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.
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[Illustration: 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.
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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 each additional hundred miles: in certain places only was
there 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 1/36 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 the introduction of penny
postage, but it must 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.