A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day. H. G. Swift
It was like exploring an unknown country, and they could only guess at the difficulties and dangers ahead. No one was certain, either, how the public would receive any demonstration of aggrieved postal servants. It might be regarded as an exhibition of downright disloyalty by those without, and as rank mutiny by the authorities within. It might even be looked on by the public at large as the beginnings of a postal strike; while it was feared that the press would prove anything but friendly. If it did not hold their puny efforts up to scorn and ridicule, it might hamper them in no small degree, and alienate any little sympathy they might be able to command among a few influential public men who had quietly promised to assist them to get the matter looked into. It was such considerations as these that caused the proposal to hang fire for a period.
About 1855, however, the discontent among the London letter-carriers began to express itself in something like organised effort. A committee was formed, and small subscriptions were collected to defray the expenses of hiring a hall in which to hold public meetings. The principal ground of complaint was, as usual, the smallness of salary as compared with the high price of provisions and increasing house-rent, and the withdrawal of payment for extra duty. It appears that while the men had been allowed the opportunity of adding to their slender wage by making sixpence an hour for overtime, they bore with the conditions of the service uncomplainingly. But they very justly regarded the withdrawal of this payment for extra duty as incompatible with the increased pressure of work imposed upon them. The meanness which few private employers would care to be found guilty of was unblushingly practised by a State monopoly upon its poorest and most defenceless menials even at this early period. But the letter-carriers were not without spirit, and not without spokesmen to protest on their behalf. On the 13th January 1856, a meeting of letter-carriers was for the first time convened to ventilate their grievances and prepare the terms of a memorial to the Postmaster-General. The memorial was accordingly drawn up, but the memorialists—which principally consisted of the fourth or lowest class of letter-carriers, and therefore the poorest paid—committed the fatal mistake of allowing its publication in the press before presentation to the head of the department. This fact was seized upon by the then Postmaster-General, the Duke of Argyll, as in itself sufficient ground for refusing their claims, and it was intimated to them that the step was so improper in the circumstances that even had the memorial been found reasonable in itself his Grace would have found it difficult to take it into favourable consideration. In the second annual report of the Postmaster-General the “misconduct” of the agitators was severely animadverted on, but his Grace in conclusion expressed his willingness to make allowance for “misconduct arising out of excited feeling,” and desired to take as lenient a course as was consistent with due regard to the discipline of the office. He therefore satisfied himself with reminding those who had shared in these “objectionable proceedings” that henceforth no annual increment would be granted without a certificate of continued good character from their superiors.
Having regard to the circumstances and the times, perhaps they had some cause for congratulation that their offence had been passed over so lightly. Certainly it must be said that the Postmaster-General of 1856 showed an example in lenity which a successor of twenty years after would have done well to copy, and which would have shown him in more consistent accord with the growing and expanding spirit of reform.
Undoubtedly there was ample justification for the discontent which centred in the recent memorial from the letter-carriers. The conditions of the service for them and the lower ranks of postal operatives especially were perhaps not what they should have been, a recent slight improvement notwithstanding. But they were better off than they were to be a year or two later. Things were bad in the Post-Office; but if the plain truth be told, probably the position of the letter-carriers rather favourably compared with the lot of those outside, whose occupation and calling bore the nearest analogy to theirs. For, though the department had committed itself to a policy of rigid economy and profit-making, and had definitely assumed a position of subserviency to the Treasury, it had not yet fully entered on that of cheese-paring parsimony at the expense of its humblest workers which was later on to so characterise it the more as it became wealthier and mightier in its operations and its ambitions. Certainly, it had assumed to think its servants well paid on a starvation pittance, but presumably it still felt some little compunction for their bodily comfort. And this was something in those days when labour had few rights and no privileges. With a curious inconsistency, while it kept the letter-carriers on a wage too low to enable them to live decently, and deprived them of a means to add a shilling or two to their incomes, it actually expressed a philanthropic concern about the manner their poor pay and prospects compelled them to house themselves. The dwellings of the letter-carriers for some time became the object of the authorities’ benevolent attention; apparently on the assumption that a slave-owner may consistently pose as a good, kind master, it at least pretended to take a paternal interest in the domestic welfare of these humble public servants still complaining of too little pay. It was suggested that some sort of postal barracks for letter-carriers and their families should be erected near to the General Post-Office. It was thought that they would enjoy a greater immunity from sickness, but more especially would it be convenient to the department to have them within easy reach, so that they might summon them by bugle-call, and shepherd them in one big drove whenever big mails arrived from abroad. Doubtless, also, it entered into the calculations of the authors of this proposed pretty little postal commonwealth, that they would be better able to keep an eye on the morals of their employés, and preserve their good characters. The authorities, however, shrunk from the responsibility of erecting and maintaining such barracks at the cost of the Government. They did not trust their pet scheme so far as that. The Duke of Argyll, whose original idea it was, thought the prospect one more suitable for a public company, but it was stated in his report that the department might afford aid by “securing to the company its rents, deducting the same from the wages” of the letter-carriers. The Postmaster-General of the period may have been animated by the best of motives; but it is observable that no part of the cost was to be borne by the department, nor were the men, already poorly paid, to be assisted in paying for the extra convenience to the department. The report of the medical officer on the matter discloses the conditions which the low wage of the letter-carriers compelled them to live under. A perusal of this report alone, it seems, provides sufficient excuse for the letter-carriers’ claim to better pay as servants of the State. And the Duke of Argyll, by the publication of the disgraceful facts, provided an unanswerable indictment against his own judgment. It has to be remembered that these were the days before workmen’s trains, when the neighbourhoods around the city were almost as congested as at present, and several times more squalid. The medical officer’s report showed that the great demand for house-room, and the convenience of living near their work obliged these men to live in single apartments, for the most part low, imperfectly ventilated, and “in many cases totally unfit for habitation.” “In some of them the officers who have lodged there have taken smallpox, scarlet fever, and similar contagious complaints. … All the cases of smallpox and fever that have come before me during the last six months have occurred to officers living in such tenements.”
And yet the public servants compelled to live amidst such surroundings were reprimanded for their “misconduct” and “objectionable proceedings” in daring to ask for that slight increase of pay which would enable them to improve the very conditions which his Grace of Argyll so deplored. The Postmaster-General’s dream of a contented little postal Utopia nestling under the shadow of St. Martin’s-le-Grand was, as a matter of course, never attempted to be realised; nor was the slightest compensating advantage given to the neglected men. Yet it must however be stated, to the credit of the authorities of those days, that though they refused any improvement in pay or prospects, they offered the men good investment for their money in the way of an insurance scheme for their benefit. If they could not better provide for their employés while living, they made amends to them when dead. The Post-Office was willing to provide a decent funeral cheaply for any of its servants whom death from ill-nutrition and overwork had saved from becoming State pensioners. It was a happy stroke and a bold one in the direction of economy, and a clever experiment in State Socialism, for which the Duke of Argyll was to be eminently commended.
Still, when all is said, and when all allowance is made for the times, the Post-Office as an employer was no worse than many a factory and many another huge workshop. It was certainly no worse than it was