Black Postal Workers: Working Lives and the Fight for Equal Treatment

A working life behind the public achievements

When Sam King started work as a postman at Waterloo in 1955, his wage packet included an extra ten shillings a week because the office lacked a canteen. Two years later he moved to sorting work at the South Western District Office in Victoria. His subsequent postings included Whitechapel and the South Eastern district, where he eventually became a postal executive. These details, reconstructed by The Postal Museum, reveal a long working career behind a man more often remembered for community leadership and public office. ¹

King spent more than thirty years in the Post Office. His recollections included encounters with racism, difficulties over overtime and involvement in the postal union. Moving between offices meant learning different jobs and negotiating relationships with colleagues and supervisors. The canteen allowance is a particularly revealing detail: employment meant a particular workplace, particular conditions and a particular sum brought home. Recovering those everyday arrangements helps restore the labour behind the public achievements. It also places questions of fair treatment within the ordinary business of earning a living. ¹

An applicant challenges the rules

Discrimination within the wider General Post Office was evident before the major post-war migration from the Caribbean. The organisation also operated telephone services. In 1944 Sarah Tagoe applied to become a telephonist, produced her British identity card and passed the required tests. Yet an interviewer recorded her appearance in racial terms and referred her case upwards because of her colour. She was told that she fell outside the age limits mentioned in the recruitment broadcast and would hear further. ²

Tagoe challenged the delay through a Colonial Office welfare officer, explaining that she believed she had been rejected because she was Black. Officials then described the situation as a misunderstanding. The welfare officer reminded the Post Office that British nationals should not face discrimination because of colour. Historian Venus Green reconstructed the episode from departmental correspondence. It exposes a gap between an announced principle and the decisions made over an individual application. Tagoe had already demonstrated her ability to do the work; she then had to press officials to apply their own stated policy. ²

Different jobs within the same service

A report by Eric Walrond, preserved in a Colonial Office file covering 1947–48, followed migrants into their new employment. Among the people discussed, twelve had entered the Post Office: two as letter sorters, three in a canteen and seven in a training school. The small breakdown is valuable because it distinguishes jobs that a general account of migrant labour might combine. Keeping the service functioning required preparation and support work as well as the handling of letters. ³

Walrond also described migrants taking jobs on the railways, in factories, in laboratories and at the BBC. His account therefore locates postal employment within a wider search for work, rather than treating it as the inevitable destination of Caribbean newcomers. The twelve were the people identified in this report, not a national total of Black postal employees. Its specificity gives the reader something more useful than a sweeping number: a glimpse of individuals entering different parts of an institution, some already performing a job and others undergoing training. Their working lives began through several routes. ³

Workers under official scrutiny

In February 1951, an MP asked the Postmaster-General how many employees the department classified as ‘coloured’, and which grades they occupied. Ness Edwards replied that detailed information was not readily available, but estimated about five hundred, mainly in manual and clerical grades. The historical category was broader than present-day usage of Black and cannot safely be treated as a precise count of African and Caribbean staff. The answer nevertheless establishes that these employees were already part of the organisation, while revealing the limits of its information about them. ⁴

Their presence also attracted attention at the highest level of government. Cabinet notes for 25 November 1952 record Winston Churchill requesting a report on such employment and asking whether it was increasing. The brief entry does not describe employees’ performance or recount their experiences. It records a prime minister treating their numbers as a matter for Cabinet scrutiny. Read alongside the parliamentary answer, it shows another dimension of working for the state: people earning their wages could also become the subject of political questions about who belonged in public employment. ⁵

The struggle over promotion

Access to a job did not settle the question of advancement. The papers of Jamaican activist and former RAF serviceman Billy Strachan document a campaign against barriers to promotion for Black postal workers. Strachan helped establish the London branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress. According to Senate House Library’s account of his archive, the organisation put pressure on the Union of Post Office Workers over attempts to restrict those workers’ progress. The dispute brought an anti-colonial organisation into a practical question about British working life. ⁶

