A PERIOD OF STAGNATION—THE BLIND POSTMASTER-GENERAL AND A GLEAM
OF LIGHT—A MEMORABLE VISIT—THE FAWCETT SCHEME.
Lord John Manners had descended from his pedestal of office and returned
to the comparative obscurity and inactivity for which his attainments so
well fitted him. Before leaving the Post-Office he had the satisfaction
of knowing that, from one point of view, he had done at least one thing
well; he had stifled discontent and reduced the common herd of postal
workers to their proper level of uncomplaining Government serfs. Under
his régime had grown and flourished naturally a system of petty tyranny
and sycophancy which rendered open honest protest well-nigh impossible,
which compelled men to endure it or accept the alternative, resignation
or dismissal, and which made any attempt at combination as impossible as
in the prehistoric days before the penny post. The condition, so far as
the limitations on their liberty were concerned, was every whit as bad as
prevailed years before the agitation. Nearly all the reforms which the
late agitation had started so hopefully to attain had been left undone.
The violent _coup_ for which Lord John Manners was responsible had taken
the heart out of the men, and they had to take the postal service as
they found it or leave it for others to be forced into their places from
the stress of competition outside. The hide-bound official tenet that
the permanency of Government employment more than compensated for all
shortcomings was now being interpreted as if to mean that this quality
of “permanency” not only compensated for but justified and rendered
necessary the employment of petty persecution, the deprivation of almost
every claim to citizenship, and the curtailment of most ordinary human
rights. The utter contempt of the officials for men’s common rights
and privileges as human beings, their churlish indifference to the
common claims of manhood, have to some extent already been shown. Even
the “permanency” of employment was commonly nullified on the smallest
pretext, and seniority and long faithful service counted for little
against the whim of a tyrannical supervisor. If it was creditable to the
public service to have it manned by those who suffered from grievances
yet dared not complain of them; if it was profitable to the Treasury
to have the rank and file of the postal service remain underpaid and
forced labour exacted from them; if it was requisite that the woes of
the men should be hidden alike from the public and from the higher
permanent officials henceforth, most of the credit, most of the honour,
was due to Lord John Manners. If it was well that all inquiry should be
stifled and the men be kept in servile subjection by superiors whose
common conception of their duties was that of Russian jailers; if it was
necessary in the course of proper discipline that men should be treated
as though they had no soul to call their own, Lord John Manners, by the
one act by which he achieved this success, deserved the gratitude of his
country.
Thus it will be seen that nearly everything which the agitation had set
out to do, all the reforms which it had promised, were left for a future
generation. A long period of stagnation had set in, and but for the
faint echo of agitation occasionally coming from the telegraphists, the
Post-Office, so far as uttered discontent was concerned, might have been
wrapped in slumber.
Lord John Manners had departed for good, unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.
His advent and departure had witnessed no change in the conditions of
the service. Time in the Post-Office dragged its slow weary length along
till the year 1881 was reached. That year was to witness a glad surprise
for the dejected sorting staff at least. If Lord John Manners was the
one man who was to be bitterly remembered as having battened down the
hatches on the galley-slaves, set a seal on their freedom of action, and
put a premium on official exaction, Professor Henry Fawcett was the
one who came at last to offer them a fuller share of air and liberty.
Lord John Manners, belonging to the political party which had encouraged
their demands, and, in the persons of some of its most prominent men,
almost, it might be said, aided and abetted the agitation, so far from
carrying out the reforms which had been confidently expected of him, had
discouraged their aspirations by means of a whip of scorpions. They had
asked for bread, and he had given them something worse than a stone.
Professor Henry Fawcett had scarcely been approached, certainly not by
those who figured in the late agitation, yet remembering his promises
of bygone years, and with a generous desire to meet the necessities of
their case, he of his own free will, and almost spontaneously, offered
reparation for the long disappointment they had sustained. Mr. Fawcett,
though never taking a prominent part, or figuring too largely in the
letter-carriers’ and sorters’ three years’ agitation, yet had associated
himself with it to an extent, often giving his wise counsel to Booth and
the others, and always his sympathy and best wishes for bettering the
conditions of the service. He showed that he was not likely to forget now.
Discontent among the telegraphists had reached a somewhat acute stage,
and the new Postmaster-General busied himself for some time in arriving
at the inner facts of their case. He rose from his study of the
telegraphists’ troubles with a conviction that something must be done
to meet the justice of their demands. It was not clamour that weighed
with him, but a genuine inclination to do the right thing so far as in
him lay, and to put in order the household which his predecessors had
more or less neglected. He had the fullest desire to mete out justice to
the telegraphists, but there was the sister branch of the service to be
considered likewise. That portion of the Augean stable was, if anything,
in a worse condition, and he decided to ascertain for himself.
