The Post Office and Its Story. Edward Bennett
the mails. And the great main roads of the country were for thirty years or more almost abandoned except by the local traffic in the districts which they passed through. Telford, the great engineer, had only recently reconstructed the magnificent road which runs from Shrewsbury to Holyhead, which was to be the means of beating all records in the speeding up of the Irish mail, but the railway gave it the appearance of a white elephant. For a long time grass could be seen growing in places in the centre of the road. “The calamity of railways has fallen upon us,” said Macadam, the great engineer of the main roads.
There was undoubtedly an appeal to the spirit of romance and adventure in early Post Office methods. De Quincey tells us that when travelling by train to York he was not personally aware that he had been going forty or fifty miles an hour. But on a coach he knew he was going at a rollicking speed: “the sensibility of the horse uttering itself in the maniac light in his eye: we heard our speed: we saw it: we felt it as a thrilling, and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies.”
Then there was the fascination of the great high-way—the thin white line, sometimes straight, sometimes winding—which was human and alive in a way that a railway track can never be. Men were not then simply driven or shot into places; they drove through places; and they touched life at every point of the road.
The Post Office is, however, not administered by poets and artists, but by men of the type of Thomas Hasker. And to men like him the coming of the mail train was a matter for official rejoicing. For it meant the speeding up still further of his Majesty's mails.
CHAPTER II
THE PENNY POST
It would be unjust to the memory of a great postal reformer to say that George Stephenson was the real author of Penny Postage, but it is quite fair to submit that it was the coming of the mail train which made Sir Rowland Hill's reform the great success which it ultimately became. It is true Sir Rowland Hill worked out his scheme when the mail coaches were still running, and it was a part of his case that the reform could be carried through with existing methods of carrying the mails, but it is open to serious doubt whether he could have succeeded had not the vast possibilities of the railway as an agent of the Post Office been before the minds of the people of this country when the plan was being discussed in Parliament and in the country. That the coming of the mail train was a probability in Sir Rowland Hill's own mind and was an incentive to his efforts while he was working out his scheme, is suggested by a comparison of dates. Sir Rowland Hill's plan was published in 1837. In September 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened: in 1833 the London and Birmingham, now the London and North-Western, opened its first section, and by the year 1837 there were in existence the beginnings of the South-Eastern, the London and South-Western, the Great Western, and the Great Eastern Railways, all known at that date under much less ambitious titles. Mr. F. E. Baines, C.B., in his vivid and entertaining book, Forty Years at the Post Office, has described the death of the old and the birth of the new system on the Great North Road. As late as April 1838 the high-road held its traffic, but from the date of the opening from London of the first considerable section of the Birmingham railway the fate of the highway was settled, “for then began this fell opponent to sap the long traffic of the Great North Road.”
It is curious now to know that one of the objections raised to the mails going by railway was the doubt that trains could journey by night. No less a person than the President of the Society of Engineers at that time said, “If mails and passengers were conveyed, policemen would be required along the line during the night.” Policemen, indeed, were stationed on the Leeds and Selby line until the night train had passed. Other authorities were of opinion that the lines would have to be lit up throughout with gas or other lights.
The agitation for Penny Postage arose out of the excessive and unequal charges and the abuses which had grown up in order to evade the charges. The Post Office had achieved wonders during the early years of the nineteenth century in speeding up the mails and in the organisation of the service. But there had been no attempt during that time to change materially the system of charging letters and newspapers sent by post. The root idea at the back of the old system was payment by distance and on delivery of the posted packet. It is unnecessary to give a table of the different charges which were in existence; it is enough to supply only two illustrations. A single letter between London and Edinburgh or Glasgow cost 1s. 3½d. The average produce of a letter in 1837 was about 7d.
To a large proportion of the poorer people of this country the charges were an almost prohibitive burden. Weight, of course, was also a considerable factor in determining the rate, and there is an instance of a packet weighing 32 ounces which was sent from Deal to London and the postage was £6, four times as much as the charge for an inside place by the coach. A large amount of irregular carriage of letters was continually going on; and there were other means of evading the charges. There is the familiar instance of Coleridge, who, when wandering through the Lake District one day, saw a poor woman refuse a letter which the postman offered her. Coleridge, out of sympathy for the poor woman, paid the money she could not raise, but the letter when opened proved to be a blank sheet of paper not intended for acceptance but sent by her son, according to preconcerted agreement, as a sign that he was well. Smuggling in letters was practised almost openly, not only by private individuals but by large firms. A publisher and school agent openly boasted that he adopted evasions of the postal laws which enabled him to receive letters from Glasgow for 2d. on which the Post Office would have levied at least 1s. 1d. Out of every 236 private letters which he received, 169 came to him otherwise than by post. A man starting on a tour in Scotland arranged with his family a plan for informing them of his progress and state of health without putting them to the expense of postage. It was managed in this way. He carried with him a number of old newspapers, one of which he put into the post daily. The postmark with the date showed his progress, and the state of his health was shown by the selection of the names from a list previously agreed upon with which the newspaper was franked. Sir Rowland Hill told the story, and he said he remembered that the name of Sir Francis Burdett denoted “Vigorous health.”
Then there was the franking privilege, by means of which all letters franked by peers and members of Parliament went free. Members of Parliament sometimes signed franks by the packet and gave them to constituents and friends. A trade was actually carried on in franks by the servants of members of Parliament, and their practice was to ask their masters to sign the franks in great numbers at a time. Forgery of franks was a frequent offence. About seventy years ago an old Irish lady informed a Post Office servant that she seldom paid any postage for letters, and that her correspondence never cost her friends anything. The official asked her how she managed this. “Oh,” she said, “I just wrote 'Fred. Suttie' in the corner of the cover of the letter and then, sure, nothing more was charged for it.” She was asked, “Were you not afraid of being hanged for forgery?” “Oh, dear, no,” she replied, “nobody ever heard of a lady being hanged in Ireland, and troth I did just what everybody else did.”
The system of payment on delivery of a letter was the cause of perpetual delays and numerous frauds. When a postman was obliged to collect at every house the necessary postage, it was extremely difficult to regulate his rounds. The temptation to defraud the Post Office, his master, was also frequently yielded to by him.
A large amount of money was every year obviously being lost to the Post Office in these different ways. A public opinion was in existence that the charges of the Post Office were unjust and excessive, and the moral sense of the community was not always alive enough to recognise any wrong in dodging the Government.
Mail Coach and Train.
When railways were in their infancy part of the journey of a mail was sometimes performed by coach and part by train. At the point where the railway began the coach was placed on a truck, which was coupled to the train.
To put the matter briefly, the rate for a single inland letter in 1837 was 4d. for 15 miles, 6d. for 30 miles, 7d. for 50 miles, and so on up to 1s. for