The Post Office and Its Story. Edward Bennett
a local penny post, and in London there were twopenny and threepenny posts. Each person in the United Kingdom received on an average only five posted packets a year. This was the year when the change from mail coach to mail train was most marked. A mail was conveyed from London to Liverpool and Manchester in 16½ hours: the secret of the speed was that the mail was carried by coach from London to Birmingham, and there put on the railway which was open to Liverpool and Manchester. The last of the mail coaches, that from Norwich and Newmarket, arrived in London on the 6th January 1846.
The Reform Bill had been passed, a reforming Government was in power, and measures of social amelioration were being discussed in all quarters. Trade and commerce were making strides, the habit of travel was growing with the people, and the need for simpler and easier methods of communicating with one another was urgent. There was a grand opportunity for a postal reformer. And the need of the time brought forth the man.
There had been postal reformers before Rowland Hill. First of all in time and distinction was Witherings, who lived in the middle of the seventeenth century. He became Master of the Posts in 1637, and he introduced a far-reaching system of postal rates, which before had been extremely casual and excessive. He made the Post Office a paying concern. He created the Post Office as we know it to-day. Then there was Dockwra, who established a penny post for the London district which existed 120 years. Only in the price had this reform any relation to Sir Rowland Hill's scheme, which was based on the idea that a uniform charge should cover any distance travelled. Dockwra's system was of course limited to short distances. Another great name in Post Office history is Ralph Allen, the Postmaster of Bath in 1719, who organised a system of cross posts all over the country. And in the first chapter I mentioned the achievements of Palmer, who established the mail-coach service.
Rowland Hill was born in 1795 at Kidderminster, and he began life as a schoolmaster. Very early he showed great talents as an organiser: his bent was towards mathematics, and he became secretary of Gibbon Wakefield's scheme for colonising South Australia. In this capacity his attention was specially directed to the abuses of our postal system. He approached the study of the system as an outsider: indeed until after his reform had been carried he had not been inside the walls of the General Post Office. He collected statistics, and it was the discovery that the length of a letter's journey made no appreciable difference to the cost of that journey which led him to think of uniformity of rates. He showed, for instance, that the cost of the mail-coach service for one journey between London and Edinburgh was about £5 a day. He then worked out the average load of the mail at six hundredweight, the cost of each hundredweight being therefore 16s. 8d. Taking the average weight of a letter at a quarter of an ounce, the cost of carriage over the 400 miles was ⅓6 part of a penny. Yet the actual postal charge was 1s. 3½d.
From the first the plan of Rowland Hill gained the support of the people, but he had to face a long and bitter opposition from the official chiefs of the Post Office and from the vested interests which were threatened by his action. Lord Lichfield, the Postmaster-General at the time, said, as an argument against the idea, that the mails would have to carry twelve times as much in weight as before, and therefore the cost would be twelve times the amount they paid. “The walls of the Post Office,” he exclaimed, “would burst, the whole area in which the building stands would not be large enough to receive the clerks and letters.” Increase of business would mean a loss, not a gain, and Lord Lichfield had not the optimism of the old Irishwoman who, when endeavouring to sell her fowls, exclaimed, “I lose on every fowl I sell, but thank the Lord I sell a lot.”
Sir Rowland Hill asked Lord Lichfield very pertinently whether the size of the building should be regulated by the amount of correspondence or the amount of correspondence by the size of the building.
One of the most curious arguments was that the British public would object to prepayment, that it was contrary to their habits and customs. There was no doubt something to be said for the idea that when you wrote a letter you had all the trouble, and you were conferring a benefit on your friend, who ought to be prepared to pay for it.
The plan triumphed. The Committee appointed to consider it recommended its adoption, and it was incorporated in the Budget of 1839. Lord Melbourne was the Prime Minister, and though not enthusiastic, was favourable. The strong feelings aroused in official circles are suggested by Lord Melbourne's remark after interviewing the Postmaster-General the day before the Bill was introduced into the House of Lords. “Lichfield has been here,” said Lord Melbourne. “Why a man cannot talk of penny postage without getting into a passion, passes my understanding.”
The Bill received the royal assent on the 17th August 1839, and after a preliminary experiment had been tried of a uniform rate of 1d. for London and 4d. for the rest of the country, in order to accustom the clerks to the system, a uniform rate of 1d. for letters not exceeding half an ounce was introduced on the 10th January. This was a busy day at post offices all over the country, and the opportunity was seized by hundreds of people to write letters to one another in honour of the occasion. About 112,000 packets were posted in London. A large number of letters were also written to Rowland Hill himself from all parts of the country, congratulating him and thanking him for his efforts. Tradesmen and business men were especially grateful for the Bill. Moreover the reform opened the doors of the Post Office to the poorer classes. The postman after 1840 was, it was said, “making long rounds through humble districts where heretofore his knock was rarely heard.”
Rowland Hill was appointed to a post at the Treasury in 1840, in order to superintend the introduction of his scheme. He retired, however, in 1842, after Lord Melbourne's Ministry went out of office. On the return of the Liberals to power in 1846 he was appointed one of the Secretaries to the Postmaster-General, and in the same year he was presented by the public with £13,360 in gratitude for his services. In 1854 he was made Chief Secretary of the Post Office, and in 1862 he received the honour of knighthood. When he retired from the Post Office in 1864 he received from Parliament a grant of £20,000, and he was also allowed to retain his full salary of £2000 a year as retiring pension. In 1864 he received the degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford, and in 1879 he was granted the freedom of the City of London. He died in August of the same year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Many and great were the reforms introduced into the Post Office during Sir Rowland Hill's period of service as Secretary. In his letter of retirement addressed to the Lords of the Treasury in 1864, he gave an account of his stewardship in a statement entitled “Results of Post Office Reform.” If we quote largely from this document it will be to show what Sir Rowland Hill claimed to have done, and it will also help the reader to understand from his own experience how far the Post Office has advanced since Sir Rowland Hill's day. First of all, Sir Rowland claimed “a very large reduction in the rates of postage on all correspondence, whether inland, foreign, or colonial. As instances in point it may be stated that letters are now conveyed from any part of the United Kingdom to any other part—even from the Channel Islands to the Shetland Isles—at one-fourth of the charge previously levied on letters passing between post towns only a few miles apart, and that the rate formerly charged for the slight distance—viz. fourpence—now suffices to carry a letter from any part of the United Kingdom to any part of France, Algeria included.”
Then Sir Rowland claimed “the almost universal resort to prepayment of correspondence, and that by means of stamps,” the establishment of the book post, the reduction in the fee for registered letters from 1s. to 4d., a reduction in the price of money orders combined with a great extension and improvement of the system, a more frequent and more rapid communication between the Metropolis and the larger provincial towns, as also between one provincial town and another, a vast extension of the rural distribution, and many other facilities for the public, including the establishment of Post Office Savings Banks. He goes on to say: “The expectations I held out before the change were that eventually under the operation of my plans the number of letters would increase fivefold, the gross revenue would be the same as before, while the net revenue would sustain a loss of about £300,000. The actual figures show that the letters have increased not fivefold but nearly eight and a half fold, that the gross revenue, instead of remaining the same, has increased by about £1,500,000; while the net revenue, instead of falling £300,000, has risen more than £100,000.”
This was written more than twenty years after