One evening, in his quiet simple manner, the blind Postmaster-General
presented himself at the General Post-Office unannounced and asked to
be taken over the sorting department, and to have things explained to
him. The scene was one of bustle and confusion; and the dull roar and
the clank of stamping machinery, and the movements of hundreds of men
in a confined space, filled the overburdened air. He was conducted to
a position on the gallery overlooking the busy, crowded Letter Branch,
which to ordinary eyes resembled nothing so much as an overturned
ant-hill. Mr. Fawcett’s form and features were not familiar to the
majority; but presently the whisper went round that the tall, silent
man, seeming to stare down upon them through the big black spectacles
which hid his closed eyes, was the Postmaster-General himself. For a
few moments strict discipline was forgotten in curiosity, and few could
really believe that one who could so intently follow the movements of the
throbbing machinery below, as he did, could be wholly blind. They did not
comprehend to the full the pathos of it; they did not know that this was
only a habit he had schooled himself into to hide his infirmity. Nor did
they know that in him they looked on the first Postmaster-General who
had come among them with an honest desire to prove their benefactor. It
chanced—or it may have been that Mr. Fawcett himself preferred it—that a
young junior sorter was deputed to take him over the building. The young
man acting as guide succeeded in so interesting him by his manner of
describing all that the blind eyes could not see that at last Professor
Fawcett asked him his position in the service, and further questioned him
as to his pay and prospects. Presumably from what he gathered on that
occasion he learnt much that set him thinking. A little while afterwards
an official circular announced that the Postmaster-General would be
willing to receive a statement of the men’s claims to better pay and
prospects.
The issue of such a circular was as unexpected as manna from heaven.
It was some days before the letter-sorters could realise their good
fortune in having a Daniel come to judgment at last after all their
privations. Although the circular was a guarantee of good faith on the
part of the Postmaster-General, the men still betrayed a certain amount
of timidity in responding to so generous an invitation, until four or
five of them, forming themselves into a provisional committee, called a
meeting in one of the kitchens, and the basis of a plan was laid down.
There were several such meetings with the sanction of the authorities,
who could not decently withhold it; there was much cackling before the
egg was finally laid, as there usually is. But at last a petition to the
Postmaster-General was formulated and sent on its mission. The claims
set forth were studiously modest, and comprised a request to rise to
fifty shillings a week by yearly increments of two shillings instead
of eighteenpence, and a yearly holiday extended to three weeks instead
of only a fortnight, and an improved scale of pay for extra duty. This
constituted the whole of the demand for the sorters.
Mr. Fawcett lost no time in doing what he considered the right thing, and
in endeavouring to apply a remedy for all the discontent which had for
so long prevailed. He went about constructing his remedial measure in
a masterly manner and broad-minded spirit. It might have been expected
that he, a professor of the “dismal science,” would have sought for a
ready means to evade the importunities of a discontented service. But
not so; he broadly recognised that discontent was a symptom, a symptom
of a growing polypus beneath the surface, and he sought for a means to
eradicate the cause. He apparently spared himself no pains to arrive at
the true facts of the situation. The report which he made to the Lords
of the Treasury signified much inquiry and many hours of labour. He
wrote: “For several months past I have been collecting information from
all sources, not only as to the alleged grievances of the staff, but
as to the conditions of service and rates of pay of persons in private
employment, whose duties seem most nearly to correspond to theirs.”
Here in these few words is told a story of diligence, patient research,
and laborious study—all the more wonderful for a sightless man—which it
would take a complete volume to adequately accord full justice to. The
consideration of this alone should extenuate whatever few shortcomings
might be found in his remedial measure, which came to be known as the
“Fawcett Scheme.” Such faults, such as they were, were but as the black
specks on the white ermine, perhaps the more accentuating the real
goodness of his intention.
