As the Titanic began to sink, two Post Office employees were seen hauling sacks of letters to the upper decks in the forlorn hope of finding space in a lifeboat for them.

Their action was in line with the tradition that the mail had to get through at all costs. But the sorters, and their 9m letters, went down with the ship.

The tradition had been built up over more than four centuries. In England, the Royal Mail, which is considering changing its brand name for overseas services, can trace its ancestry back to 1516 when Sir Brian Tuke was appointed by Henry VIII as master of the posts.

His job was to see that the royal mail - and the king himself - travelled safely to their destinations. Charles I turned the Royal Mail into a public service in 1635 to offset the cost to the royal purse. Letter charges were based on the number of pages and the distance to the delivery point. It would have been a junk mailer's paradise since the recipient, not the sender, paid the postage.

After the English civil war, the Royal Mail became the responsibility of the General Post Office, set up by act of parliament in 1660.

The service was greatly improved in the late 18th century when lightweight mail coaches replaced the old stagecoaches. The mail coaches were fast, travelled at night, and ran to a timetable. They carried guards to deal with highwaymen. The horses were changed every 10 miles.

The coaches were to be replaced by an even greater technological advance, the railway. The first mail carried by train was in 1830 - from Manchester to Liverpool. The first travelling sorting office was a converted horse box on the train between Birmingham and Warrington, and within 20 years mail coaches had disappeared from the roads.

The Royal Mail's biggest revolution was triggered by the publication in 1837 of a pamphlet entitled Post Office reform: its importance and practicability. It was the work of a little known radical, Rowland Hill.

Hill's ideas were the foundation of today's postal system. He proposed a system of uniform rates and pre-paid postage. The penny black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp, was introduced in 1840.

When Hill's secondment from the Treasury came to an end, his political friends created the £1,200-a-year post of secretary to the postmaster-general specially for him.

Anthony Trollope, a clerk at the GPO in London, was sent to Ireland in 1841 as a postal surveyor. During his time there, he reorganised postmen's rounds to make them more efficient and started his career as an author, writing 1,000 words each day before going to work.

Trollope is credited with inventing the pillar box, which first appeared in St Helier, Jersey, in 1852. It was designed by John Vaudin, a local man. The first London boxes in 1855 were rectangular, though the standard red cylindrical design was established by 1859.

The Royal Mail introduced the halfpenny postcard as a cheap alternative to letters in 1870. The parcel post was started in 1883.

The modern Royal Mail handles about 77m letters a day. Sorting the mountain of mail has been helped by the introduction of post codes - first used in Norwich in 1959.

The Royal Mail has survived competition from the electronic media - phone, fax and email - partly as a result of the growth of junk mail. But leaner times are to come. The letter monopoly which it has enjoyed since the 1600s is likely to be reduced or even abolished in the next few years to encourage competition.

Mail will still get through, but the postman delivering it may well be working for a German, Dutch or US post office.

by Nicholas Bannister, Royal Mail