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Vintage Post Box, Ireland

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The green post box, in various shapes and sizes, is a familiar sight on city streets and country roads throughout Ireland. 

Introduced well over 150 years ago by the novelist, Anthony Trollope, who worked for the Post Office in Ireland for several years, the letter box is an instantly recognized symbol of the Post Office. The intention was to make it easier for people to post their letters and make it unnecessary for them to have to wait for a post office to open. The first boxes appeared on the streets of cities like Dublin, Belfast and Cork over 150 years ago and were subsequently introduced elsewhere. The big pillar boxes were soon joined by smaller boxes that fitted into walls and later by lamp boxes which were cheaper to make and could be attached to lamp and telegraph poles

Quite apart from their decorative and utilitarian qualities, Irish post boxes have symbolic value too. Before Irish independence post boxes were red but one of the first acts of the new Irish Government was to order that green would be the new colour for Post Office letter boxes. Sometimes a bit of red paint still shows through! The symbols of our past – in the form of crowns and royal insignia – take their place alongside the signs of independence – Saorstát Eireann, P&T and, of course, An Post.

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 High Quality archival photographic 6x4" print in an ivory card stock mount with an overall size of 8x6". Each mounted print is backed with card to protect it in transit and is packed in a cellophane bag.

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Postcards Ireland

Design Moment: Green post box, c1922

What to do with all those bloody red brit boxes dotting the free state paint ’em green.

Old post box on Dublin’s Westmoreland Street: “The actual shade of green was not specified, so the colours varied depending on what paint was to hand.” Photograph: Peter Thursfield

For the week that’s in it, it seemed a good time to focus on an Irish-designed object that would fit in with the giants of instantly recognisable design that usually feature in this column. It’s not an easy task. Perhaps the reason why design is the distant, far-flung poor relation in our cultural family tree – with literature the treasured son – is encapsulated in our post boxes.

Novelist and postal official Anthony Trollope, who lived for a time in Donnybrook, is credited with introducing post boxes to Ireland in the mid-19th century. The penny post had been such a success that postage volumes were on the increase and having to go into the post office simply to post a letter was becoming impractical.

Those first boxes were red – pillar-box red – as they were throughout the British empire. Made of cast iron, they appeared freestanding on streets, embedded into walls and attached to poles. Not just a useful and a practical solution to a problem,the boxes in all their vivid redness were a potent and ubiquitous symbol of British rule in Ireland.

Green solution

This presented a challenge in 1922. The first act of the new Irish government flexing its independent muscles was not to commission a new Irish design for the post boxes and a programme of replacement. Instead, it ordered that the post boxes be painted green. So: An Irish solution to an Irish problem. It didn't seem to matter that the boxes also featured the royal cypher symbols– either ER (Edward Rex), GR (George Rex) or more commonly VR (Victoria Regina), complete with a large crown – still clearly visible through the coat of green paint.

In the early days, stories were told of patchy paint jobs and the red showing through. The actual shade of green was not specified, so the colours varied depending on what paint was to hand around the country. This was not an era of brand-control Pantone matching. Still, over time newer boxes appeared featuring the letters P&T (Post & Telegraphs) and later An Post.

The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage ( buildingsofireland.ie ) has a comprehensive archive of post boxes throughout the country, as well as where to find the most interesting older ones, including examples of the rare "Penfold Hexagonal" post box.

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P&T Post Box (1950's).

The little museum of dublin dublin, ireland.

The civil service ran the post and telephone system in Ireland until 1984, when it was replaced by An Post and Telecom Éireann. The Department’s logo – P & T in Gaelic script – can still be seen on manholes covers around the city, at access points to the phone lines.

• Title: P&T Post Box (1950's).
• Date: 1924/1984
• Location: Dublin
• type: Post Box
• decade: 1950's

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THERE ARE A surprising amount of them still around. And these days the biggest threats to their existence tend to be rogue lorries and, surprisingly, a thriving blackmarket for stolen postboxes.

Ireland’s British Empire-era postboxes are, however, surprisingly resistant to World War Two bombs, as An Post archivist Stephen Ferguson explained to  The Journal .

