Keen stamp collector Liz Stewart-Smith was delighted to find a link to Britain’s oldest postmistress
Since finding her name in a directory over 30 years ago, Liz Stewart-Smith has been fascinated by a Buckinghamshire postmistress named Rebecca Rainbow
Several months passed without a word, until one day a parcel arrived at the door
Later this summer, The Postal Museum will reopen at a brand-new site in central London. Formerly known as the British Postal Museum & Archive, the £26 million attraction will tell the story of the nation’s postal service and allow visitors to take a journey underground on the original ‘Mail Rail’ trains that served the capital.
Among the first in the queue will be Liz Stewart-Smith, who travelled to the original museum while researching her “family heroine” – a Buckinghamshire postmistress named Rebecca Rainbow
“I first discovered Rebecca when I moved to the Milton Keynes area in the early 1980s,” explains Liz. “Initially, I had been keen to learn about my father’s mother, Mary Ann Rainbow, who said she had grown up in nearby Olney.
“As I took my research further, I found that most of the Rainbow family lived in two neighbouring villages – Hanslope and Castlethorpe. The parish registers were still in the care of the incumbents, so my sister and I spent a day at Buckinghamshire Record Office transcribing 400 years of Rainbows from bishops’ transcripts. There were hundreds of them!”
Through census records, Liz discovered that many of the Rainbows worked in the lace industry, which dominated the region until the end of the 19th century. However, it was around the same time that she also spotted Rebecca Rainbow’s name in a Post Office directory, listed as the postmistress for Castlethorpe. As a keen stamp collector, Liz was eager to find out more.
“I knew Rebecca must be connected to me somehow,” says Liz. “Eventually I found that she was not related to me by blood, but through marriage to a man named John Rooker Rainbow, who was the brother of my great grandfather.”
But undertaking further research into Rebecca’s career was to prove tricky. Liz’s main option was to travel to the old Postal Museum at Mount Pleasant, where she spent a day scouring the collections for clues.
“My visit was really frustrating,” says Liz. “The system for looking up documents was so obscure that I came away empty-handed. Thankfully, one of the archivists kindly took on my query and promised to get back in touch if they ever found anything.”
Several months passed without a word, until one day a parcel arrived at the door. Inside was a copy of the licence to sell stamps issued to Rebecca Rainbow’s husband, John, dated 19 February 1840. It was a remarkable breakthrough, but how did Rebecca Rainbow end up being in charge?
“John became a sub-postmaster in 1844, but died shortly afterwards aged just 31. To make matters worse, Rebecca owed John’s father a mortgage of £100, which had to be returned to the estate.
“With four children under the age of eight to support, she carried on running her grocery business and the post office from her small cottage, appearing in the 1847 Kelly’s Post Office Directory as ‘post office receiver and shopkeeper’.”
Even in a small village such as Castlethorpe, Rebecca’s days would have been long and arduous. On top of childcare duties, she would have risen early to receive letters from Stony Stratford at 8.30am, making sure they were dispatched by 7pm. By 1864, when Rebecca was recorded as sub-postmistress, the post was received at 7.30am and sent back to Stony Stratford at 5.45pm. Although she received help from family members, Rebecca kept up a similar routine for the next three decades.
“Rebecca never actually retired,” says Liz. “By the time she died in 1894 aged 82, she had been in charge of Castlethorpe Post Office for 51 years, and was named by newspapers as the oldest postmistress in Britain.”
Long after finishing her initial research, Liz managed to track down a photo of Rebecca thanks to the mkheritage.co.uk website, which was set up to promote the history of Milton Keynes. The picture also features her daughter-in-law Elizabeth Rainbow and granddaughter Lizzie Gobbey, who later became postmistresses themselves.
“Women were playing an important role in the Post Office long before the First World War,” says Liz. “Rebecca wasn’t the only postmistress in the country, but for a woman to serve in such an important position for so long and keep it in the family was a huge achievement.”
“Even though she isn’t a blood relative, I am proud that she appears in my tree.” Jon Bauckham