General Post Office in the context of "Postmaster General of the United Kingdom"

Camberley /ˈkæmbərliː/ is a town in north-west Surrey, England, around 29 miles (47 kilometres) south-west of central London. It is in the Borough of Surrey Heath and is close to the county boundaries with Hampshire and Berkshire. Known originally as "Cambridge Town", it was assigned its current name by the General Post Office in 1877.

Until the start of the 19th century, the area was a sparsely populated area of infertile land known as Bagshot or Frimley Heath. Following the construction of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in 1812, a small settlement grew up to the south and became known as Yorktown (also spelled York Town). A second British Army institute, the Staff College, opened to the east in 1862, and the nucleus of Cambridge Town was laid out at around the same time. The two settlements grew together over the following decades and are now contiguous. Much of the town centre dates from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including The Atrium, a retail, entertainment and residential complex, opened in 2008.

The London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) was a British railway company. It was formed on 1 January 1923 under the Railways Act 1921, which required the grouping of over 120 separate railways into four. The companies merged into the LMS included the London and North Western Railway, the Midland Railway, the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (which had previously merged with the London and North Western Railway on 1 January 1922), several Scottish railway companies (including the Caledonian Railway), and numerous other, smaller ventures.

Besides being the world's largest transport organisation, the company was also the largest commercial enterprise in the British Empire and the United Kingdom's second largest employer, after the Post Office.

BT Group plc (formerly British Telecom) is a British multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-line, broadband and mobile services in the UK, and also provides subscription television and IT services.

BT's origins date back to the founding in 1846 of the Electric Telegraph Company, the world's first public telegraph company, which developed a nationwide communications network. BT Group as it came to be started in 1912, when the General Post Office, a government department, took over the system of the National Telephone Company becoming the monopoly telecoms supplier in the United Kingdom. The Post Office Act of 1969 led to the GPO becoming a public corporation, Post Office Telecommunications. The British Telecom brand was introduced in 1980, and became independent of the Post Office in 1981, officially trading under the name. British Telecom was privatised in 1984, becoming British Telecommunications plc, with some 50 percent of its shares sold to investors. The Government sold its remaining stake in further share sales in 1991 and 1993. BT holds a royal warrant and has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange, and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

Eircom Limited, trading as Eir (/ɛər/ AIR; stylised eir), is a large fixed, mobile and broadband telecommunications company in Ireland. The company, which is currently incorporated in Jersey, traces its origins to Ireland's former state-owned monopoly telecommunication provider Telecom Éireann and its predecessors, P&T (the Dept. of Posts and Telegraphs) and before the foundation of the state, the telecommunications division of the GPO. It remains the largest telecommunications operator in Ireland and has overseas operations focused on the business and corporate telecom markets in the United Kingdom. The company was in majority state ownership until 1999, when it was privatised through a flotation on the Irish and New York Stock Exchanges.

Eir is currently majority owned by Xavier Niel's Iliad SA and his Paris-based NJJ Telecom Europe investment fund (64.5%). The group includes French telecommunications provider Free and Iliad Italia. Other major investors include Anchorage Capital Group (26.6%), and Davidson Kempner (8.9%).

Royal Mail Group Limited, trading as Royal Mail, is a British postal service and courier company. It is owned by International Distribution Services. It operates the brands Royal Mail (letters and parcels) and Parcelforce Worldwide (parcels). Formed in 2001, the company used the name Consignia for a brief period but changed it soon afterwards. Prior to this date, Royal Mail and Parcelforce were (along with Post Office Counters Ltd) part of the Post Office, a UK state-owned enterprise the history of which is summarised below. Long before it came to be a company name, the 'Royal Mail' brand had been used by the General Post Office to identify its distribution network (which over the centuries included horse-drawn mail coaches, horse carts and hand carts, ships, trains, vans, motorcycle combinations and aircraft).

The company provides mail collection and delivery services throughout the UK. Letters and parcels are deposited in post or parcel boxes, or are collected in bulk from businesses and transported to Royal Mail sorting offices. Royal Mail owns and maintains the UK's distinctive and iconic red pillar boxes, first introduced in 1852 (12 years after the first postage stamp, Penny Black), and other post boxes, many of which bear the royal cypher of the reigning monarch at the date of manufacture. Deliveries are made at least once every day except Sundays and bank holidays at uniform charges for all UK destinations. Royal Mail generally aims to make first class deliveries the next business day throughout the nation.

Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer (the first electromechanical being Konrad Zuse's Z3 completed in Berlin in 1941), although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.

Colossus was designed by General Post Office (GPO) research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers based on plans developed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.

The London postal district is the area in England of 241 square miles (620 km) to which mail addressed to the London post town is delivered. The General Post Office under the control of the Postmaster General directed Sir Rowland Hill to devise the area in 1856 and throughout its history it has been subject to reorganisation and division into increasingly smaller postal units, with the early loss of two compass points and a minor retraction in 1866. It was integrated by the Post Office into the national postcode system of the United Kingdom during the early 1970s and corresponds to the E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W and WC postcode areas. The postal district has also been known as the London postal area. The County of London was much smaller, at 117 square miles (300 km), but Greater London is much larger at 607 square miles (1,570 km).

The British Broadcasting Company Limited (BBC) was the commercial forerunner of the public British Broadcasting Corporation and formed on 18 October 1922 by British and American electrical companies doing business in the United Kingdom. Licensed by the UK's General Post Office, its original office was located on the second floor of Magnet House, a GEC building in London, and consisted of a room and a small antechamber.

On 14 December 1922, John Reith was hired to become the managing director of the company at that address. The company later moved its offices to the premises of the Marconi Company. The BBC as a commercial broadcasting company did not sell air time but it did carry a number of sponsored programmes paid for by British newspapers. On 31 December 1926, the company was dissolved and its assets were transferred to the non-commercial and crown-chartered British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

A mail coach is a public coach contracted to carry the mail. In Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia, they were built to a General Post Office-approved design operated by an independent contractor to carry long-distance mail for the Post Office. Mail was held in a box at the rear where the only Royal Mail employee, an armed guard, stood. Passengers were taken at a premium fare. There was seating for four passengers inside and more outside with the driver. The guard's seat could not be shared. This distribution system began in Britain in 1784. In Ireland the same service began in 1789, and in Australia it began in 1828.

A mail coach service ran to an exact and demanding schedule. Aside from quick changes of horses the coach only stopped for collection and delivery of mail and never for the comfort of the passengers. To avoid a steep fine turnpike gates had to be open by the time the mail coach with its right of free passage passed through. The gatekeeper was warned by the sound of the posthorn.