Saturday, July 30, 2016

Royal Post "Bingo!"

In the ancestral land where even I would be a Republican, I took on the challenge of one of our BYU Welsh Professors to take photos of the different British (of generally German descent) kings and queens on royal post boxes since they were first put into use under Victoria. It is a bit of a challenge because there are only a couple of dozen boxes with Edward VIII, the Abdicator, in the whole of the British Isles. One of them happens to be in Cardiff, it is. I'm not telling where I found it but other less mysterious sites on the web might list it, they do.

Here is my collection:

We start, of course, with Victoria. "R" stands for "Regina," Latin for "queen."


Then, we go to her boy Edward the Seventh. "R" now stands for "king," which is also useful if you are a dinosaur or in My Fair Lady (coincidentally Edwardian, by the way).



Next was cousin to the Kaiser and the Tzar, George Five. And it's a good thing Benjamin Franklin was on our side when he established post offices or I'd be looking for a few more Georges:

He doesn't have a Roman numeral because he was the first G to have a post box
After him followed his son, Edward the Playboy, who apparently was really in love with Mrs. Simpson. Hence, the scarcity of boxes with his name as he was  never crowned and abdicated. The rarity of this initial is the "Bingo" in the Post Box Game!

Still a functioning box somewhere in the environs of Cardiff.
But you won't get it from me!
Next, was his younger brother, Darcy, er, George VI, who was a good king, and probably much better than his older brother with his nazi-leaning sympathies might have been. George VI was a brave king through the Second World War. His daughters served as nurses.


And finally, the ubiquitous and long-lasting monarch E-II. Her mum lived a long age, the longest among all the saxon branch of royals in Britain. So E-II could be around a bit longer. We'll see if she can outlast her troubled boy Charles.


And there you have it. A complete set.

I have returned home to the land of E Pluribus Unum (if only). And hope and pray we will not start putting presidents' names on PO boxes, especially not in large, gold, block letters.

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