The Amersham & District Philatelic Society

From an early age Ian Wilkinson was an avid collector. As a child it was stamps, cigarette cards, matchbox labels, Dinky toys etc. Sadly most of his early collection was lost when the family house in London was bombed in WWll. He didn’t begin collecting again until the early 1960s when he resumed stamp collecting.

Soon after he moved to Chesham in 1970 he was rummaging in a second-hand goods shop when he came across a small china postbox bearing the old Chesham crest on it. He purchased it and asked the shop proprietor to look out for other similar items with a local or Post Office connection.

Shortly afterwards he found a small tin money box modelled in the form of a postbox. It bore the Royal Cypher of King George V. The shop owner claimed that this had been sold by Woolworth’s in the High Street before WWII. These incidents started what was to become a dominant interest for the rest of Ian’s life and take over not only his study but his garage, too. At first it was confined to pillar boxes of all shapes, sizes and uses and eventually there were over 1000 of them. But slowly, toy mail vans, model postmen and other postal related items were eagerly sought. Soon the interest spread to real letter boxes particularly when it was discovered that sometimes scrap ones could be purchased from the Post Office.

His front garden was adorned with a green 1865 postbox. At first Ian thought he must be unique in collecting letter boxes but subsequently found other collectors and together they formed The Letter Box Study Group which still survives today. By the time of Ian’s death in 1992 there were over 600 members who between them had surveyed almost 50,000 letter boxes across Great Britain. At this time Ian’s collection had amounted to about 3,000 items. Anything which appeared letterbox-like was collected. This included items fashioned in wood, china, metal, glass, rubber and plastic. Many of them had uses as salt/pepper pots, string dispensers, tape measures, musical boxes and sweet or biscuit tins. There were also a few beautifully constructed private

posting boxes of polished wood usually complete with the locks, hangings and warning notice plate. Private posting boxes were often installed at the front of prestigious hotels, hospitals and public buildings.

Also among the collection were 204 items containing model postboxes, 245 model postal vehicles, 13 actual street postboxes, and numerous cigarette cards, greetings cards, stamps, covers and postmarks all bearing a postbox theme within their design. Fortunately this collection is preserved today because it was acquired in 1989 by the National Postal Museum in London, now known as the British Postal Museum & Archive. It was not catalogued until recently but now items have been labelled for display.

Based on information provided by Mrs Daphne Wilkinson.

Ian Wilkinson is featured in the current exhibition in Chesham Museum on ‘The Post Office and Communications’ with a selction of items from Ian's collection loaned by BPMA to the Chesham Museum.

This article is reproduced from Chesham TownTalk No44 by kind permission of its editorial board