A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day. H. G. Swift
public meetings and the encouragement they had received, with the numerous injunctions from outside friends and sympathisers to keep together, begot a spirit of comradeship which sunk all petty distinction of class, and Booth’s activity did much to cement them. The sorters were slightly better off than the letter-carriers in point of pay and status, but they had grievances much in common, and they had learnt more than ever to recognise that they were useful and necessary to each other in the fight for freedom, a decent wage, and better conditions of work. The army of discontented letter-carriers had been very much increased since 1860. In that year the levelling-down principle, first introduced in 1854 by Rowland Hill and a Commission which then sat, was carried one step further by the formation of an inferior grade to be known as auxiliary or assistant letter-carriers, originally a hybrid class, something between postal labourers and the ordinary letter-carriers. They were badly paid and worse treated; they shared all the misfortunes and hardships of the letter-carriers without their advantages as to pay and prospects. They were a cheap class of labourers in the rich postal vineyard, for whom it seemed the authorities thought any treatment good enough, if only because they were cheap. Their working hours were spread over even a greater period of the day than were those of the full-blown letter-carriers. Their position in the service was most precarious.
Their wretched conditions of service soon impelled them to organise among themselves, but their organisation was as feeble as their funds were shallow, and though nominally they were a separate body, yet virtually they were to be counted in with the general army of malcontents. They gave and received whatever moral support was possible. They joined in where they could; they attended the postal meetings, and assisted in some degree towards the general betterment of the service.
The condition of the auxiliary letter-carriers was so pitiable as to cause wonder that the heads of the department could be so short-sighted as to set up in the persons of these men, many of them almost bootless scarecrows, such a damning and convincing proof of postal ineptitude and parsimony. With a class of men in the Government service working under such conditions, it is easy to see that they were not to remain unaffected by the prevailing epidemic of discontent. Almost from the first they sent forth ready recruits to swell the ranks of the disaffected. They were in themselves a reservoir of discontent, and provided the agitation with a fresh justification, enabling the agitators to make a stronger complaint than ever against the authorities. If anything were wanting to prove that the letter-carriers especially were a body of ill-used men, these auxiliaries supplied the last piece of material evidence. They presented a pathetic spectacle to the public eye. The idea of a man struggling to keep himself and a big family on fifteen shillings a week, the while to remain honest and irreproachable, was likely to awaken the public to it as a matter for its own concern. The auxiliaries had to attend, whenever their services were required, at a remuneration lower than that of a dock-labourer, being threepence or fourpence per hour, and but for the fact that they were compelled to engage in other callings many of them might have starved.
The condition of the indoor staffs could not be so prominently brought under the public eye, but both letter-sorters and letter-carriers alike suffered from disabilities, and had grievances which fully entitled them to an inquiry and a hearing. It was not only that they were expressly forbidden by rule to hold public meetings to discuss their grievances and endeavour to enlist outside sympathy, or to take any public action whatever for the purpose of removing the wrongs of which they complained. To obtain redress of any grievance, the only course officially open to them was to apply through their immediate superiors; but this, with the so-called right of appeal to the Postmaster-General, more often than not begot annoyance and petty persecution from those of whom redress was sought. The right of appeal especially was rendered nugatory by the exercise of the power of damaging endorsement on the part of officials through whose hands such an appeal would have to pass on its way upward to the chief of the department. Indeed, their experience in the matter of petitions to the Postmaster-General had up to the present amply proved that the authorities were intended to serve as a breakwater or a barrier to resist all such appeals, and provide the public head with ample excuses for refusal or an ignoring of the claims of all humble subordinates. As has already been noted, it took many dreary years of waiting or slow climbing to reach what is to-day regarded as a decent living wage. The rules of the department did not insist that a man should work more than eight hours in the twenty-four, but owing to the increase of work they were more commonly extended to ten and sometimes eleven hours in the working day, while these duties were usually divided into two, three, and four separate attendances, the intervals barely leaving time for meals and going to and from the office. All that the sorters had ventured to ask for was that these abuses should be removed; that their pay should better correspond to their heavier responsibilities and the increased cost of living; that their hours should be confined to eight in the twenty-four, and adjusted more humanely.
The letter-carriers joined with the sorters in complaining that their pay, thirty shillings a week after fifteen or twenty years’ drudgery, was not a fair wage; that promotion was not only unequal, but too slow. A peculiar grievance with them then, as it has always remained, was that the fact that letter-carriers were given Christmas-boxes by the public had invariably been made a pretext for paying the men badly. Letter-carriers who were formerly eligible for sorterships had all such promotion closed against them; and practically they were left without any hope of ever getting beyond their thirty shillings a week, even if ever they got so far. A great and widespread source of dissatisfaction too was the way in which men who had been induced to enter the service with a fair promise of promotion had been bilked by subsequent alterations in the establishment.
There were other causes of discontent not so broadly defined, but poor pay and lack of promotion were the main features. Man cannot live by bread alone, but the Post-Office made it its business to see that its servants never became lazy through over-feeding. It sealed their lips and prevented a public voicing of their grievances, and it almost dared them to open their mouths too widely either for talking or eating.
CHAPTER VI
BOOTH THE LEADER OF THE AGITATION—A MASS MEETING IN THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE—A PETITION TO PARLIAMENT
So the wave of discontent gathered force. By 1871 the agitation for better pay, better-adjusted hours of duty, and better prospects had assumed some appearance of an organisation, though without a recognised leadership. But the man was to come when the hour demanded him. The forces were ready; an army of volunteers, enthusiastic and confident in their cause, but as yet undrilled. They were not undisciplined though, for the rules and restrictions by which they were bound kept them in order, and strengthened their self-control. An army of discontented Government servants thus almost of their own free-will, and spontaneously brought together without an acknowledged leader, without even as yet an accepted plan of procedure, is, from this distance of time, not a little curious to contemplate. It at once affords an evidence of the existence of very real grievances as the impelling cause of the men’s sincerity and of their self-command. So far, there is not one single case of enthusiasm carried to excess; the movement had been orderly in its growth, and in no case had their grievances caused them to forget the respect due from them to those who ruled over them; nor to diminish their loyalty to the public service. It is as gratifying as it is remarkable.
Here, then, at this period were the forces, two contingents of them, ready and eager to test their strength in any manner that was legitimate and lawful.
They would not shrink from the displeasure of the officials; they knew that the frown of the Postmaster-General was already upon them. Who then was to be leader of these irregulars? The man came forward when the moment arrived, and henceforth for a few years Booth was to assume the leadership. He was not particularly eloquent, and had no gifted fancy, nor a tongue to form choice periods; but he had a full-throated voice with a ring in it, a head well poised on thick-set shoulders, and every comrade knew him for one who was not afraid. Every comrade knew him for a man who meant what he said, and could say it pointedly, if not elegantly. Experience of him had taught them that what he put his hand to he carried through; they knew that he could formulate a petition as easily as he could knock