ABOUT POSTMASTERS.
The description furnished by Scott in the 'Antiquary' of the internal
management of a country Post-office, as existing towards the close of
last century, is extremely amusing and piquant; but the probability is
that, while so much of what is said might be true to circumstances, the
picture was heightened in colour for the purpose of literary effect. No
doubt a certain amount of gossip emerged from such country offices,
derived from the outsides and occasionally from the insides of letters;
yet it is hardly likely that a group of curious women should have
gathered together in the postmaster's room to make a general overhaul of
the contents of the mail-bag, as is described in the case of the
Post-office at Fairport. In small country towns in the present day, it
is no uncommon thing to attribute the spread of "secrets" about the
place to a breach of confidence at the Post-office, while the real fact
is that things told by the persons concerned in strictest secrecy to
their most intimate friends are by these communicated again to other
kind friends, and so the ripple of information rolls on till there is no
longer any secret at all, and the poor official at the Post-office is
assumed to be the only possible offender. The smaller the place the
greater is the thirst for neighbourly gossip, the more quickly does it
spread when out, and the more ready are those whose secrets ooze forth
to point the finger of suspicion at the Post-office.
Every one knows what a small country Post-office is nowadays. When we
seek change of air and relaxation in the holiday season, choice is made
maybe of some little country village or seaside resort whereat to spend
the few weeks at our disposal. If the place be a _place_ at all, there
we shall find a Post-office; but possibly there is no house-to-house
delivery, and letters must be called for at the Post-office itself. As
the post-hour approaches, groups of visitors take up positions near the
office door, or squat themselves down on any patch of sward that may be
conveniently near. Young ladies waited upon by their admirers, mothers
with their children, a bachelor group or two from the inn, and here and
there a native of the place, some expecting letters, others indulging a
feeble hope in that direction, attend as assistants at what is one of
the excitements of the day. Presently the post-runner, with his wallet
slung upon his back and a rustic walking-stick in his hand, appears in
the distance, jogging along with that steady swinging stride which is so
characteristic of his class. The visitors begin to close up around the
Post-office; in a few minutes the runner steps into it; he throws down
his wallet of treasures on the counter, removes his faded and dusty hat,
and with his coloured cotton handkerchief wipes the sweat from his
soiled and heated face. Meanwhile the attention of the postmistress is
given to the contents of the bag; and as the expectant receivers of
letters crowd in at or around the door, a few who have been unable to
approach sufficiently near derive what consolation they can from eyeing
the operations through the shop window, or by vainly endeavouring to
catch an early glimpse of some well-known superscription as the letters
pass one by one through the hands of the postmistress.
The division of the letters, which can hardly be called a system of
sorting, is a proceeding worthy of study. Some letters are placed up on
end against sweetie-bottles in the window, others are laid down on
shelves, others again are spread out on drawers or tables, quite in an
arbitrary fashion. The postmistress has no difficulty in reading the
addresses, as a rule, but the name of a new-comer seems to demand a
little study: the letter is looked at back and front, and then laid down
hesitatingly in a place by itself, as if it were an uncanny thing. The
address of a letter for any young lady supposed to be engaged in
correspondence of a tender kind seems also to require scrutiny; and
should she happen to be well in at the door, it is immediately handed to
her, those who are in the secret and those who are not forming different
ideas as to the reason for this special mark of favour. While this is
being done, an undefined sensation is produced in the small crowd, and
the recipient retires in confusion to peruse the letter in peace and
quiet elsewhere. At length the whole treasures are ready, and the
distribution to the eager callers is a matter of a very few minutes, to
be renewed again at the same hour next day.
Something like this is the routine observed when the delivery is being
effected at small rural Post-offices in our own days--the keeper of the
post being a shopkeeper, generally a grocer.
In the earlier history of the post, and up till the time of
mail-coaches, the Post-office was very generally to be found established
at the inn of the place. There was an evident convenience in this, owing
to the innkeeper being the postmaster in the other and original sense of
the provider of horses to ride post, when it was common to send on
expresses, by means of these agents, from stage to stage. But the
innkeepers, being often farmers besides, had business more important
than that of the post to look after, and consequently the work was
delegated to others. The duty of receiving and despatching the mails was
frequently left to waiters or chambermaids, with the undesirable but
inevitable result that the work was badly done. Often there was no
separate place set apart for Post-office business; letters were sorted
in the bar or in one of the public rooms, where any one could see them,
thereby excluding all possibility of secrecy in dealing with the
correspondence. Referring to the middle of last century, a surveyor
expressed himself to the effect that "the head ostler was often the
postmaster's prime minister in matters relating to the mails."
[Illustration: Interior of an Old Post-Office.]
The interest taken by Boniface in the Post-office does not seem to have
been very great; for an English surveyor, writing in 1792, thus
expresses himself: "Persons who keep horses for other uses, and
particularly innkeepers, may assuredly more conveniently and at less
expense work the mails than those who keep horses for that business
only. But, on the other hand, it may be observed that innkeepers, so far
from paying Government service the compliment of employing in it their
best horses, too often send their worst with the mails; and as to their
riders, they are, in general, the dregs of the stable-yard, and by no
means to be compared to those employed by postmasters in private
stations."
