CHAPTER XV
IRELAND
1801-1828
At the Union with Ireland the Irish Post Office was not merged into the Post Office of England as the Scotch Post Office was merged at the Union with Scotland. The existence of two separate establishments, presided over by different heads, who had not always the same objects in view, and were influenced by different considerations, was not unattended with inconvenience.
Between the Post Offices of the two parts of the kingdom, moreover, there were differences not only of practice but of law, the statutes passed during the seventeen years that the Post Offices were separate not having been repealed at the time of the Union. Thus, the law which regulated franking was stricter in Ireland than in England, although, it must be confessed, the practice was looser. The law prohibiting the illicit conveyance of letters was also stricter. In England the Post Office was not empowered to search for letters; in Ireland the Post Office might search both vehicles and houses from sunrise to sunset. In England the mail-coaches were exempt from toll; in Ireland no such exemption was allowed. In Ireland, again, the Post Office was legally bound not, as in England, to deliver letters but only to carry them; and except in Dublin there was not a single letter-carrier in the kingdom. Even the constitution of the two Post Offices, though apparently similar, was really different. In Ireland, as in England, there were two heads commonly called joint postmasters-general; but whereas in England the assent of both was necessary to make a decision operative, in Ireland the assent of one was sufficient. This, while probably designed to facilitate the despatch of public business, was, as will be seen later on, attended with a curious result, a result which the framers of the statute can have little contemplated.
Of such differences of practice as were not rendered necessary by any difference of law it may be sufficient to mention a few. In England the mail-coach contractors supplied horses only; in Ireland they supplied coaches as well. In England the contract was for short periods and for short distances, seldom for more than one or two stages; in Ireland, where there was little or no competition, the contract was for the whole of the road over which the coach travelled, and for as much as twenty and even thirty years. Meanwhile no alteration was possible except with the contractors' assent. In England the horse-posts were provided upon the most advantageous terms of which each particular case would admit; in Ireland the obligation to provide them was imposed upon the local postmasters, who received for the service, cost what it might, one uniform rate of 5d. a mile. In London there was no despatch on Sundays; in Dublin the mails were despatched on Sundays as on other days. In Dublin, again, the men who collected letters by the sound of bell, bellmen as they were now called, received not as in London 1d. a letter but 1d. a house, a difference of which the inhabitants were wont to shew their appreciation by sending to a single house for delivery to the letter-carrier the letters of an entire street.
In Dublin there was one institution to which there was no counterpart in London. This was the British Mail Office, an office set apart for the management of the mails passing between England and Ireland. Other mails were dealt with in the Inland Office; but those to and from England were considered of such paramount importance as to deserve exceptional treatment. At the present day the term "office" as applied to the public service conveys the notion possibly of a palace and certainly of a building or part of a building consisting of several rooms. The British Mail Office, though destined to play a not unimportant part in the history of the Irish Post Office at the beginning of the present century, consisted of one room only, and this room was exactly six feet square.
The establishment of this office was one of many measures which owed their origin to Lord Clancarty, who was joint postmaster-general with Lord O'Neill from 1807 to 1809. Clancarty enjoyed an honourable distinction. Other postmasters-general were habitual absentees, their visits to the Post Office, if visits they made, being confined to the rare occasions on which they passed through Dublin on their way to London and back. Clancarty, on the contrary, devoted to his official duties all the powers of a keen intellect and a singularly energetic nature. Shortly after his appointment he proceeded to London, and having made himself master of the system pursued in the Inland Office in Lombard Street, returned to Dublin, resolved that, as far as circumstances would permit, a similar system should be established there.
A formidable difficulty, however, presented itself in the different hours of attendance in the London and Dublin offices. In London the attendance was daily, on every night and every morning; in Dublin it was only on alternate days, on every other night and every other morning. How to get rid of this difference was the question which Clancarty now set himself to solve. There was at this time in the Inland Office a clerk of the name of Donlevy, whose parts pointed him out as qualified to take the lead among his fellows. Clancarty sent for this young man, and told him that under the plan which was about to be introduced he would have to attend daily. Donlevy objected that a plan which would involve such attendance was an unreasonable, an oppressive plan, and that no man's constitution, strong as he might be, would stand it. "But," said Clancarty, "I will make you vice-president." "My Lord," replied Donlevy, "I am very much obliged to you; but under the conditions proposed I would not accept even the office of president." "Very well," rejoined Clancarty, laying his watch on the table, "I will give you three hours to consider of it." Long before the three hours had expired, Donlevy, who knew the character of the man with whom he had to do, and what would be the penalty of refusal, had accepted the vice-presidentship, and opposition to the introduction of daily attendance was at an end.[82]
But Clancarty was an exception to the general rule. Lord Rosse, who succeeded him and remained postmaster-general in conjunction with O'Neill for more than twenty years, was, like his colleague, an habitual absentee; and the consequence was to place large power in the hands of the chief permanent officer on the spot. This was Edward Smith Lees, who had been appointed joint secretary with his father in 1801, and who on his father's death some years afterwards became sole secretary. The power which Lees must in any case have possessed as chief resident officer was enormously increased by the fact to which we have already referred, that the signature of either of the two postmasters-general was sufficient. Of this fact Lees took advantage to an extent which may seem incredible. If the particular postmaster-general to whom the case was referred agreed to the course recommended, no reference to the other appears to have been considered necessary; but if he did not agree, a reference to the other took place without the fact of disagreement being made known, or even an intimation that his colleague had been consulted. By thus playing off one postmaster-general against the other, Lees generally contrived to secure approval of his own recommendations; but when, as occasionally happened, such approval could not be obtained from either, he claimed and exercised the right, as chief officer on the spot, to take his own course.
