Women of letters

To mark International Women’s Day, we discover the stories of rural postwomen who once walked the English countryside.

‘Footpaths cover our landscape as grooves cover a record. Walk them and you can play them back, hear their stories and discover who created them and why.’ Alan Cleaver’s upcoming book, ‘The Postal Paths’, explores mail delivery routes and the lives of those who walked them.

‘They would cross muddy fields or rocky escarpments in all weathers and sometimes in the dark.’ But, Alan says, although these routes were invariably called ‘postmen’s paths’, women walked them too. Despite the Post Office placing many restrictions on women – such as banning night work and forcing resignation upon marriage – in the countryside, rules went unheeded.

Take Jane Preston, who walked her 11-mile route for over 50 years, three miles of it across the margins of Morecambe Bay’s salt marshes. A newspaper report from 1941 describes Jane, then 68, carrying the night mail three miles to the station.

Alan, who has written books about corpse roads and drovers’ roads, first came across posties’ paths unexpectedly in 2015. ‘I’d been visiting a local farmer and when I went to leave, he said, “Oh, take the postman’s path”, explaining that it was a shortcut across the fields.’

Intrigued, Alan researched entire rural routes that posties walked before vans were introduced in the 1970s. It wasn’t simple though. Drawing a blank at London’s Postal Museum, he found some limited information in local archives and by trawling through old newspapers. In 1917, for example, ‘Penrith Observer’ mentioned Mary Walker. Having started as a postwoman in 1879, she walked 13 miles a day in the Westmorland valley of Kentmere – as well as looking after 12 children, caring for her blind husband, and supplementing her income by baking oatcakes.

Alan also discovered Hannah Knowles, Eskdale’s postwoman from 1912 to 1973. ‘Just 4ft 8in tall and known as La’al Hannah – la’al is Cumbrian dialect for little – she had only three days off sick in 61 years. In 1966, she received a British Empire Medal for services to the community.’ When La’al Hannah finally hung up her postal sack, she’d walked an estimated 87,000 miles.

What Alan really wanted was testimony from posties themselves, despite knowing that many would no longer be alive. Nonetheless, he put out calls on social media. Jean Brennand’s niece, a postwoman recruited during World War 2 when working-aged men were called up, got in touch.

‘Jean was 98 at the time and has since passed away,’ says Alan, ‘so I was very lucky to talk with her. She used to climb one of Cumbria’s steepest hills, up to the Kirkstone Pass Inn from Ambleside, delivering the post to the farms on the way. Then, after coffee and cake at the inn, she’d walk back down. Jean’s first job though, aged 14, was delivering telegrams. She remembered delivering one announcing to a family she knew that their son had been killed in action.’

Alan also tracked down Patricia Nolan who, as a student, stood in for the regular postie during holidays. Patricia described the route she walked, including ‘a tough hike up the hill onto the fell in order to deliver to the farms – occasionally braving a field of bullocks’.

He met 92-year-old Mary Hunter too, who still lives in Flash, England’s highest village. It was in this remote moorland landscape in Staffordshire that Mary, then 18, delivered the post in the late 1940s – telling Alan that Christmas Day deliveries meant being plied with a great deal of sherry, port and mince pies.

Because of the isolation of many farms and dwellings, rural posties like Mary didn’t only deliver letters and parcels, they were ‘walking post offices’, collecting mail and selling stamps and postal orders. They also delivered everything from medicine to football pools coupons, and kept the community together by bringing gossip and connection. For some, the postie was the only person they ever saw, so they wrote letters to themselves to ensure a visit.

It’s 50 years, however, since posties last hiked across our countryside. That’s why Alan – who has walked all the paths himself – wants to preserve their routes and stories.

This is something the family of Elsie Rowson, who died in 2013, has done in Shropshire.

‘Elsie’s 11-mile route – a hard climb delivering to cottages on the Stiperstones – is now a memorial walk,’ says Alan. ‘I did it with her family and it was tough! Elsie, though, would have been carrying a heavy bag of parcels and letters. She also used to take radio batteries for charging – as big as car batteries and weighing a tonne. She even took cakes she baked for the local nurse and read letters for those who couldn’t read. People like Elsie shouldn’t be forgotten.’

The Postal Paths (Monoray, £22) is published on 24 April.