FORMATION OF AN ORGANISATION—BOOTH, THE
LETTER-CARRIER—CONDITION OF THE LETTER-CARRIERS—PROPOSED
PETITION TO PARLIAMENT.
It was scarcely to be expected that, with the spirit of discontent
so widespread among every class and section, that discontent would
remain altogether dumb and inarticulate. If the authorities imagined
that by putting their veto on the right of public meeting discontent
would in consequence die a natural death, they were mistaken. It may
have slumbered for a while, only that there were already a few active
spirits at work among the letter-carriers. Secretly and quietly, and
almost unrecognised even among those whom he was slowly organising,
one man particularly at this period was actively at work. His name was
William Booth, a City letter-carrier. He began by convening little
hole-and-corner meetings in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. And what
was a source of no little annoyance to the authorities, those smuggled
meetings of postal employés were more often than not reported in the
public press, though the names of the speakers were not always given.
Nor did it stop at smuggled meetings outside the official domain; for
Booth called several meetings, with the official permission as well as
without, in the letter-carriers’ kitchens. Some were impromptu meetings,
carefully planned by the indefatigable Booth, and, as usual, reported
next morning. Such meetings were generally for the purpose of shaping a
policy, and for discussing the best means of drawing the attention of
Parliament to their grievances. They were always well attended, not only
by the letter-carriers themselves, but by every other class and section
of postal employé in the Post-Office buildings. But spies and overseers
were frequently present to see that no one used a pencil to scribble a
surreptitious note. Yet, even with this precaution, to the chagrin of the
authorities, the morning papers had accurate accounts of the proceedings.
The invisible reporters were never looked for in the proper place, for
they stationed themselves by one of the open windows of the underground
kitchens which looked into the Post-Office yard; and through these
windows every word of the speakers floated upward to be deftly caught by
the eager reporter in waiting.
Then, as if to test the existing official prohibition, Booth advertised
that he would lecture on postal grievances at Cowper Street Schoolrooms,
and the fact was announced by the distribution of some thousands of
handbills. The lecture was delivered to a crowded and enthusiastic
audience, and many of the public were present. The result of this was
that the lecturer was next day called up before the Controller to explain
why he held a meeting outside the Post-Office building, the forbidding
rule notwithstanding. Booth very adroitly won his case on a quibble, and
was afterwards none the less proud of having done so. He maintained it
was a lecture merely, there being no resolution of any kind discussed;
and there being no prohibitive rule against lectures, of whatever nature,
he submitted that he had broken no regulation. The official Solon
discharged him with a caution.
The agitators were by this time made aware in many unpleasant little ways
that they were constantly under the surveillance of the departmental
informers. Both on duty and away from it they could scarcely move with
freedom. Booth especially was regarded as such a dangerous firebrand that
the department felt it advisable to keep itself acquainted with his every
movement while off duty, and for that purpose he was constantly shadowed
to find out where he went and with whom he mixed. His house at Brixton
was watched almost night and day, and several times the official touts
got reprimanded by their superiors for reporting that Booth had not left
the house after being seen going in, when as a matter of fact he was
found to have addressed a postal meeting the same evening. For the sake
of causing their discomfiture, and for the fun of the thing, he generally
circumvented the watchers by getting over the back-garden wall and
dodging through a neighbour’s house into a side street.
In this manner principally he got together meetings of men whose
co-operation he sought, and though such gatherings were often secret and
unrecorded, they were largely the means of setting the agitation on the
move along definite lines. The agitation from this period may be said to
have been started in a little coffee-room off Gunpowder Alley, in Fleet
Street, and from Gunpowder Alley, very appropriately, most of the squibs
to be directed against the postal authorities were prepared and fired.
It was here that the first conference of postal servants was held, when
Booth, having called together a body of representatives from the various
district offices, besought them to assist him to form an organisation
of postal employés for mutual benefit and maintenance of rights. It was
the ambitious aim to unite the whole of the Post-Office and Telegraph
employés, to assist in obtaining by legitimate means the abolition of
Sunday work, increase of wages, and an honest and clearly-defined system
of promotion without loss of pay, and generally to relieve cases of
distress. The planks of the platform having thus been rough hewed, it
remained to nail them together. For this purpose a small preliminary
public meeting was called in a schoolroom attached to the Borough Road
Congregational Church, which was lent by the Rev. G. M. Murphy, a notable
preacher of the day, who became an active sympathiser with Booth and
his efforts. This inaugural meeting in the little schoolroom took place
on the 17th of May 1872, when the society was formally constituted and
members enrolled.
At the time the bare idea of a protective society of this kind within
the ranks of the postal service was so novel and audacious, and the
difficulties in the way of its complete success so numerous, that for
some months it hung fire, and even many of those who had joined predicted
an early demise. At any rate, the progress made was not very reassuring
to Booth and his coadjutors, who were staking almost everything on
the cast of the die. Nevertheless, the leaders worked with a will to
pull the movement together and make it presentable before the public,
and an enormous amount of work was quietly accomplished. An extensive
correspondence was carried on with public men and others who were to be
counted on as friendly, and who were likely to help and encourage them in
the future. By this means they awakened an interest in their work among
a numerous class of members of Parliament belonging to both political
parties, and gave them that knowledge of postal wants which was expected
to bear fruit when the time came.
It was not very long before the authorities were surprised to receive
an application from the men to be allowed to hold a mass meeting inside
the Post-Office, and the loan of the Newspaper Branch was requisitioned.