Thus Lees, like Freeling, was an autocrat within his own domain; but the means by which the two men attained this result were essentially different. Freeling kept the postmasters-general informed of every incident, however trivial. Lees gave no information which could with decency be withheld. Freeling supported his views by a perfect wealth of explanation. Lees explained no more than enough to carry his point. Freeling's candour, like his loyalty, knew no bounds. It is to his candour, indeed, that we owe our materials for criticising his own proceedings. Lees's candour and loyalty, on the contrary, so far as these can be said to have had any existence, were held in rigid subjection to considerations of expediency and personal advantage.
The circumstances attending the appointment of Lees's brother, a searcher in the Customs at Wexford, to a position in the secretary's office only inferior in point of rank and emolument to his own, well exemplify the mode in which the business of the Irish Post Office was conducted during the first two or three decades of the present century. The minute appointing him was signed, not by O'Neill and Rosse, nor by either of them, but by one of Lees's own subordinates, and purported to embody a decision come to at a Board at which the two postmasters-general were present. "At the Board"—so ran the minute—"present the Earls." The whole thing was a fiction from beginning to end. The Earls had not been present, and there had been no Board. Indeed, as Lees was afterwards forced to admit before a Committee of the House of Commons, during a period of twenty years that O'Neill and Rosse had been joint postmasters-general and he their secretary, he had seen them only once together in the same room, and that was in the drawing-room at Parsonstown.
The example set in high quarters was not without its effect below. Every one seems to have been left to do pretty much as he liked. The force was maintained at a level very far in excess of the actual requirements, and it was no uncommon thing for one-half of the entire number to absent themselves without notice in a single morning. Some of the clerks never attended at all, while others gave to their Post Office duties only such fragments of their time as they could snatch from other and more lucrative employments. Thus, one was a clerk in a private bank, another a clerk in a merchant's office, a third was a surgeon, several held appointments under the Customs or the Imprest Office, and many were practising attorneys. To most of these the object of holding an appointment in the Post Office appears to have been not so much the salary attaching to it as the privilege which they enjoyed, or rather which they assumed to themselves, of sending and receiving their letters free. The attorneys, indeed, were credited with a still less respectable motive. All, as soon as a mail arrived, helped themselves to their own letters and the letters of the firms in which they were interested. The president of the Inland Office held a valuable appointment in the Bank of Ireland, and was not in a position to check on the part of his subordinates a license which he allowed to himself. The receiver-general, the highest financial officer on the establishment, was a private banker and money-lender, and, beyond signing the balance-sheet at stated periods, the only Post Office function he performed was to frank his own correspondence.
That in Ireland the Post Office arrangements were made subservient to private interests does not admit of a doubt. A suspicion will indeed now and again cross the mind that even in England the readiness to raise the rates of postage, and the hostility shewn to newspapers except when supplied by the clerks of the roads, were not unconnected with personal considerations; but what in the case of England is at best only a matter of suspicion becomes in the case of Ireland an absolute certainty. In Ireland, as in England, the clerks of the roads had from the first establishment of the Post Office enjoyed the privilege of franking newspapers; but soon after the British Mail Office had been established by Clancarty, two other clerks, styling themselves express clerks, undertook to supply newspapers express. Their plan was very simple. In London the newspapers were made up in a parcel addressed to the express clerks; and these clerks had in readiness messengers of their own, who proceeded to deliver the newspapers as soon as they arrived in Dublin and without waiting, as others had to do, for the sorting of the mail. This alone would have given to the express clerks a considerable advantage over the ordinary news-vendor. But, more than this, the British mail was irregular in its arrival, and the latest hour in the evening at which a delivery by letter-carrier took place in Dublin was seven o'clock. The express clerks delivered the English newspapers by their own messengers as late as eleven o'clock.