There are a total of 5,000 or so postboxes across the country – some well over a century old and others far more modern. People are often caught off-guard noticing the number of postboxes bearing the royal seal of Britain’s monarchs from the 19th and early 20th centuries, he said.

Until the War of Independence began, every postbox around the country had the seal of whatever monarch was on the British throne when it was installed and while most have been replaced, there are a surprising amount dotted around the country.

“Up until up until a relatively recent time there would occasionally be a letter that would come in to us at An Post from somebody not happy that there was still a royal seal – a cipher is the term we use – on one of our boxes,” Ferguson explained.

Shortly after the formation of the Freestate and the Department of Posts and Telegrams, postal workers began grinding the seal of Britain’s Victoria, George and Edward off postboxes although they left several hundred intact.

“There was partly a financial angle as to why not all of them were replaced, maybe just a more mature attitude once we finally had independence. But mostly it wasn’t really the best use of time and resources for the postal service to be going around chasing these up,” Ferguson said.

While the effort of removing all royal ciphers was too difficult, slapping on a fresh coat of paint onto postboxes was a quicker and more noticeable solution for the Irish postal service of the early 1920s.

In recent months, eagle-eyed cinema-goers may have noted a scene in the Banshees of Inisherin that features the local postmistress taking a tin of green paint to a red wall-mounted postbox.

Under British rule, postboxes in Ireland were the same shade of famous ‘pillarbox red’ as postboxes in the UK are to this day, but this was replaced by the current ‘Saorstát green’ shade as it was called.

“It’s ironic really because the very first postboxes on both islands going back to the 1850s were green before the British red colour was adopted in the 1870s. So we went green – red – green. On older boxes that have chipping paint you can see the red underneath from 100 years ago.”

The Blackmarket

As time passes older postboxes often need to be retired to museums or put into storage due to their age, which is understandable seeing as they’ve been around decades longer than the country they’re located in.

“The oldest postbox still in use is from approximately 1858 and in Cork’s Kent Station. In the foyer we have our little postbox which is small and quiet, tucked in at the wall,” Ferguson said.

It’s important to move vintage boxes to safer location to prevent them being damaged.

Traffic, particularly lorries, are prone to hitting postboxes near roads and they can often be put out of service temporarily by people trying to fit big parcels into postboxes built for the smaller letters of the past.

More dramatically, there is a thriving blackmarket for people who want smaller mounted postboxes – known as lampboxes – for their garden or living room and decide that a replica just isn’t good enough.

“Unfortunately, there are cases of theft, that’s particularly the case in relation to the little lampboxes that are mounted on poles. People come along and cut down the pole to steal them and there is quite a market for them.”

“Some of the boxes are worth a considerable amount of money, I’m afraid. You find boxes on eBay or similar sites being offered for sale. There have been cases where we’ve had to get our investigation people involved with particular sellers.”

A Victorian-era postbox was stolen from rural Donegal last year, while two vanished from Co Limerick.

Although it’s quite easy for a lorry to take out a pillarbox (the tall cylindrical boxes that are what typically come to mind when a postbox is mentioned), bombs actually have a harder time of it.

The North Strand area of Dublin was bombed by Nazi airplanes in May 1941, resulting in the deaths of 28 people, over 90 injuries and the destruction of 300 houses. 

“The local post office was destroyed, but the the letterbox outside survived. I think the  cylindrical construction of some of these things mean that they’re very hard to destroy with a general blast like that. If you drive a truck into it, yes, it’ll shatter. But quite a lot of times they survive destruction that’s going on around them in terms of explosions or fire.”

From surviving explosions to preventing them, the postal system on this island has had to face the challenge of keeping the world going as normal at the height of the Troubles.

“If you wanted to put a bomb somewhere, the large apertures on postboxes were perfect. People would sometimes put lit cigarettes or something in there as a prank. But when something is lethal, action has to be taken.

“The Belfast box, as it was called, was designed out of necessity with an extra narrow slit, so that you could only fit through an ordinary letter, there’s no possibility of putting in a letter bomb that will either go off inside or go off later on in the sorting office.

