BEGINNINGS OF COMBINED AGITATION—THE COMPULSORY SUNDAY LABOUR
QUESTION—FIRST PUBLIC PROTEST AT EXETER HALL.
That the spirit of discontent in the Post-Office manifested itself so far
back as over half a century ago, will probably somewhat surprise most
people outside the postal service itself. Possibly even farther back than
that, some traces of discontent and effort at agitation might be found;
but in those obscure days, however the working conditions of the service
may have justified it, all such effort must have begun and ended with a
few individual insubordinates, whose names are buried in oblivion and
the official records. But it has to be remembered that in the earlier
days of the Post-Office the very conditions under which the members of
the working staff were introduced into the service almost precluded the
possibility of organisation for the redress of grievances. Indeed, it may
be well understood that in the pastoral days of the good old times—when
life went slower, and when there was an absence of that feverish rush and
hurry so characteristic of the present everywhere, and of the Post-Office
in particular—postal officials were the happy inhabitants of a sort of
Sleepy Hollow. In a word, probably there was little discontent in the
earlier days, owing to the system of appointment by patronage. At least,
there could have been very little open and avowed discontent, and much
less could it have been organised.
As a survival of the system in vogue in the old twopenny-post days, the
greater part of the working staff—that is to say, those subordinates
who afterwards came to be described as the manipulative part of the
machinery, were for many years after the introduction of the penny post
recruited from those in whose behalf some influence had been exercised
or invoked. Many were the sons of old servants of the aristocracy,
others the sons or relatives of the dependants of M.P.’s, of Justices
of the Peace, of lawyers, and public men more or less eminent. Every
notability who could exercise any influence with the postal authorities,
or with those who were _en rapport_ with the powers that were, had their
nominees. It was then next to impossible for a mere outsider, whatever
his merits, to obtain employment under the Postmaster-General without
this golden talisman. This system, so general in the earlier days, has
been adverted to only in order to show one reason for there being so
little discontent openly manifested, and to explain why agitation did not
assume an organised form till later in the century. For however slow may
have been the times, doubtless the conditions of the postal service were
not even then so Arcadian as to stifle entirely the feeling of discontent
in some. But the system of nomination by influence and patronage, and
what in these days might be called by the uglier name of nepotism, was
better calculated to foster a feeling of dependence in the majority, and
one of grateful loyalty in many. This, too, it has been already pointed
out, was in the days when the principles of trades unionism were little
studied and little understood, even so far as they had taken root in
the minds of the working-classes. Combination in any shape or form was
in fact little sympathised with by those whom it sought to benefit,
and in Government offices particularly would have been anathema to the
authorities, or, at any rate, received with fear and aversion.
While the good old principle of “looking after Doub” prevailed
extensively in every other Government office, it was almost paramount
in the Post-Office; and this being so, it would be surprising to find
anything but a state of stagnant contentment existing among the working
staff. If not exactly a state of stagnant contentment, the readiness
to assert a principle, and to resent encroachment on existing rights
and privileges, would certainly not be forcibly in evidence. Whatever
official wrongs, if any, they may have been subjected to at the hands
of their superiors, they showed no willingness to be awakened to a
sense of them. The tide of Chartism beat in vain against the grim walls
of the Post-Office; the fluctuations of trade disputes, strikes, and
lock-outs interested them only in a casual way, if at all; while the bare
idea of organised opposition to the wishes of the authorities, however
arbitrary, would have spelt downright treason. They were recruited from
a class of men who, if they had not always been brought up in the paths
of virtue, had always gone along the line of least resistance, which
was that of conventional respectability. Once in the Post-Office, they
had a character to keep up, and they were not as other men who had to
work for their living with dirty hands. They felt that their Queen and
country had reposed a confidence in them by selecting them for the
responsible position they held. They were something midway between
lawyers’ clerks and menials of the royal household. They doubtless felt
they were very superior persons, though their wages were meagre and their
uniform scanty; but the authorities were like unto little gods to them,
and so they took it for granted that Heaven had established a natural
gulf between them. Still they were the children of patronage, and of
fathers whose only ambition was to see their sons settled in a Government
situation; for a Government situation was for their sons the Mecca and
the goal of those people who always kept good and paid proper respects
to the parson and their rent regularly to the squire. And when the sons
got there they felt they were a chosen few, invested with a caste and
a distinction which entitled them to hold their heads a little higher
than the people living in the same street. The consciousness that his
neighbours occasionally pointed him out as the “gentleman who works in
the Post-Office” more than atoned for his inability to wear fashionable
clothes and a top-hat like his superiors.
This system of patronage as a means of rewarding the deserving relatives
of old servitors and sworn retainers by drafting them into the General
Post-Office, though it would not be tolerated in these democratic times,
yet is reminiscent somewhat of the good old days when such things were
only right and proper in every department of the State, and when it
was taken for granted that Government situations were only the just
reward of faithful service rendered elsewhere to the heaven-born men
of power and influence in the State, and created for them to prove
their generosity. Such a system is perhaps therefore saved from utter
condemnation by just a suggestion of poetry about it, recalling the
earlier coaching days, when the bond between master and servant was
often one of intimacy and mutual obligation; and perhaps it would not be
difficult to say a good word for it. It showed at least that whatever
the failings of those in power and those in high places, whatever their
attitude towards the working-classes generally, however they may have
sniffed contemptuously at any suggestion of Chartism, or at all attempts
at combination among the masses, they were not always unmindful of their
moral duties towards their own dependants. Willingly enough they paid
their obligations, and rewarded services rendered by quickly pushing
the applicants into the service of the State. They felt that they had
discharged the whole duty of man when they had done this; they had
provided the son of a deserving old family servant, of an influential
constituent, or of a good paying tenant, with a berth for life in a
Government office, and, what was more, had proved their importance in
being able to do so.
