The first mail service to the town was probably on horseback, though Ripley would have been so small there would be little call for it. In an 1828 Directory, there was mention of the “new” Royal Mail coach calling at the White Lion every morning at ten on its way to Derby and Birmingham, and presumably in the other direction towards Manchester. A year later there were other mail coaches calling at the Red Lion, whose landlord, Thomas Moore, was now able to call himself Post Master.

Very soon afterwards, post began to arrive by rail, to Butterley Station, where the little hexagonal building at the gates of the works served as Post Office, initially for both the works and the town. This quite likely makes it one of the first post offices in the country, though it was operated by Butterley, and since postage stamps were not introduced until 1837, the first letters would have been paid for in the old way by the recipient not the sender.

By the late 1840s there was a Post Office using an existing building or shop on High Street, with Ruth Wall as Postmistress. Remarkably, in the next 80 years, Ripley had only two people in charge of the Post Office: James Warriner from 1850 to 1902 and Isabella Searanche from 1902 to 1929.

Newly-married Warriner had moved to Ripley around 1844 at the age of 21 and established his hairdressers and stationers’ business.  He added the Post Office to his business around 1850. Isabella Searanche had been employed by him as clerk and telegraphist at the age of 14 in 1883. When he retired in 1902 at the age of 80, she took over as Postmistress in his premises and later in Rowland’s shop at the corner of Church Street and Moseley Street.  She retired in 1929 and died in 1948.

By 1862, the Post Office included a savings bank, and by 1870 a telegraph office. Boys as young as 13 or 14 were employed to deliver telegrams on foot or by bicycle. The first wall letter box was at the Butterley Works, with others added gradually from the 1870s. By 1912 there was a Post Office telephone exchange in Grosvenor Road, telephone number Ripley 26.

The first purpose-built Post Office (as opposed to someone’s pub or shop) appeared in the Market Place in 1936, to be replaced by a newer larger building in 1956 and transferred to the Coop in 1992.