In the case of the country the advantage which the express clerks enjoyed was still greater. The mails for the interior of Ireland left the Inland Office in Dublin at seven o'clock in the evening; but under a rule, on the observance of which the authorities rigidly insisted, no mails from the British Mail Office were to be received in the Inland Office for despatch the same evening unless they were brought there ready sorted full twenty minutes before that hour. Practically, therefore, as the sorting occupied about twenty-five minutes, mails from England arriving later than a quarter past six were detained until the following evening. No such detention, however, was sustained by the express newspapers, which, addressed as they were to the express clerks, could be forwarded up to the last moment. It may readily be supposed that, with such advantages in their favour, the express clerks and the clerks of the roads, for the two bodies had amalgamated and formed one common purse, found many customers. That they realised and fully appreciated their position will be seen from the following advertisement which was issued no longer ago than April 1822:—
British Newspaper Office, General Post Office.
The clerks of roads and clerks of express newspapers having, under the authority of the postmasters-general, reformed their establishment in this department for the transmission of British and foreign newspapers, lottery, commercial, army and navy lists, periodical and other publications, the nobility and gentry of Dublin are respectfully informed that they can be supplied with those articles either by an express delivery (which is made by special messengers immediately on the arrival of the packets) or by the regular course of post.
Country correspondents will have a peculiar advantage, as upon all occasions when a packet arrives before the despatch of the inland mails but too late for general transmission, their newspapers will be forwarded at the last possible moment.
Newspapers exchanged at pleasure any time during the period of subscription.
Subscriptions to be paid in advance.
Further particulars known by application to Messrs. Leet and De Joncourt, General Post Office, who will receive subscriptions.
Daily attendance from twelve till four o'clock.
London daily newspapers to Dublin by general delivery, £10:17:6 per annum.
Leet and De Joncourt were the two express clerks; but among the clerks of the roads, on whose behalf they wrote as well as their own, was Lees, the secretary, who participated in the profits derived from the sale of newspapers, and received the lion's share.
The news-vendors bitterly complained. That the newspapers supplied by the express clerks and clerks of the roads should be exempt from postage[83] was bad enough; but that they should also enjoy priority of transmission and delivery was past all endurance. How was it possible to compete under such conditions as these? The booksellers also complained, for the express service, though originally confined to newspapers, had now extended to periodicals as well. On a Quarterly or Edinburgh Review, for instance, when sent by coach from Dublin into the country, the bookseller's customers had to pay for carriage from 1s. 8d. to 2s. 6d., whereas the express clerks and clerks of the roads sent it, through the medium of the post, carriage free. A heavier indictment remains. The law permitted the examination of newspapers passing through the post with a view to ascertain whether they contained unauthorised enclosures; and it was confidently alleged that of this power the Post Office servants took advantage in order to retard the transmission and delivery of newspapers that were not supplied by themselves. A ring, the news-vendors maintained, had been formed at the Post Office, and they were the victims.
The management of what was technically termed the alphabet appears to have been influenced by similar considerations. This was nothing more than a rack with divisions corresponding to the letters of the alphabet, into which might be sorted ready for delivery all correspondence addressed to the Post Office to be called for. Such was its primary object; but in course of time the bankers and merchants, finding that through the alphabet they could get their letters sooner than if delivered by letter-carrier—as soon indeed as the mail arrived—made use of this expedient for their ordinary correspondence, readily paying for the accommodation a fee ranging from three to five guineas a year. This had gone on for a considerable period, when Lees appears to have been suddenly seized with compunction at the unfairness of a practice which, in the matter of delivery, gave to one man an advantage over another; and he issued instructions that henceforth, after the arrival of each mail, there should be a certain interval during which letters should not be delivered from the alphabet. The pretence imposed upon no one. Men readily discerned that in proportion as the advantages of the alphabet were restricted the express service was rendered more valuable.
It would be unjust to the memory of the Irish Post Office of seventy years ago not to mention here one good practice and, as far as we know, the only good one that then existed. By virtue of an arrangement with, the War Office, soldiers' wives, on presentation of a formal document with which the military authorities provided them, could draw from any Post Office in the kingdom a certain sum of small amount until the entire sum mentioned in the document was exhausted. Thus, a soldier's wife desirous of joining her husband could pass from one end of the country to another, and, without carrying anything in her pocket, could be supplied with money on her way. Of this practice, curiously enough, not a vestige now remains.
