on the shop from his grandparents.
“A few years ago you’d know everyone in the village,” he said, “ because they’d come in to the post office for their tax discs and pensions, but now so much is done online. It’s the way things are going with the post offices moving into shops but society’s changing and me with it as I do things online now. The first change was when the sorting office went from the back of the shops in 1977, that’s when things began to change. Then pensions were switched to a card account rather than the books, and then the internet and computers changed. It’s partly a shame but you can’t stay in the past.”
His parents Alice (or Mickey as his mum called herself) and Arthur took on the business in Cannington in the early 1950s with Mickey running the post office and Arthur taking on the antique shop next door. It was an arrangement that worked well until Arthur’s early death in 1962 leaving Mickey to bring up two boys and to run a business as well that included the sorting office and a coach booking service from the same premises.
From the sorting office the postmen and women would set off on their rounds by bike covering all the villages meaning a round cycle ride of ten or more miles a day.
“We used to do deliveries on Christmas Day mornings,” he recalled, “and we’d have a party in the sorting office first thing with sherry and whisky and gin at about six in the morning while sorting the mail. I can assure you that some of the postmen and women would go off on their bicycles a bit wobbly. They weren't blotto - but a bit tipsy. You wouldn’t get away with it today with health and safety. It was more light-hearted in those days but they were on bikes and there wasn’t any traffic.”
His brother Peter left home to become a social worker while Michael took over the reins of the business from his mum when she died more than 20 years ago and continued with the post office through to this year when he retired. The Post Office has now closed and has been moved into the Spar store.
"It's the way it's gone," said Michael, "the world changes and we change with it."