In response to his solicitations, the Lords of the Treasury accepted
his proposals for a revised scale of pay for telegraphists and “sorting
clerks,” and on the 13th of June 1881 the scheme was issued. It dealt
with the principal complaints from the two branches of the service, the
telegraphic and the postal; and referred specifically to inadequacy
of pay, arising from stagnation of promotion, the excessive amount of
overtime, the small rate of pay allowed for it, and the severity of night
duty; the insufficiency of yearly holiday; and a readjustment of pay for
work performed on Christmas Day and Good Friday. The scheme apparently
intended was to apply to telegraphists and sorters pretty equally, and
altogether, if nothing more can be said of it, it was a bold attempt,
and the bolder because it was the first attempt of the kind, to bring
order out of chaos, to unite in some manner the tangled and disconnected
threads of a complex and perplexing problem. It was practically the first
attempt to solve a problem teeming with petty jealousies and sectional
discontents; a patient attempt to skilfully untie the Gordian knot, which
Lord John Manners had only rudely hacked at with the knife of official
despotism. It was an honest attempt to fulfil his obligations to a
distressed and justly-discontented service with which years before taking
office he had professed a sympathy. With him it was the accomplishment of
a duty; and it was as such that he laid his proposals before the Lords of
the Treasury. It was a forward step in the right direction which ought
to have been taken long before it was. Instead of attempting to suppress
discontent in the same fashion as his predecessor, he gave to postal
servants their first charter of liberty. It was not complete; it was not
made to fit the full demands of the case perhaps; few first charters
are; but without it, further extensions of postal liberty would scarcely
have been possible. If it was only a gleam of light in the darkness, and
the beginning of a process of development, where only stagnation had
prevailed, it was something; and honour was due to its author for his
rare courage.
By the Fawcett scheme the letter-sorters found their position materially
improved. They who had dropped agitation, who had been reduced to a
condition of timorous servility almost, who had scarcely dared to ask
for what they were invited to take, found themselves nearly as well off
as those who had fancied themselves entitled to far greater benefits.
Everything that the sorters through years of vain agitation had sought
to obtain it seemed was now to be granted. The claim to rise to fifty
shillings a week, for the asking of which some time before five of their
number had been dismissed, was now given them without demur. And what
was more, the scheme was dated back to the preceding April, so that some
immediate monetary benefit accrued to the majority. In addition to the
increases in wages there was to be payment for sacred holidays; a revised
system of payment for overtime; the recommendation being that extra
duty be paid for strictly in proportion to the amount of weekly wages
received; while there were certain other minor advantages, including
one which minimised the severity of night attendance. It is unnecessary
here to give the whole measure in detail; but such, broadly, were the
advantages apparently vouchsafed to the sorting force, the defeat of
whose legitimate aims by a former Postmaster-General, and whose rejection
had reduced them to a condition of hopeless apathy. The glad surprise,
then, with which they especially received the Fawcett scheme may be still
imagined.
Yet Mr. Fawcett’s generous attempt to apply a panacea for postal
discontent was to some extent doomed to fall short of the effect
intended, and this from little fault of his own.
The just intention that animated Mr. Fawcett in his recommendations was
shown by his actually offering, in one case at least, more than was
demanded of him, and more than he was compelled to give in any instance.
True, his liberality in this respect extended to only one section of
the service—the London sorting force; but the fact remains that he
might easily have withheld all that he so freely gave. Had he been less
liberal-minded, he might, with as much excuse and with as much success
probably, have adopted the uncompromising attitude of every predecessor
in office. Whatever compelling influence there might have been which
resulted in the Fawcett scheme proceeded from the telegraphists’
agitation of that period, though it is more natural to believe that Mr.
Fawcett acted throughout independently, and was moved from purely just
and liberal motives.
Unfortunately, however, it must be said, though there is excuse in
abundance, that his good intention was hardly balanced by a due sense of
proportion. That was the principal internal fault of the scheme. While
it naturally satisfied the sorters for the time, it brought little more
than disappointment to the telegraphists, who expected so much more than
was apportioned them. It left the postmen and the auxiliary postmen just
where they were before in point of pay, their only share being a prospect
of partaking of the minor advantages, such as payment for overtime and
sacred days, which presumably were now to be enjoyed in common by all
classes. A measure which, by its fault of disproportion, must inevitably
engender the jealousy of the less favoured against their comrades in the
service, could not be regarded as a final settlement. It was successful
only to an extent as a temporary solution of an existing difficulty, but
not as the ultimate settlement for all time of a troublesome problem.
Probably its author would have claimed no more for it than this; but even
on these grounds it might have gone further. That this scheme, costing
the country as it did £152,000 per annum, and affecting ten thousand
servants, was not made to go further, so as to bring some measure of
material benefit to the postmen and auxiliaries and others, was to be
regretted. Doubtless Mr. Fawcett felt that he had gone far enough in
recommending benefits involving such a reduction on the yearly profits
of the Post-Office; but a little closer consideration of the conditions
of the letter-carrier class at that time might have averted the trouble
among them which arose later on. There is this, however, to be said in
extenuation of its shortcomings in respect to the letter-carriers. They
either did not take Mr. Fawcett’s invitation to state their grievances
as seriously addressed to themselves, or, from some misunderstanding,
their case was not put as fully and as convincingly as it might. The
Postmaster-General therefore possibly felt justified in thinking that
the letter-carriers were more or less satisfied with their position
and prospects, and he was not induced to go out of his way on their
behalf. With the letter-sorters the matter was rather different; they
had responded, even if none too vigorously, with the result, as has been
shown, that the five shillings taken off their weekly wage some years
before by Lord John Manners was now restored to them. That was the single
advantage by which they scored over the letter-carriers. The strength
and the justice of the Fawcett scheme lay principally in the fact that
new privileges were to be enjoyed in common; that at least every man in
the Post-Office could claim payment for Christmas Day and Good Friday;
and that payment for extra duty was adjusted in fair proportion to his
salary. These were in themselves no inconsiderable advantages, which were
worth being thankful for.