It is also pleasant, amid so much indifference as was at that time exhibited to the convenience of the public, to be able to record one instance to the contrary. Thomas Whinnery, the postmaster of Belfast, had read an account of the alphabet at Liverpool—how the letters were sorted into a rack according to the initials of the merchants to whom they were addressed, so as to be ready to be delivered when they should be called for—and he resolved to introduce something of the same kind into his own office. Instead, however, of adopting the alphabetical order he assigned to each merchant a particular number, letting him know what his number was, and instead of a fixed rack as at Liverpool he contrived a revolving one; and this, with the numbers conspicuously exhibited over each division, he placed in full view of a window opening to the street. Thus, any one looking through the window could see for himself whether there were any letters for him, and was saved the trouble of inquiring.
Equality of treatment as between man and man had not yet become one of the canons of the Post Office, and even Whinnery, well-meaning as he was, made a distinction as remarkable as it was invidious. Belfast not being supplied with an official letter-carrier, he employed a man of his own to deliver the letters, and charged on their delivery 1d. apiece. The letters, however, instead of all being delivered at one time, were arbitrarily divided into two classes, termed particular letters and ordinary letters; and the delivery of the ordinary letters was not begun until that of the particular letters was finished, a difference in point of time of two and a half hours. In order to maintain the distinction, the man had actually to go over the same ground twice. Particular letters were defined to be letters for merchants and other busy men, letters to which it was presumably of importance that replies should be given promptly.
We have said that in Ireland the mail-coach contracts were not, as in England, for short distances but for the whole of the road over which the coach travelled. The explanation is that, while in England the local inn-keepers were eager to horse the mail for one or two stages, in Ireland, where the coach had to be provided as well as the horses, the venture was too serious to be undertaken lightly, and the contracts fell into the hands of a few persons of means who dictated pretty much their own terms. Thus, in Ireland the cost of conveying the mails by coach was considerably higher than in England, though forage and labour were cheaper.[84]
All this was soon to be changed. In one of the early years of the century a young lad had arrived in Dublin, a lad without means and without friends, a foreigner who was unable to speak one word of English, and yet who, despite these drawbacks, did for the country of his adoption more probably than was accomplished by all the legislation that took place during the fourscore years and more over which his life extended. This was Charles Bianconi, a man to whom the Post Office owes a debt of gratitude which, as it seems to us, has never been sufficiently recognised. After serving an eighteen months' apprenticeship to a foreign print-seller in a small way of business, Bianconi passed the next two or three years of his life in hawking prints about the country on his own account, and in 1806, at the age of twenty, he turned carver and gilder and opened a shop at Carrick-on-Suir. From Carrick he removed shortly afterwards to Waterford, and finally settled down at Clonmel.
The experience of these few years determined Bianconi's future career. While roaming over the country with his prints for sale, he had had forcibly impressed upon him the difference between a pedlar like himself who was doomed to tramp on foot and his more fortunate fellow who could post or ride on horseback. At Carrick the want of facilities for travelling had been brought home to him in a hardly less cogent manner. Gold-leaf for the supply of his shop he had to fetch from Waterford, and Waterford is distant from Carrick twelve or thirteen miles. Between the two towns, however, the only means of communication was by water, and by water, owing to the windings of the river, the distance is twenty-four miles. A single boat, moreover, was then the only public conveyance, and, besides being obliged to wait for the tide, it took from four to five hours to accomplish the journey. From this time Bianconi appears to have become possessed with the idea that his mission in life was to devise some cheap and easy means of communication between town and town. Imbued with this notion, he gave up his shop in the summer of 1815, and started a single-horse car for the conveyance of passengers from Clonmel to Cahir, a distance of about eight miles. At the end of the same year he started similar cars from Clonmel to Cashel and Thurles, and from Clonmel to Carrick and Waterford. From such humble beginnings sprang that splendid service of cars which, extending from Sligo and Enniskillen in the north to Bandon and Skibbereen in the south, and from Waterford and Wexford in the east to Galway and Belmullet in the west, carried passengers daily over more than 4000 miles of road at an average cost to each passenger of 1-1/4d. a mile.
But we are anticipating. The Post Office, largely as it availed itself in later years of the means of communication which Bianconi placed at its disposal, was slow to perceive the advantage which his enterprise offered. The country postmasters were wiser in their generation. Located on the spot, and with their perception quickened by the motive of self-interest, they made use of the cars as fast as these were put on the roads. No sooner had a car been started from Clonmel than the postmaster sent by it the mails which he had been used to send by horse-post. For this service he received an allowance of 5d. a mile. Bianconi performed the service for him for an allowance of 2-1/2d. a mile. The same thing took place elsewhere. It was not until the year 1831, when the Post Office of Ireland was amalgamated with that of England, that Bianconi was brought into direct relations with headquarters. Meanwhile, through a strange lack of vigilance on the part of the Irish authorities, his very existence was ignored, and the postmasters continued to receive 5d. a mile for a service which, wherever Bianconi's cars extended, they were getting done for one-half of that amount.
