A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day. H. G. Swift
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H. G. Swift
A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066134792
Table of Contents
A HISTORY OF
POSTAL AGITATION
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY—THE CAUSES OF DISCONTENT AND THE RISE OF POSTAL AGITATION
The long continuance of agitation and disaffection in the postal service would seem almost to entitle the public to the belief that the Post-Office is a place where the Englishman’s privilege, which is to grumble, is systematically maintained and indulged in as a recreation. Possibly to many it might seem to justify some such cynicism as that the Post-Office is a public institution whose employés make mild conspiracy their serious business in their working hours, and deliver letters and send telegrams only as a pastime.
The spirit of unrest, at last finding expression in organised agitation, has for so long been associated with the Post-Office that that department has come to be regarded in the public mind as not merely a vehicle of general convenience, but principally as a hot-bed of discontent. In strange contrast to that serene contentment and peaceableness which so distinguishes the rest of the Civil Service, the Post-Office has continued to stand out, with its familiar declaration of grievances, a single discordant note in the harmony. The Temple of Mercury in St. Martin’s-le-Grand has been found from time to time the scene of angry discord, and the caduceus of the messenger of the gods, with its twining snakes, receives a new significance as a postal emblem. The ground about, that should be expected to yield nothing but the perennial golden harvest, is found to be given over to weeds, and the production of a crop of nettles.
Until recently almost, discontent in a Government department was thought a form of moral disease, and agitators were hunted as assiduously as was the Colorado beetle. There are doubtless many among the public who actually entertain some such view in regard to postal servants. There are many again to whom the Post-Office is represented by the principal living emblem in livery, the postman; and him perhaps a few tolerate as something of a nuisance, to whom they have to give a forced contribution annually to bring up his wages, or whom custom compels them to bribe into civility and a proper observance of his duties. For beyond the fact that discontent has prevailed more or less in the postal service for many years past, the public know but little of the inner workings or of the conditions which produce this symptom. It may be that the postman, being such a familiar, and to the majority a more or less welcome figure, filling the public eye, as he does, shares only with the Postmaster-General the distinction of representing the greatest public working institution in the world. What lies behind the outward and visible working of the vast and complicated piece of machinery, neither the man in the street nor his peers care much about, because it is hidden away from the light of day. The numerous army of postal workers, which comprise the indoor staff—those who sort letters and those who send telegrams—are as little thought of as the unseen crew of stokers below, engaged in their inglorious, but none the less useful, task of keeping the furnaces agoing.
The history of labour in the Post-Office has been a history of restraint and repression on one side, and of determined, persistent, and, in the end, more or less successful resistance on the other. The awakening of the trades-union spirit, and the manifestation of discontent, so long as it confined itself to a few London letter-carriers, was not formidable enough to excite either the anxiety or the animosity of the department. Discontent, disorganised, sporadic, and uncertain in its utterance, could either remain ignored or dealt with summarily.
It was only when agitation assumed much larger dimensions that it began to arouse that mingled feeling of apprehension and aversion which in itself became the means of aggravating still further those very evils which the authorities aimed at suppressing. Time and again the authorities, while complaining of the heat, yet added fuel to the fire.
Unionism in the Post-Office has ever been regarded as something verminous, something to be stamped out, something impertinently out of place in a Government office, and its leaders treated as breeders of sedition. And this has been so