Postman Bob - Workaday Wednesday

 

Bob is the uniformed figure standing by the wagonette in Poulton Square.

My great uncle Bob was a postman.  He was the   third son of James Danson  and Maria Rawcliffe, born, according to the family bible, on 3^rd June 1881, at Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire and most probably named after his maternal grandfather Robert Rawcliffe.

I was pleased to see recently  that the British Postal Service Appointment Books have been made available on www.ancestry.co.uk.    It is always fascintating to see an original record relating to an ancestor, but  to be honest they gave little information besides recording his name and appointment in  1907 in Preston as a Rural Postman with a further entry showing  his appointment  as postman in Blackpool in May 1925.  

His daughter Irene  presents a much more colourful picture of his work and recollects that:

"He went a long way on his bicycle from Poulton over Shard Bridge [where his grandfather Henry Danson had been a toll keeper] to deliver the post over Wyre.  He had a little hut at Presall where he had to wait until it was time to do the collections and then ride all the way back to Poulton.

In later years he worked from Blackpool General Post Office where his round was North Promenade and the Cliffs - very windy, but it seems the hotel people looked after him with cups of tea now and again. 

He was told at the oubreak of the First World War when his other brothers were joining the army, that he had a bad heart.   But work must have kept him fit, as he lived to be 89 years old and died in 1970.



Uncle Bob in 1929 at the wedding of his only sister Jennie.

[Workaday Wednesday is one of many daily blogging prompts from http://www.geneanbloggers.com/  to encourage writers to record their family history.]

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