But it is not only with the Irish Post Office in relation to its internal affairs that this chapter proposes to deal. The communication between England and Ireland or rather between the capitals of the two countries had, since the Act of Union, been under constant review, and it becomes important to see how, during the first two or three decades of the present century, this communication stood both by sea and by land.
By the Act of 1784, which made the Irish Post Office independent of that of Great Britain—an Act not repealed by the Union—Great Britain and Ireland were to receive, in respect to letters passing between the two countries, each its own proportion of the postage. The Channel service remained; and with this Ireland was to have nothing to do, at all events in the first instance. Great Britain was to provide the packets and to receive the packet postage. Ireland, on the other hand, until she should have established packets of her own, was to receive from Great Britain the sum of £4000 a year "in lieu as well of the profits of the said packets as in compensation for other purposes." This arrangement appears to have worked smoothly enough until after 1801, when, owing to the increase of correspondence as a consequence of the Union, the Irish Post Office began to complain that the conditions were hard, and that Great Britain had the best of the bargain. Surely, under the very terms of the statute, Ireland was entitled to have packets of her own; and if this were denied her, did not justice demand that the conditions should be reconsidered? The question had come before successive Governments and always with the same result—that the existing arrangement was not to be disturbed. What Pitt and Portland and Perceval had decided was not to be done Lees now proceeded to do on his own account.
We doubt whether travellers of the present day who cross from Holyhead to Dublin in the magnificent boats which modern science has provided have any idea of the misery to which our grandfathers were exposed in making the passage. His Majesty's packets afforded the best, if not the only means of transit; and these were six in number, and ranged from 80 to 100 tons in burthen. Customs duties were at this time levied on goods passing between the two countries, and passengers' luggage was subjected to strict examination. Thus, to the discomforts of a sea-passage made in vessels of light tonnage were added the vexations incidental to a rigorous search of personal baggage; and these vexations were rendered all the greater by faulty arrangements. Passengers were unnecessarily detained, and often, even after detention, had to proceed on their journey leaving their luggage behind. In course of time, indeed, an exception was made in the case of peers and members of Parliament. After December 1819, as the result of incessant complaints, the luggage of these privileged persons was allowed to pass unexamined on their giving a certificate on honour that it contained no articles liable to duty; but at the time of which we are writing, the year 1813, all travellers, whether of high or low degree, were treated alike.
Despite conditions which at the present day would be considered intolerable, the number of passengers carried to and fro by the Holyhead packets was between 14,000 and 15,000 a year;[85] and there can be no doubt that the advantage which the British Post Office derived from this traffic was considerable. It is true that the fares went to the captains; but of course, except for the fares, the Post Office would have had to pay more for its packets. These were supplied at an annual cost of £365 apiece, or £2190 altogether; and such being the terms on which boats could be hired, Lees was confirmed in his opinion that Ireland would do better if, instead of receiving from Great Britain a compensation allowance of £4000 a year, she were to provide her own packets and share the packet postage.
Freeling took a different view. The better the bargain was for the British Post Office, the more determined he was that with his consent the terms should not be altered. And, more than this, he little relished the prospect of competition between English and Irish packets. Indeed, so long had he been accustomed to deal with a monopoly that the very name of competition was hateful to him. At this very time he tried, and tried in vain, to repress a boat which had been set up between Weymouth and the Channel Islands in opposition to the packets. Another similar attempt which he made a little later was hardly more successful. The War Office had chartered vessels to convey troops between Bristol and Waterford, and these vessels had assumed the title of "Government Packets," a title which, according to Freeling, induced persons to go by them who would otherwise have gone by the Post Office packets from Milford. Lord Palmerston was then Secretary at War, and we think we see the twinkle in his eye as he replied to Freeling's letter of remonstrance. Freeling's objection was of course to the Bristol boats being styled packets, but he had spoken of them by the title by which they were known of "Government Packets." The contractors, wrote Lord Palmerston, had been directed to drop the word Government forthwith, and the boats would henceforth be called War Office packets, to distinguish them from the packets employed by the Post Office.