Such, at least, they would have been, only that the unfortunate fact
remained that most of these advantages for some unexplained reason were
for long withheld by the authorities who administered the scheme. The
advantages and benefits intended for the sorting force were precisely
and definitely laid down; but the department, either thinking that the
force did not merit justice in such full doses, or from some mistaken
conception as to the spirit and letter of Mr. Fawcett’s measure, did not
give them the full benefit of it there and then. Indeed, it even came
to be contended that the Fawcett scheme was never meant to apply to the
London postal staff. The men had been taught to be grateful for small
mercies. They had been willing to open their mouth and shut their eyes,
inspired by the new hope of getting something, just as they had prepared
themselves never more to expect anything else than to live and die in the
service, discontented and ill-treated to the last. The generous offer
of an immediate small monetary benefit overwhelmed them. They were in
the position of the pauper coming in for a windfall who is content so
long as he gets only a portion, reserving till later his inquiries as
to the peculations of others and the extent to which he has been robbed
by the good kind guardians meanwhile. It is sufficient to say that very
little of the advantages set forth in the scheme, which was said to cost
so much, was interpreted to apply to them. In the matter of payment
for extra duty even they found themselves no better off, while every
other expectation that the scheme had raised slowly dwindled at last
into a vague sense of disappointment and a loss of faith in the justice
of the Post-Office stewards. Resentment did not come until the actual
discovery later on that they had been cheated out of Mr. Fawcett’s good
intention. It was not till the blind Postmaster-General was still and
voiceless in the quietude of the grave that the suspicion took definite
shape that some of his principal benefits had been so long withheld
from them. It was that discovery and that conviction which furnished
the real primary reason for the starting of a further great agitation
in a few years’ time. It is only necessary, however, to refer to this
in passing; that forms a portion of the narrative to be told presently.
The scheme therefore failed in its effect through being applied only in
a too niggardly fashion by those who administered it. It was made to
fail mainly because of that; but its failure was partly due to its own
internal defects.
One fault of the Fawcett scheme—one which was not discovered until some
long time afterwards, but which was destined to prove the source of
further trouble—was its ambiguity in several of its terms as applied
to the “sorting clerks” and “sorters.” On the face of it the textual
phrasing of the scheme was clear and precise enough, and there is no
reason to doubt that both Mr. Fawcett and the Lords of the Treasury meant
to be perfectly and honestly unambiguous. Yet owing, it may be supposed,
to the lack of efficient organisation among those whom it most benefited,
the full value of the measure was not so fully examined as it might
have been. The sorters especially were only too glad to receive without
criticism, and without looking such an unexpected gift-horse in the
mouth, any remedy for their present grievances. And so the letter-sorting
staff ate the lotus leaf of contentment, and for a long time were too
busy with self-congratulation to have any suspicion of the doubt which
was to by-and-by arise as to whether they were enjoying all that they
were entitled to by the textual warrant and by the intention of their
benefactor. The manner of its application and its interpretation by the
officials was never questioned, therefore, until several years later,
when the expansion of the service and the growing requirements of the
force made it only too evident that the Fawcett scheme, conceived and
inspired though it was in the most generous spirit, was impossible of
adaptation for all time.
That the London sorters were identical with the “sorting clerks” alluded
to specifically in the scheme the sorters themselves had little doubt,
while they had a vague impression that they were now given something
nearly approaching to equality with the telegraphists. But they were not
induced to inquire further, or to examine the terms of their bond more
closely yet awhile. This was not the result of their apathy so much,
however, as their want of knowledge about the scheme itself. A notion
prevailed that the printed scheme was something forbidden to the minor
officials, and as unobtainable as the sibylline books. In fact, it was
not till fully eight years later that it came to be discovered that it
could be obtained in the ordinary way as a Parliamentary publication.
It was reserved till 1889 to definitely inquire for themselves whether
they had or had not received the full benefits secured to them under
its provisions. And even then it seemed that the dead benefactor was to
be robbed of the credit and the honour that were due to him. In fact,
as will be learnt, little less than an insult was to be offered to the
memory of the dead statesman.