Whatever may have been the hesitation in giving official sanction to
so large an order, the required permission was, nevertheless, granted
after some delay. The object of this meeting was to discuss the terms
of a postal petition to Parliament, and possibly it was the nature of
the project which caused the authorities to deem it wiser to confine its
discussion within their own walls than to drive it into the public arena.
And just here it is necessary to point out that at this time the
fraternal feeling between the London letter-carriers and the
letter-sorters was stronger than ever. The several public meetings and
the encouragement they had received, with the numerous injunctions
from outside friends and sympathisers to keep together, begot a spirit
of comradeship which sunk all petty distinction of class, and Booth’s
activity did much to cement them. The sorters were slightly better
off than the letter-carriers in point of pay and status, but they
had grievances much in common, and they had learnt more than ever to
recognise that they were useful and necessary to each other in the fight
for freedom, a decent wage, and better conditions of work. The army of
discontented letter-carriers had been very much increased since 1860.
In that year the levelling-down principle, first introduced in 1854
by Rowland Hill and a Commission which then sat, was carried one step
further by the formation of an inferior grade to be known as auxiliary or
assistant letter-carriers, originally a hybrid class, something between
postal labourers and the ordinary letter-carriers. They were badly paid
and worse treated; they shared all the misfortunes and hardships of the
letter-carriers without their advantages as to pay and prospects. They
were a cheap class of labourers in the rich postal vineyard, for whom it
seemed the authorities thought any treatment good enough, if only because
they were cheap. Their working hours were spread over even a greater
period of the day than were those of the full-blown letter-carriers.
Their position in the service was most precarious.
Their wretched conditions of service soon impelled them to organise among
themselves, but their organisation was as feeble as their funds were
shallow, and though nominally they were a separate body, yet virtually
they were to be counted in with the general army of malcontents. They
gave and received whatever moral support was possible. They joined in
where they could; they attended the postal meetings, and assisted in some
degree towards the general betterment of the service.
The condition of the auxiliary letter-carriers was so pitiable as to
cause wonder that the heads of the department could be so short-sighted
as to set up in the persons of these men, many of them almost bootless
scarecrows, such a damning and convincing proof of postal ineptitude
and parsimony. With a class of men in the Government service working
under such conditions, it is easy to see that they were not to remain
unaffected by the prevailing epidemic of discontent. Almost from
the first they sent forth ready recruits to swell the ranks of the
disaffected. They were in themselves a reservoir of discontent, and
provided the agitation with a fresh justification, enabling the agitators
to make a stronger complaint than ever against the authorities. If
anything were wanting to prove that the letter-carriers especially were
a body of ill-used men, these auxiliaries supplied the last piece of
material evidence. They presented a pathetic spectacle to the public
eye. The idea of a man struggling to keep himself and a big family on
fifteen shillings a week, the while to remain honest and irreproachable,
was likely to awaken the public to it as a matter for its own concern.
The auxiliaries had to attend, whenever their services were required, at
a remuneration lower than that of a dock-labourer, being threepence or
fourpence per hour, and but for the fact that they were compelled to
engage in other callings many of them might have starved.
The condition of the indoor staffs could not be so prominently brought
under the public eye, but both letter-sorters and letter-carriers alike
suffered from disabilities, and had grievances which fully entitled them
to an inquiry and a hearing. It was not only that they were expressly
forbidden by rule to hold public meetings to discuss their grievances
and endeavour to enlist outside sympathy, or to take any public action
whatever for the purpose of removing the wrongs of which they complained.
To obtain redress of any grievance, the only course officially open to
them was to apply through their immediate superiors; but this, with the
so-called right of appeal to the Postmaster-General, more often than
not begot annoyance and petty persecution from those of whom redress
was sought. The right of appeal especially was rendered nugatory by the
exercise of the power of damaging endorsement on the part of officials
through whose hands such an appeal would have to pass on its way upward
to the chief of the department. Indeed, their experience in the matter
of petitions to the Postmaster-General had up to the present amply
proved that the authorities were intended to serve as a breakwater or
a barrier to resist all such appeals, and provide the public head with
ample excuses for refusal or an ignoring of the claims of all humble
subordinates. As has already been noted, it took many dreary years of
waiting or slow climbing to reach what is to-day regarded as a decent
living wage. The rules of the department did not insist that a man should
work more than eight hours in the twenty-four, but owing to the increase
of work they were more commonly extended to ten and sometimes eleven
hours in the working day, while these duties were usually divided into
two, three, and four separate attendances, the intervals barely leaving
time for meals and going to and from the office. All that the sorters had
ventured to ask for was that these abuses should be removed; that their
pay should better correspond to their heavier responsibilities and the
increased cost of living; that their hours should be confined to eight in
the twenty-four, and adjusted more humanely.
The letter-carriers joined with the sorters in complaining that their
pay, thirty shillings a week after fifteen or twenty years’ drudgery,
was not a fair wage; that promotion was not only unequal, but too slow.
A peculiar grievance with them then, as it has always remained, was
that the fact that letter-carriers were given Christmas-boxes by the
public had invariably been made a pretext for paying the men badly.
Letter-carriers who were formerly eligible for sorterships had all such
promotion closed against them; and practically they were left without any
hope of ever getting beyond their thirty shillings a week, even if ever
they got so far. A great and widespread source of dissatisfaction too
was the way in which men who had been induced to enter the service with
a fair promise of promotion had been bilked by subsequent alterations in
the establishment.
There were other causes of discontent not so broadly defined, but poor
pay and lack of promotion were the main features. Man cannot live by
bread alone, but the Post-Office made it its business to see that its
servants never became lazy through over-feeding. It sealed their lips and
prevented a public voicing of their grievances, and it almost dared them
to open their mouths too widely either for talking or eating.