Attached to the Irish Post Office, by virtue of a contract which had yet some years to run, were boats called wherries. Originally designed to carry between the two countries special messengers and despatches during the period immediately succeeding the Union, they had long lost their original character, and were now being employed in picking up what goods and passengers they could, and transporting them across the Channel in opposition to the packets. These boats were not ill adapted to the purpose which Lees had in hand. On the 19th of July 1813 he despatched a letter to Freeling, incidentally mentioning that "as the intended packet station at Howth had sufficient depth of water for the vessels belonging to the Irish Post Office, it was in contemplation, until such time as the regular packets should be stationed there, that the mails from Ireland should be despatched in its own vessels, and that, as soon as the arrangements now in progress should be completed, the measure would take effect." This letter was received in London on the 23rd of July, and on the next day intelligence reached Lombard Street that the mail from Ireland had been refused to the British packet and had been given to the Irish wherry.
And now might be witnessed a most unedifying spectacle—in Dublin Lees placarding the walls of the city with advertisements,[86] vaunting the merits of his own packets; at Holyhead the authorised packets arriving without the mails, and the mails being brought by boats which did not arrive until after the mail-coach for London had started; and in London Freeling wringing his hands and invoking the aid of the Government to check the vagaries of his brother-secretary on the other side of the Channel. "For the first time," he wrote, "the postmasters-general of Great Britain have not the means of redressing grievances connected with their own department, and the most serious remonstrances may be expected from the merchants and traders of London on this alarming and unnecessary evil."
The prediction was a safe one. Not only were the mails often one day behindhand in arriving in London, but the letters they brought were charged with an additional rate of postage in respect of the distance between Dublin and Howth. The merchants flocked to the Post Office to inquire the reason. No reason could be given them, and they were invited to let their applications for a return of the charge stand over until the postmasters-general should have informed themselves on the subject. Some assented; others accused the postmasters-general of trifling, and demanded instant redress. Matters had thus gone on for a fortnight when Lord Liverpool, to whom an appeal had been made, directed that the wherries should be withdrawn. One is left to suppose that this direction cannot have been communicated in the proper quarter, for as a matter of fact it had no result. In vain the captains of the packets applied at the Dublin Post Office for the British mails. All such applications met with a flat refusal, and the mails continued to be sent by the wherries as before. At length an end was put to the scandal, but not until it had lasted for more than six weeks.
The question now arose whether for the forty-four days during which the wherries had acted as packets the compensation of £4000 a year which Ireland received from Great Britain should not be withheld. Freeling had not only taken it for granted that such would be the case, but had been unable to conceal his regret that this was the only penalty of which the circumstances would admit. Liverpool, however, decided otherwise. Lees might have been wrong-headed and even perverse, but there could be no doubt that law was on his side. Accordingly, the compensation was paid for the period during which the packets had not carried the mails, and not long afterwards the Government brought in a bill raising the amount which Ireland was to receive from £4000 a year to £6000.
We now pass over six years. In July 1819 a curious invention, which had for some little time been in practical operation on the Thames between London and Margate, was brought into use between Holyhead and Dublin. This was no other than a vessel propelled by steam. Two vessels of this class were now set up by private individuals styling themselves the Dublin Steam Packet Company; and of this company, to the amazement of the authorities in Lombard Street, Lees had become a director. The quality which the new vessels possessed of being able to go against wind and tide, and the comparative speed with which they accomplished the passage, soon commended them to the favour of the public; and the consequence was a reduction to the extent of nearly one-half in the number of passengers by the Post Office packets.[87] The matter was serious, for it was in consequence of the fares which the captains received that they let their boats to the Post Office at little more than a nominal sum: and of course this sum would have to be increased according as the fares diminished.
We now see the Post Office at its best. Not possessing in the case of passengers a monopoly such as influenced and often perverted its action in the case of letters, the department proceeded to do much as private persons with sufficient capital at command would have done in similar circumstances, namely to build better boats than those already employed, and endeavour by the superior excellence of its service to recover the custom it had lost. Orders were given for two steam packets, the best that Boulton and Watt could build; and on the 31st of May 1821 the Royal Sovereign, of 206 tons burthen, with engines of 40 horse-power, and the Meteor, of somewhat smaller dimensions, began to ply. "Hitherto," wrote the postmasters-general eight days later, "they have answered the most sanguine expectations that had been formed of them; the letters have been delivered in Dublin earlier than was ever yet known, and Ireland has expressed herself grateful for the attention that has been shewn to her interests."
The Post Office behaved in this matter with a moderation which was altogether wanting where its monopoly was concerned. To be outdone by a private company, to employ inferior boats, boats of an obsolete type and of a low rate of speed—this would not be creditable to a public department, still less to a department whose special function it was to carry the correspondence of the country at the highest speed attainable; and properly enough the Post Office might take steps to establish its pre-eminence. But it would be quite another thing for a public department to undersell a private company, and, by charging lower fares, to run its boats off the line. This, it appeared to the authorities in Lombard Street, would exceed the bounds of fair competition. Accordingly the fares by the Post Office steam packets were fixed at the same amounts as those charged by the company; and these fares were somewhat higher than those which had been charged by the sailing packets. By sailing packet, for instance, the charge for a cabin passenger had been one guinea, by steam packet it was £1:5s.; for a horse the steam packet charge was £1:10s. as against one guinea by sailing packet, and for a coach £3:5s. as against three guineas.