Lack of interest in the mails did not, however, stand in the way of
their turning the post to account in favour of their visitors; for in
another official report the following observation is made on the subject
of franking: "The Post-office is not of the consequence or
recommendation to an inn which it used to be before the restriction in
franking took place; and a traveller, now finding that my host at the
public office is deprived of that privilege, moves over to the Red
Lyon."
When mail-coaches came to be put upon the road, the necessity for having
postmasters other than innkeepers forced itself upon the authorities, so
that there should be an independent check upon the contractors, and a
better regulation of the arrival and departure of the mails, with less
chance of excuse for delays; and thus a change was brought about in the
status of country postmasters.
But postmasters in the old days do not seem to have been uniformly happy
in their posts. The following from a surveyor's report of December 1792,
relating to the postmaster of Wetherby, in Yorkshire, shows this, and no
doubt describes the case accurately. The Wetherby office had been made
more important by some rearrangement of posts, with the result which the
surveyor thus pathetically brings under notice: "The
Postmaster-General's humanity, I humbly apprehend, would be very much
affected if they knew exactly the situation of this poor deputy. He has
now experienced the difference between his former snug duty and the
very great fatigue of a large centre office, and labour throughout
almost the whole of every night since the 10th October 1791. Also the
very heavy expenses incurred thereby for assistance, coal, candles,
paper, wax, &c., without any addition to his salary. To add to his
distresses--for he is not rich" (who ever heard of a rich
postmaster?)--"he has been so closely pressed from the Bye-letter Office
for his balance due there as to have been compelled to borrow money to
discharge them, at the very time that he could not obtain any account
from the General Office, nor warrants for payment of as large sums due
to him."
It is not difficult to picture this poor postmaster of Wetherby, tied to
duty all night long arranging his mails by the light of a guttering
candle, and smarting under financial difficulties; the Head Office
squeezing him for revenue with one hand, and holding back what was due
to him for his services with the other.
Sometimes country Post-offices would be the scene of small gatherings
late at night, waiting the arrival of the mail, as was the case at
Dumfries in 1799, when some few of the inhabitants would wait up till
ten, eleven, or twelve o'clock to receive the English newspapers, so
eager were they to peruse them.
Similar anxiety to be first in possession of commercial or political
news conveyed through the newspapers was no doubt common to all business
centres at the period referred to; though in our own age such
information is largely anticipated and discounted by the telegraph, and
in this respect the circumstances have changed. Senex, in 'Glasgow Past
and Present,' humorously describes the scene enacted at the Tontine
Coffee Rooms, in Glasgow, during the French War, at the close of last
century, on the arrival of the mail. He says:--"Immediately on receiving
the bag of papers from the Post-office, the waiter locked himself up in
the bar, and after he had sorted the different papers and had made them
up in a heap, he unlocked the door, and making a sudden rush into the
middle of the room, he tossed up the whole lot of newspapers as high as
the ceiling. Now came the grand rush and scramble of the subscribers,
every one darting forward to lay hold of a falling newspaper. Sometimes
a lucky fellow got hold of five or six newspapers, and ran off with them
to a corner, in order to select his favourite paper; but he was always
hotly pursued by some half-dozen of the disappointed scramblers, who,
without ceremony, pulled from his hands the first paper they could lay
hold of, regardless of its being torn in the contest. On these occasions
I have often seen a heap of gentlemen sprawling on the floor of the
room, and riding upon one another's backs like a parcel of boys. It
happened, however, unfortunately, that a gentleman in one of these
scrambles got two of his teeth knocked out of his head, and this
ultimately brought about a change in the manner of delivering the
newspapers."
Again, when a mail was passing through a town between stages in the
middle of the night, the postmaster, awoke by the postboy's horn, would
present himself at an upper window and take in his bag by means of a
hook and line, his body shivering the while in the cold night blast.
An instance of such a proceeding is given by Williams in his history of
Watford, where the destinies of the post were, at the time, presided
over by a postmistress. "In response," says he, "to the thundering knock
of the conductor, the old lady left her couch, and thrusting her head,
covered with a wide bordered night-cap, out of the bedroom window, let
down the mail bag by a string, and quickly returned to her bed again."
Coming thus nightly to the open window in her night dress could not have
been without its risks to a delicate creature like the postmistress.
These postmasters required looking after occasionally, however, for they
sometimes did wrong. In 1668 the postmaster of Edinburgh got into
trouble by levying charges of 1d., 2d., or 3d. upon letters over and
above the proper rates, and he was peremptorily ordered to discontinue
the practice.
[Illustration: The Postmistress of Watford despatching the Mail.]
They also, it would appear, exercised some sort of surveillance over
private correspondence. Chambers, in his 'Domestic Annals of Scotland,'
to which valuable work we are again indebted, gives a case in point: "In
July 1701, two letters from Brussels, _having the cross upon the back of
them_, had come with proper addresses under cover to the Edinburgh
postmaster. He _was surprised with them_, and brought them to the Lord
Advocate, who, however, on opening them, found they were of no value,
being only on private business; wherefore he ordered them to be
delivered by the postmaster to the persons to whom they were directed."
