03/10/2026
This is a first from us. Our furthest flung Postbox Saturday comes all the way from Sri Lanka! Photographed in city of Nuwara Eliya by a member of the museum team on a trip away and itâs led to something of a mystery we wanted to solve.
Zoom in and youâll find the royal cypher of King George V, but one that's very different to the ones youâll find on British boxes, which simply bear the letters GR and no roman numeral V. Youâll find an example by swiping across.
Instead, this cypher looks more like the cypher of King George VI and weâre certain that we havenât confused them because on the base itâs written that the box was manufactured in Colombo in 1929 - 19 years into King George Vâs reign.
King George V was the first George to reign since postboxes started appearing on British streets and he didnât feel the need to make the distinction that he was âthe fifthâ. Even though this somewhat contradicts the fact his father King Edward VII included numerals on his own postbox cyphers!
To see if we could get to the bottom of this puzzle, we contacted postbox experts who were able to provide us with an answer. Apparently, there are 'a few rare examples' of boxes produced overseas having this alternative George V cypher. These were often locally produced boxes in various parts of the former British Empire who would have used the monarchâs imperial cypher, not the version King George has wanted to use for postboxes in Britain.
As it turns out, we even have a box with the very same cypher at our museum store in Debden! It's a box from Hong Kong, which as you can see from the last image has that very same imperial cypher as the one we spotted in Sri Lanka.
Mystery solved.