These charges, which were fixed with the express object of not exposing the company to undue competition, had not been long in force before Parliament intervened. The Select Committee on Irish Communication protested in the interests of the public against the raising of the fares, and the Post Office was constrained to submit. The substitution of steam packets for sailing packets bore immediate fruit. The number of passengers carried by the Post Office between Holyhead and Dublin, which in 1820 had sunk to 7468, rose in 1821 to 13,737 and in 1822 to more than 16,000; and for some years the Holyhead packets were not only self-supporting but produced a clear gain to the revenue of more than £6000 a year.
The change which had been made at Holyhead was not long in extending itself to other packet stations from which there was communication with Ireland. Between Milford and Waterford sailing packets were replaced by steam packets in April 1824, and between Portpatrick and Donaghadee in May 1825. By sailing packet the average duration of voyage between the last-mentioned stations had been seven hours and forty-eight minutes. During the winter of 1825-26, a winter unexampled for the derangement of sea-communication, the average time which the little Post Office steamers Arrow and Dasher took to perform the voyage was less than three hours and a half.
And yet, despite these exertions to maintain its superiority, the Post Office was not to remain in undisputed possession of the Irish traffic. Private steamers had begun to ply between Liverpool and Dublin, and the fares by these steamers were lower than by the Post Office packets from Holyhead. As a natural consequence, the passenger traffic to which the Post Office looked to recoup itself for the heavy expense to which it had been put in replacing sailing packets by steam packets was diverted to Liverpool.
Nor was it only in the matter of passengers that the Post Office lost by the competition. Its reputation also suffered. The mails for Ireland left Liverpool at three o'clock in the afternoon, before the Exchange was closed, and reaching Holyhead by way of Chester and Llangollen at six o'clock on the following morning, did not arrive in Dublin until the afternoon. The private steamers, on the contrary, did not leave Liverpool until the business of the day was over, and arrived in Dublin on the following morning. Hence comparisons were drawn not favourable to the Post Office; and it by no means tended to allay dissatisfaction that the owners of the private steamers were refused permission to carry the mails. This they had offered to do, in one case for nothing more than exemption from harbour and light dues; but at that time, strange as it may appear to us with our present experience, it was a fixed principle with the Post Office that private firms even of the highest eminence were not to be entrusted with the carriage of the public correspondence. Accordingly it was decided that between Liverpool and Dublin the Post Office should run its own packets, and the new service began on the 29th of August 1826. The opening was marred by a lamentable disaster. Early in September the Francis Freeling packet, a recently-built cutter named after the secretary, and reputed to be the finest vessel of its kind afloat, foundered during a heavy gale and all the passengers and crew were lost.
The new service, while an unquestionable convenience to the public, did not altogether satisfy the Post Office. It is true that, as a consequence of the increased accommodation, the letters for Ireland passing through Liverpool nearly doubled in number; but this satisfactory result was not without alloy. During the past few years the art of building as applied to steamboats had made rapid progress; and not only were the packets on the Liverpool station larger than those stationed at Holyhead, the horse-power of the engines being 170 in the one case as against 40 in the other, but they were altogether better equipped. The fares by the Liverpool route as fixed by the Post Office were also relatively lower, and to any one proceeding from London or the large manufacturing towns of the North the distance to be travelled by road was shorter. As a consequence, the diversion of traffic from Holyhead to Liverpool, notwithstanding the longer sea voyage, proceeded still more rapidly than when the steamers from the latter port were in private hands; and the Holyhead service, which had for some years produced a clear profit of many thousand pounds a year, was now carried on at a loss.
To the Post Office authorities, indeed, there was in connection with the four packet stations in communication with Ireland only one thing which gave them unqualified satisfaction. It was this—that to the Post Office belonged the credit of being first to demonstrate by practical experience that, to use Freeling's words, "steam vessels could force their way at all seasons of the year and in weather in which no sailing vessel, be her qualities what they might, would attempt to put to sea." Whether the claim is well founded or not we have no means of judging; we only know that it was made.
