The Post Office and Its Story. Edward Bennett
not be supposed that the reform was an immediate financial success. The last complete year (1839) of the old system of high rates yielded a profit of £1,659,000. The first complete year of the new system produced only £500,789. But in two years the number of chargeable letters passing through the post had increased from 72,000,000 per annum to 208,000,000, and in a few years the profit of 1839 had been passed.
Sir Rowland was a fighter and reformer to the last. Like all men who accomplish great things, he was exceedingly self-confident and impatient of opposition. The official mind works from precedent to precedent, and Sir Rowland proposed to make all things new. Effort after effort was made to push him aside without any lasting success. He was dismissed from the Treasury in the second year of penny postage, at a time when its very success seemed to depend on friends, not foes, directing the organisation. Thomas Hood wrote to him: “I have seen so many instances of folly and ingratitude similar to those you have met with that it would never surprise me to hear of the railway people, some day, finding their trains running on so well, proposing to discharge the engines.” It was more in obedience to the feeling of the country than to any liking for the reformer that the Government of the day appointed him to the Post Office four years after his dismissal from the Treasury.
Sir Rowland was always perhaps a little uncomfortable as a Post Office chief. He was in the midst of men against whom he had been working for years, and there are many stories in existence of his caustic way of dealing with his staff. Anthony Trollope, who was in the service of the Post Office at the time, ventured one day to point out to Sir Rowland that the language in a certain report, if literally construed, might be held to mean what was not intended. Sir Rowland replied: “You must be aware, Mr. Trollope, that a phrase is not always intended to bear a literal construction. For instance, when I write to one of you gentlemen, I end my letter with the words, 'I am, Sir, your obedient servant,' whereas you know I am nothing of the sort.” Indeed nobody could have used this official phrase with less sincerity than Sir Rowland Hill.
But I like best this story of Rowland Hill in the evening of his days, after he had retired from the Post Office. It is pleasant to think of him still absorbed in the subject which had made his name a household word. His daughter, in her biography of him, tells us that whenever he met any foreign visitors, he was bound sooner or later to ask them about postal matters in their own country. He met Garibaldi at a banquet, and the inevitable question was put to him, but Sir Rowland could not work up any interest on the part of the Italian statesman in the matter. Sir Rowland complained to his brother of his disappointment in Garibaldi; he evidently thought him an over-rated man, especially in the matter of intelligence, and the brother replied, “When you go to heaven I foresee that you will stop at the gate to inquire of St. Peter how many deliveries they have a day, and how the expense of postal communication between heaven and the other place is defrayed.”
It was of course this absorption in his subject which gave him the victory. Penny Postage was probably inevitable, even if there had been no Rowland Hill in this country. Railways alone made a change in the postal service necessary, but it is to the lasting credit of Sir Rowland that he obtained the reform years before it would otherwise have been achieved. He carried the reform by assault, and the nation might have waited long years before the vested interests in the old system had given way to the needs of the nation. “Loss to the revenue” was the argument chiefly directed against Sir Rowland Hill's scheme: it is the argument still used when further concessions are asked for by the public. The reply that the Post Office exists for the convenience of the public is not always appreciated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the time being. He looks to the Post Office to provide him annually with a substantial sum of money. Perhaps the complete vindication of Sir Rowland Hill lies in the fact that roughly speaking the whole of the annual surplus from the Post Office at the present day is derived from the writer of the penny inland letter.
CHAPTER III
LOMBARD STREET AND ST. MARTIN'S
LE GRAND
Nothing will give the reader a better idea of the advances made by the Post Office during the last two hundred years than a comparison of the various buildings which have from time to time been the home of the General Post Office in London. The story of the buildings is one of continued growth and expansion right down to the present day. The General Post Office is always becoming too small and inconvenient for its work. And there has scarcely been any period when it was not necessary to rent overflow premises to meet the growing needs of the times.
As I have already pointed out, the system of posts in the time of the Tudors was used chiefly for the conveyance of Government despatches. The Master of the Posts was a Court official, and there was no need for a public office in London. The extension of postal business, especially between London and the Continent, required, however, in the later years of the sixteenth century, an office in the City of London, and according to Stow's Survey a post office was first established in Cloak Lane, near Dowgate Hill. This is the hill on which Cannon Street Station now stands, and it was also the centre of Roman London. The necessity of the foreign post was one of the reasons for the creation of the office, and it is a link between this time and our own that the continental mail train now starts from Cannon Street Station. Scarcely anything is known of this post office except the bare fact of its existence.
From Dowgate Hill the General Post Office was removed, at some date in the first half of the seventeenth century, to the sign of the Black Swan in Bishopsgate. These were most probably what we now call licensed premises: at any rate Pepys has recorded that on one occasion he went “to the musique-meeting at the Post Office.” Then happened the Great Plague of 1664–1665, and we have the benefit of a report from the senior officer as to the way in which the visitation affected the Post Office. “That dureing the late dreadfull sickness when many of the members of the office desert the same and that betweene 20 and 30 of the members dyed thereof, your petitioner, considering rather the dispatch of your Majesty's service than the preservation of himself and family, did hazard them all, and continued all that woefull tyme in the said office to give dispatch and conveyance to your Majesty's letters and pacquetts, and to preserve your revenue arising from the same.” The writer was evidently a pushful official who expected recognition of his services, and in yet a fuller petition for a reward for keeping the Post Office open during the Plague he begs that he may have an order to the Commissioners of Prizes to deliver to him some brown and white sugar granted to him by His Majesty from the ship Espérance of Nantes, condemned as a prize at Plymouth. I hope he obtained his sugar: in our days we should have made him a K.C.B. Then came the Great Fire of 1666, and the Post Office was burnt out. In an old newspaper of 1666 may be seen this advertisement: “The General Post Office is for the present held at the Two Black Pillars in Bridges Street over against the Fleece Tavern, Covent Garden, till a more convenient Place can be found in London.”
As soon as the City was rebuilt “the more convenient Place” was found in a house in Lombard Street, and by the year 1680, if not earlier, the General Post Office moved into its new premises. The house had been the private residence of Sir Robert Viner, a city dignitary who had been Lord Mayor of London, and it was rented from him. This was the home of the Head Office for nearly 150 years. Comparatively little is known of the history of this office, and a writer to whom I am indebted for much of my information writes justly “that one cannot escape a feeling half of wonder and half of shame that so few records should remain of an office where possibly Milton and certainly Dryden posted their letters.” But what we do know about this office is exceedingly interesting.
There were officials occupying positions which go by the same name as at the present day. There were the Postmasters-General, a dual office which in the early part of the eighteenth century was non-political, and the Postmasters-General were entitled to live at the General Post Office and to have free coals, candles, and tinware. There was a Receiver-General with a salary of £150, an Accountant-General with a salary of £200, a Comptroller of the Inland Office, six Clerks of the Roads, a Secretary to the Postmaster-General, and a Postmaster-General's Clerk. Positions which are not known in these days were Windowman and Alphabet Keeper—this man handed out letters to callers, and his other title probably referred