Still, whatever may have been the abuses attaching to such a system, the
State was to an extent the gainer in getting men of good character, with
a good certificate of family respectability, and, moreover, men who were
guaranteed to go for any length of time without winding up, who were
warranted never to become discontented, but always to remain faithful and
loyal, well satisfied with the position in which it had pleased God and
their patron to place them.
With the rank and file of the postal service composed of such men,
brought in under such conditions, it is not surprising that discontent
never raised its head, and that many a grievance went unredressed because
it was silently endured. Nor is it surprising that the Post-Office,
garrisoned by such an army sworn in in this manner, was almost the last
citadel that it attacked with any degree of success. It would have been
too dangerous for any man to have attempted to bell the cat in those
days, and however strong may have been the desire in some, without
the support and confidence of their fellows it would have been sheer
official suicide to have taken the first step. They were men calculated
to endure much. Petty official tyranny to such men meant no more than
mild discipline. A grievance with them was but an evanescent thing, felt
to-day, forgotten to-morrow; for they had a stake in the Post-Office. To
express discontent would be to court certain dismissal, and that would
have meant much to them, while it would mean the betrayal of the good,
kind patron, their father’s master or landlord, whose powerful influence
had placed them there. Indeed, it is easy to understand that no man would
have felt himself either a spy or a renegade to principle in secretly or
openly denouncing the rash fool who would endeavour to organise a meeting
of protest against his superiors. Such were the conditions and such the
temper of the men of the postal staff that must have long obtained prior
to the fifties and sixties. From the introduction of the penny post in
1840, which practically organised the Post-Office on a new basis, there
is no evidence of combined discontent worth recording till the early
fifties, though through that period of eighteen years or so the leaven
of discontent was slowly but surely working, till a desire to make their
wants known at last became manifest.
Yet only a few years after the institution of the penny post the
indoor working staffs and the letter-carriers were both given grave
cause for dissatisfaction by the extension of Sunday labour. Whatever
protest they may have made of their own accord counted for little;
but it is interesting to find that so early as 1848 an influential
and public-spirited section of the community took up the matter of
compulsory Sunday labour on behalf of the aggrieved postal servants, the
sorting-clerks and others, and publicly expressed that dissatisfaction
which Government servants dared not themselves utter too openly.
At that time it was contemplated by the authorities to compel two
attendances on that day as on other days of the week, and to abolish
entirely for postal servants in London the distinction between the day of
rest and ordinary working days. This was the origin of that question of
compulsory Sunday labour in the Post-Office, which was to continue for
thirty years and more as one of the prevailing causes of dissatisfaction
to thousands of men. On the 8th October 1849 a great mass meeting was
called at Exeter Hall to protest as strongly as possible against this
desecration of Sunday. The meeting was convened in the interests of
postal servants themselves as much as in furtherance of the Sabbatarian
principle, and there is little doubt that the men of the Post-Office
who were the principal objectors to the new regulation, were behind the
scenes aiding and abetting in the success of the movement. A writer in
the _Patriot_ newspaper of that year, and one evidently familiar with
the Post-Office machinery, drew a vivid picture of the possibilities of
Sunday labour in the Post-Office. This article in the _Patriot_, probably
from the pen of the first avowed discontented postal servant, did not a
little to further the memorial for the cessation of the practice, which
was afterwards drawn up by the Sunday-School Union, and forwarded to the
Lords of the Treasury. The action of the authorities was denounced as
sacrilegious, arbitrary, and tyrannical, by a number of clergymen and
others speaking for the aggrieved men, while Rowland Hill, the postal
reformer, the “Father of the Penny Post,” came in for a large share of
hostile criticism, his name being repeatedly hissed at the Exeter Hall
meeting. If the audience hissed Rowland Hill, they as loudly cheered
the postal servants on whom this new official imposition was to be put,
directly it became known that, to their honour, they had respectfully but
firmly declined to submit, and that when the sheets for their signature
went round the large establishment only two men could be got to sign away
their birthright for the little extra pay. The name of the Queen was
invoked to prevent this iniquitous violation of the “Pearl of Days.”
The memorial was forwarded to the Treasury; and the request for an
interview with Lord John Russell to support the prayer of his memorial,
met with only a curt refusal through his secretary. There the matter
ended, so far. The Post-Office had its way, and compulsory Sunday labour
in the Post-Office became an established, and in the minds of many, a
disgraceful fact; to prove, however, a source of further trouble later
on, and to provide one of the most substantial excuses for agitation
during the next thirty years. Yet the comparatively feeble agitation by
proxy, set on foot then in 1848, did produce, nevertheless, some little
result; and on March 18, 1850, a Parliamentary paper was issued to show
the “results of the measures recently adopted for the reduction of Sunday
labour in the Post-Office.”