Postboxes are an easy target for vandalism, terrorism or making a political point, he said, because they are a symbol of state authority that can be found almost everywhere.

Belfast boxes went into use in Northern Ireland and England but were phased out.

Cultural Exchange

Although the number of British-era postboxes is likely to decline slightly as time passes, in many cases “there’s no reason why they can’t go on being used with a reasonable amount of regular maintenance and care,” Ferguson pointed out.

Letter-writing continues to fall out of fashion and older postboxes are occasionally put into museums (or stolen), but there’s one box with the cipher of a British monarch that won’t need retiring anytime soon because its surprisingly new.

A Queen Elizabeth II wall-box was erected in the the village of Shanagarry, east Cork in 1987 and the reason surrounding it remains mysterious, even to Ferguson.

A postbox dedicated to someone who wasn’t even born when her family ceased to rule the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ is a bit peculiar.

“I remember I looked into it with local management eight or nine years ago but got no clear information. Maybe it should just remain an intriguing secret!” he joked.

He added that there is also a French postbox in Kilrush, Co Clare, although for a more obvious reason than the QE2 box.

“Occasionally, I’ve been approached by foreign postal administrations to do a swap of a box with them. We may take a French box, and I send them an Irish box. Sometimes it’s for a museum, but there are a couple of places in this country where you will find a French box in service within our postal system.”

The town on the Atlantic coast is also twinned with the French town of Plouzané in Brittany, and there may well be Irish postbox somewhere in France, Ferguson added.

“It’s worthwhile people opening their eyes to take take a look at these little items of street furniture across the country, because you can learn a lot from them.”

He added, with a smile: “And hopefully people will post a letter or two as well to keep us in business a little while longer.”

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Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, the two firms said, as the e-commerce group steps up its rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier.

The e-commerce group said it will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, which like Google’s Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI also operates an AI-powered, text analyzing chatbot. As part of the deal, Amazon said it has an option to increase its investment in Anthropic to a total of $4 billion.

TechCrunch reported exclusively earlier this year that Anthropic, which also counts Google as an investor, plans to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years. Anthropic, which earlier this month launched its first consumer-facing premium subscription plan of chatbot Claude 2, plans to build a “frontier model” — tentatively called “Claude-Next” — that is 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI, according to a 2023 investor deck TechCrunch obtained earlier this year.

But this development, the startup cautioned, will require a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months. (Microsoft has invested as much as $11 billion in OpenAI over the years.)

In Amazon, Anthropic has found a deep-pocketed strategic investor that can also provide it with compute power to build future AI models and then find and help sell the offerings to scores of cloud customers.

As part of the investment agreement, Anthropic will use Amazon’s cloud giant AWS as a primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development, the e-commerce group said. Anthropic will additionally use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models. (Anthropic has been a customer of AWS since 2021.)

Amazon believes it can help “improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration” with Anthropic, said Andy Jassy, Amazon chief executive, in a statement.

“Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”

Anthropic — which also counts Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Zoom among its backers — has raised a total of $2.7 billion to date. The startup was valued at about $5 billion in May this year when it secured $450 million in a funding round. It didn’t say how Amazon valued Anthropic in the new investment.

The deal with Anthropic allows Amazon, which is increasingly flexing its own muscles around AI , to build a bulkier war chest in the frantically fast-growing industry.

Image and Data: Goldman Sachs

Anthropic chief executive and co-founder Dario Amodei told the TechCrunch Disrupt audience last week that he doesn’t see any barriers on the horizon for his company’s key technology.

“The last 10 years, there’s been this remarkable increase in the scale that we’ve used to train neural nets and we keep scaling them up, and they keep working better and better,” he said last week. “That’s the basis of my feeling that what we’re going to see in the next 2, 3, 4 years… what we see today is going to pale in comparison to that.”

Anthropic has made a “long-term” commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry’s top foundation models. In addition, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.

“Training state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources including compute power and research programs. Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we’re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research,” said Anthropic in a statement. “We look forward to working closely with Amazon to responsibly scale adoption of Claude and deliver safe AI cloud technologies to organizations around the world.”