Sir Anthony Trollope had a lengthy career with the Post Office, starting as a humble clerk in 1834. He escaped the tedious work at St Martin’s-le-Grand after seven years by volunteering as a field clerk in Ireland; here his career flourished. It was while he was working as a Surveyor in the Channel Islands that he recommended the erection of pillar boxes the first of which were trialled in St Helier, Jersey, in 1852. He continued to rise in the GPO becoming Surveyor of the Eastern District of England. He left the GPO in 1867, by which time his income from writing far exceeded his postal salary.