The episode also complicates any assumption that unions automatically offered equal treatment to everyone they represented. A workers’ organisation could itself require pressure from Black members’ supporters. Strachan connected campaigning in Britain with movements in the Caribbean, and his papers preserve pamphlets, correspondence and evidence of those relationships. Promotion was a concrete expression of equality: being employed mattered, but so did the chance to acquire responsibility and move beyond an initial grade. The campaign placed those ambitions within a wider demand that migrants should participate fully in the institutions where they worked. ⁶

Experience carried from British Guiana

Some migrants arrived with substantial experience of postal work and labour organising. Eric Huntley recalled that, while working as a postman in Buxton, British Guiana, in 1951, he saved for a flatbed duplicating machine. He used it to produce an unofficial journal for the Post Office Workers’ Trade Union. Buying the equipment put considerable pressure on the household budget. His account makes publishing tangible: before there could be a bulletin, someone had to acquire the machine and absorb its cost. ⁷

Huntley told an interviewer that security forces seized the duplicator during a raid in 1953, amid the colonial government’s confrontation with the independence movement. The postal workplace had been a setting in which he developed political commitments and practical publishing skills. His subsequent contribution to Black publishing in Britain therefore had roots in an earlier working life. Recognising that connection changes the picture of migration. Workers carried organisational knowledge, familiarity with collective demands and experience of producing information for colleagues. These resources could travel with them, even when money and equipment could not. ⁷

A wage, a family and time to study

Huntley arrived in Britain in January 1957. His initial job was as a railway shunter at Stonebridge Park, before he found employment at Mount Pleasant sorting office in London. In the oral-history account published by Rod Westmaas, Huntley remembered the postal job as a means of making ends meet rather than work he enjoyed. He combined demanding schedules with night classes. That distinction matters: an occupation could provide necessary income without fulfilling the ambitions of the person doing it. ⁸

Work also belonged within a family story. Huntley wrote frequently to his wife Jessica and their children while they were separated. Jessica joined him in April 1958; their sons followed with their grandmother in 1962. The account links employment, study and the effort to establish a household across two countries. It allows space for fatigue and dissatisfaction alongside determination. A secure-looking job title does not, by itself, explain someone’s experience. The hours available for study, the money needed for family life and the emotional cost of separation were all part of what earning a living meant. ⁸

Pay and hours were collective questions

The institution these workers entered had a wider history of disputes over wages and working conditions. In January 1971, members of the Union of Post Office Workers began a national strike over pay. It involved postmen, counter clerks, cleaners, telephonists and telegraphists. Accounts collected by the Communication Workers Union describe resentment over long hours and the difficulty of earning enough, as well as disagreements over the union’s conduct of the dispute. The workforce’s shared employment did not produce a single view of its leaders or strategy. ⁹

The strike continued for more than six weeks and ended without securing the original pay demand. Later recollections emphasised the hardship for families and the bitterness that remained among members. This wider labour history supplies an essential context for Black postal employment. Workers’ concerns included the same questions of income, time and collective bargaining that shaped the service as a whole. A history concerned only with racist incidents would leave those conditions unexplained. The demand for equal treatment existed within a continuing argument about the quality of the jobs themselves. ⁹

Manchester: changing the workplace from within

Ian Taylor remembered encountering racist graffiti when he began working at Manchester Mail Centre in the 1980s. In a 2021 union interview, he recalled that there were very few Black employees and few women. He became increasingly dissatisfied with management’s treatment of staff and stood for election as a late-shift representative in 1992. His route into activism began with conditions in a particular workplace and a decision to take responsibility for changing them. ¹⁰

Taylor subsequently helped establish the CWU Black Workers Conference in 1996. He remembered objections from people who questioned the need for a separate conference, but argued that it encouraged Black members to come forward and strengthened the union. His experience connects two forms of participation: representing colleagues over ordinary workplace issues and creating opportunities for members whose experiences were inadequately recognised. Becoming a representative meant acquiring a voice in the organisation that negotiated with management. Establishing a conference made room for collective discussion of problems that individual employees might otherwise have had to face alone. ¹⁰

Representation needed continuing work

By the CWU Black Workers Conference in Leicester in 2016, delegates were discussing how to recruit more members from minority ethnic backgrounds and encourage them into branch roles. The union’s contemporary report describes mentoring, education and visits to branches and regions. Delegates also called for closer investigation of inequalities in employment and advancement. The programme shows that representation involved practical organisation: finding potential representatives, supporting their development and making sure that discussion led to activity within branches. ¹¹

