I’m not sure that folks today even know what the GPO, or General Post Office was, or even if they really wish to find out? People today mostly want a service to work well for them without the worry of how or why it does, what it does!
The GPO once operated both the postal and telecommunication services in the UK. Various names such as The Post Office, or the British Post Office were familiarly used in everyday use. Royal Mail always delivered the post (letters and parcels), but the local post office was where you went to buy stamps. Conveniently, The Post Office ran Royal Mail, so whichever name you used, it didn’t really matter!
Telephones were installed and the system was operated by the Post Office too! GPO Telephones was the name until the organisation became a corporation in October 1969. Posts and Telecoms split so that British Telecom came into being from about 1980. For the period between 1969 to 1979 the term Post Office Telephones morphing into Post Office Telecommunications (circa 1974) were the other names used!
British Telecom- Part of the Post Office became British Telecommunications Plc from 1984 and thence simply BT (trading name) from 1991. Openreach, the engineering bit, was named in 2006 and is steadily on the way to separation from BT. The companies and products continue to evolve from year to year, which is why tracking them becomes ever more complicated; thus it’s worthwhile to set out the details in a book.
Structure is everything in understanding a big company; how it operates and what it does. Tied up in it all is the history, which goes back to the 1830s for recognisable buildings in London, although Royal Mail has over 500 years of history! The fine detail is an unfolding trail of stories and evolution.
[Writing this ‘off the cuff’ without reference to papers isn’t the same as writing for a book – the facts have to be triple-checked and cross-referred to other sources, to confirm the accuracy of the info.]