CHRIS KOENIG looks back as far as 1635 and Charles I for the origins of the Oxfordshire postal service

Oxford's main post office in St Aldates, with its beautiful panelled Postmaster's Room upstairs, was opened in 1879. When the foundation stone of the ornate building by architect E.G.Rivers was laid, the postmaster gave out a few facts and figures about the postal services in those days.

They make interesting reading in this age of emails and postal strikes. In 1879, there were 121 postal employees, of whom 87 worked at, or from, the main post office. The number of letters and packages which had to be sorted and delivered each week was 240,000, of which just over a third were delivered in Oxford and its immediate neighbourhood.

That compares with one million packages a day handled nowadays by the 400 postal workers at the sorting office at the Oxford Business Park in Cowley, now scheduled for closure when Oxford sorting will go to Swindon.

But in 1879 there were four deliveries and six collections a day in Oxford, and the postmaster said there were still people about who could remember when all letters for Oxford addresses were carried by just one postman.

Before the present main post office opened there was an office at 123 High Street which opened a couple of years after the introduction of the Penny Black stamp in 1840. When it was destroyed by fire an office was opened in the old Town Hall until the new office in St Aldates opened.

Further back in time, Charles I appointed Thomas Withings as Postmaster General in 1635 with the stipulation that the London-Bristol mail should run through Oxford. But after the Civil War that route ran via Newbury and Reading instead.

The effects of this potentially damaging move to Oxford's economy were alleviated slightly in 1709 when a branch of the so-called Cross Post from Exeter to Chester via Bristol was extended to Oxford and Wantage.

Not until 1784 did regular mail coaches operate with the cost of a stamp depending on the distance travelled. By the early 19th century two coaches a night were leaving the Angel Inn in High Street at 11.30pm for London, one via Henley and one via High Wycombe.

The distance from Oxford to London was reckoned as 57 miles. Early post marks therefore (stamped on to the letter, not stuck on) contained the figure 57 and customers paid accordingly.

After the introduction of the penny post, Oxford was given the postal number 603 and letters posted here were overstamped with a Maltese cross containing that number.

However, in 1871 the Oxford office was by mistake issued with an overstamper, or obliterator, marked 613. Letters marked with the wrong number were still being sent out two years later and are much sought after by collectors.

Another Oxford postal peculiarity occurred in 1859 when Oxford University's much respected debating society, the Oxford Union, suffered a bout of stamp pilfering.

The Post Office granted the society permission to overprint its penny stamps with the initials OUS between wavy lines as a precaution against theft. This was the only time the Post Office has given such permission, and even that was withdrawn in 1870.

Running parallel to the penny post in Oxford and Cambridge was an inter-college message service whereby the colleges issued their own stamps. This was only brought to an end in 1885 when the Post Office complained that the system infringed its monopoly.

Pillar boxes appeared in Britain in 1855. Oxford has 13 Victorian post boxes - six pillar boxes and four wall boxes - according to a recent count, with the venerable hexagonal model in Park Town being the oldest.