Yet zeal for the King's interest did not always have an acceptable
reward, as is shown by the Scotch Privy Council Record of 1679. The
keeper of the Edinburgh letter-office was accused of "sending up a
_bye-letter_ with the flying packet upon the twenty-two day of June
last, giving ane account to the postmaster of England of the defeat of
the rebels in the west, which was by the said postmaster communicated to
the King before it could have been done by his Majesty's Secretary for
Scotland, and which letter contains several untruths in matter of fact."
For having forestalled his Majesty's Secretary, probably, rather than
for the inaccuracy as to facts, the keeper of the post was sent to the
Tolbooth, there to meditate upon the unprofitableness of official zeal,
during the Council's pleasure.
It does not seem to have been thought prudent to intrust the
date-stamping of letters to postmasters generally until some time in the
present century. Down to the close of last century, at any rate,
according to a Survey report of the year 1800, this was allowed only at
the more important offices. The report is as follows:--"In regard to
having the Dumbarton letters stamped with the day of the month, as now
done at Glasgow, the subject has often been considered, and although it
has been approved of with some large commercial towns in England, and
Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, it has been much doubted how far it
would be proper or necessary to establish it generally with less towns,
where the practice might be more subject to irregularity or abuses,
besides the very great expense such a supply of stamps would occasion to
the revenue."
The smallness of the salaries allowed to the postmasters of former times
is referred to in another chapter, and this may, no doubt, have
contributed to the lack of interest taken in the work by some of these
officials.
But while their pay was small, a good deal of form and circumstance
attended their appointment, as will be seen from the following
reproduction, on a reduced scale, of the formal appointment of the
postmaster of East Grinstead in 1786. From a Post-office point of view
the form is interesting, as no such documents are now in use.
[Illustration: This whole page is a facsimile.
CHARLES _Earl of_ TANKERVILLE, _and_ HENRY FREDERICK _Lord_ CARTERET,
_His Majesty's Postmaster-General of all His Majesty's Dominions in_
Europe, Africa, _and_ America.
TO ALL PEOPLE to whom these Presents shall come, Greeting. KNOW YE, that
We, the said CHARLES _Earl of_ TANKERVILLE, and HENRY FREDERICK _Lord_
CARTERET, having received good Testimony of the Fidelity and Loyalty to
His Majesty, of Mr. Thomas Palmer and reposing great Trust and
Confidence in the Knowledge, Care and Ability of the said Thomas Palmer
to execute the Office and Duties required of a Deputy Postmaster, have
deputed, constituted, authorized and appointed, and by these Presents do
depute, constitute, authorize and appoint, the said Thomas Palmer to be
our lawful and sufficient Deputy, to execute the Office of Deputy
Postmaster of the Stage of East Grinsted in the County of Sussex to
have, hold, use, exercise and enjoy, the said Office of Deputy
Postmaster of the Stage aforesaid, with all and every the Rights,
Privileges, Benefits and Advantages to the same belonging, from the
Fifth Day of January last for the Term of Three Years, unless sooner
removed by Us, under such Conditions, Covenants, Provisoes, Payments,
Orders and Instructions, to be faithfully observed, performed and done
by the said Deputy, and Servants, as he or they shall, from Time to
Time, receive from Us, or by our Order. In Witness whereof, We the said
CHARLES _Earl of_ TANKERVILLE, and HENRY FREDERICK _Lord_ CARTERET, have
hereunto set our Hands, and caused the Seal of the said Office, in such
Cases used, to be affixed. Dated the Eighth Day of 1786 in the
Twentysixth Year of His Majesty's Reign.
By Command]
Traditions of hard work and long hours linger still in the Post-office,
though nowadays the periods of duty are generally reduced to moderate
limits. Some idea of the service required to be rendered formerly by
Post-office servants may be gathered from the following order, dating
about 1780 or 1790. It refers to the Secretary to the Post-office in
Dublin, but we ought perhaps to put a very free interpretation upon
it:--"The duty of the Secretary is to carry on the general
correspondence, and, under the direction of the Postmaster-General, to
superintend the whole business of the office; to attend the Board, and
give directions for carrying into execution the orders of the
Postmaster-General. His attendance is constant, and at all hours by day
and by night--generally from 7 until 10, from 12 until 5, and from 9
until 11 o'clock each day."
The postmasters of the United Kingdom are a very large class, numbering
many thousands, and comprising every variety of individual from the
honest country shopkeeper to the highly intelligent men who are placed
in charge of the offices in our principal towns. The former have enough
to do in mastering the various codes of rules under which the many
branches of business are carried on; while the latter, in exercising
discipline over their forces, carrying out changes of administration,
and endeavouring to meet the wishes of a public ever wakeful to their
interests and privileges, are something in their way like petty
sovereigns, of whom it might not inaptly be said, "Uneasy is the head
that wears a crown," though the material emblem itself be wanting.