This conference used an inclusive political understanding of Black workers, bringing together people from several minority ethnic communities. Its account should therefore not be read as referring only to African and Caribbean employees. That wider participation was itself significant. Delegates connected workplace concerns with hostility towards migrants and with pressures on training provision. Their priorities show how struggles over fair treatment could develop beyond an individual complaint. They also reveal the continuing need to ask who spoke for the workforce, how representatives were prepared, and whether members experiencing disadvantage could influence decisions made in their name. ¹¹

Workers become interpreters of postal history

In 2025, African, Caribbean and Black diaspora women employed by Royal Mail in London contributed to The Postal Museum’s exhibition Voices of Resistance: Slavery and Post in the Caribbean. Working with artist Ella Phillips, the group created a reimagined map from ribbons bearing words and phrases. They called themselves the Royal Mail Culture Bearers. Their artwork brought the reflections of contemporary employees into an exhibition about the postal service’s historical connections with the Caribbean. ¹²

Two participants, Carol and Serena, explained what the project meant to them. Carol described people from different cultures considering food, culture, resistance and freedom together. Serena reflected on the strength and contributions of women whose experiences had often been overlooked. Their involvement expanded the role available to postal workers within a museum: they were contributors to interpretation, bringing knowledge and questions of their own. The project offers another way of understanding belonging at work. Employees could help decide how the institution’s past was presented, and make connections between that history and the communities to which they belonged. ¹²

Recovering the lives behind the uniform

The records of ordinary postal employment offer further routes into this history. Postal Museum archivist Susannah Coster explains that appointment books can identify when someone joined, their job and their workplace. Establishment books may record promotions and salaries. Pension records can preserve information about service, health and retirement, while staff magazines may reveal sporting interests and other activities. Together, such sources make it possible to follow a career through changes that a single photograph or job title cannot explain. ¹³

These records also require careful reading. An official assessment describes an employee through the employer’s eyes; a retirement entry records only particular aspects of a working life. Coster’s guide shows the value of combining different kinds of evidence rather than expecting one record to tell everything. For families researching a postal worker, dates of appointments and changes of office can provide the framework for a fuller story. That story may include achievement, frustration, friendship, political activity or years of dependable service. Each belongs within the history of the people whose daily labour kept correspondence moving. ¹³

Sources

[1] The Postal Museum. Meg Venter, Sam King, a postal worker of the Windrush generation; 19 June 2020.

[2] International Review of Social History, Cambridge University Press. Venus Green, Race, Gender, and National Identity in the American and British Telephone Industries, especially pp. 200–201; August 2001.

[3] The National Archives. Source 3: Report by Eric Walrond, extract from CO 876/88; 1948; file dated December 1947–October 1948.

[4] House of Commons, Hansard. Post Office: Coloured Workers, written parliamentary answer, HC Deb vol. 484, c. 70W; 14 February 1951.

[5] The National Archives. Cabinet Secretary's notes, CAB 195/10, meeting of 25 November 1952, item 8, printed p. 446; 25 November 1952.

[6] Senate House Library, University of London. Argula Rublack, The view from the ‘Motherland’: Billy Strachan's fight for the Windrush generation; 21 June 2021; updated 7 November 2023.

[7] Freedom News. Eric Huntley: interview with a Black literary pioneer; 21 August 2024; originally published May 2023.

[8] University of London Press. Rod Westmaas, Maybe one day I'll go home, chapter 11 of Memory, Migration and (De)Colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond; 2020.

[9] Communication Workers Union. Sean Ryan and Dave Chapple, recollections and accounts of the Great Post Office Strike of 1971; 2021 anniversary collection.

[10] Communication Workers Union. You are the Union—what are you going to do about it? Interview with Ian Taylor and other representatives; 22 April 2021.

[11] Communication Workers Union. Black Workers Conference 2016; 12 October 2016.

[12] EC1 Echo. Penny Dampier, A visit to the new Postal Museum exhibition; 11 April 2025.

[13] Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine; contribution by The Postal Museum. Susannah Coster, Post Office records: How to find Post Office employee records; 25 April 2024.

Sources checked on 23 October 2026.