By land, at the beginning of the present century, communication with Ireland was in a more backward state than it was by water; and since the Union a very general opinion had prevailed that this communication should be improved. It would perhaps be too much to say that the British Post Office proved obstructive in the matter; but there can be no doubt that it did not lend the assistance it might have done, and the reasons are obvious. In the first place, a little soreness existed. No sooner had the Act of Union passed than the Government decided that between London and Dublin there must be an express in both directions daily. This, as the postmasters-general pointed out, would cost more than £4000 a year, and, as it was not required for Post Office purposes, the Post Office should not bear the cost. Accordingly the question as to the source from which the cost should be defrayed was reserved for future consideration; but after the express was well established, the Post Office received notice that it must defray the cost itself, and it continued to do so for twenty years and more. This was always a sore point with Freeling, and he constantly adduced it as an instance of unremunerative work.
Another reason which kept Lombard Street back from assisting to improve the communication with Ireland was that the British and Irish Post Offices approached the subject from different points of view. With the British Post Office the main object, an object which in its judgment was sufficiently well attained already, was the transmission of letters; with the Irish Post Office, as indeed with that section of the public which could best make its voice heard, the main object was the transport of passengers. Yet a third reason, we can well believe, was the conviction that for any improvement that might be made, though primarily for the sake of Ireland, the British and not the Irish Post Office would have to pay. These three reasons, we cannot doubt, were at the root of the manifest indisposition displayed by the British Post Office to meet what had gradually become a very general demand.
The first strenuous effort to induce the authorities in Lombard Street to improve the communication with Ireland was made in 1805, the prime mover in the matter being John Foster, the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer. At this time the mail-coach between London and Holyhead went by a circuitous route through Chester. Foster maintained that it should go direct through Coventry and Shrewsbury. By Coventry the distance was 264 miles, and by Chester 278 miles—a difference, in point of time, of more than two hours.
It was alleged that by the shorter route other delays which now took place might be avoided; but how important was a saving of even two hours may be judged from the fact that the time of the mail-coach leaving Holyhead was fixed with reference, not to the arrival of the packet from Dublin, but to the arrival of the coach in London. All the mail-coaches were timed to reach London early in the morning, so that the letters they brought might go out by the morning delivery. To effect this object, the mail-coach by the Chester route had to leave Holyhead at seven o'clock in the morning, an hour by which it was barely possible for the packet from Dublin to have arrived. During the whole of the year 1804, for instance, the Dublin mails arrived at Holyhead in time to catch the coach to London on only twelve occasions; and, of course, when the mails did not catch the coach, they had to remain idle at Holyhead until the following morning.
If, argued Foster, the route be by Shrewsbury and Coventry, the coach can leave Holyhead so much later that the occasions on which the Dublin mail does not arrive in time to catch it will be not as now the rule but the exception. Freeling set the suggestion aside as impracticable. The coach, he maintained, must go through Chester. At Chester centred all the correspondence from the great manufacturing towns of the North, from Liverpool and Manchester, from Hull, Halifax, and Leeds, indeed from all parts of Yorkshire and many other counties besides. Was this correspondence of no account? Or was it suggested that a second mail-coach should be established? Already the Post Office was paying many thousand pounds a year for an express service between London and Holyhead which it did not require. Could it in reason be expected to incur the further expense which a second mail-coach would involve? The thing was impossible, and the project could not be entertained.
Foster, though silenced for the time, was not convinced. In 1808 the subject was mooted again. Clancarty, who had recently been appointed joint postmaster-general with O'Neill, had arrived in London, prepared to argue the point with all the energy of his energetic nature. Foster was unable to come; but he had sent a memorandum which no one who was not thorough master of the subject could have produced. A meeting was appointed at Lord Hawksbury's office. Freeling poured out all the old objections, and proceeded to contend, as he had contended three years before, that the project was impracticable. But one was present there who did not believe in impracticabilities. This was the new Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Arthur Wellesley. Wellesley's opinion was emphatic—that all other considerations must be made subordinate to the one grand purpose of facilitating communication between the two capitals of London and Dublin. Freeling had encountered a stronger will than his own. What had been impossible before was possible now, and that very evening arrangements were begun to be devised for accelerating the Irish mails.
Even now, what little was done was done grudgingly. The mail-coach from London which ran through Oxford and Birmingham to Shrewsbury was extended from Shrewsbury to Holyhead, and was met at Llangollen by an express from Chester bringing the cross-post correspondence. Thus matters remained for nine years, when, under pressure which the Post Office could no longer resist, the Coventry route was adopted. The Post Office opposed the change to the last, even though a Parliamentary Committee had recommended it, and an address in its favour had been presented to the Prince Regent. At length Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, brought his authority to bear, and in July 1817 a mail-coach by way of Coventry began to run, accomplishing the distance between London and Holyhead in thirty-eight hours.
But in order to facilitate communication between England and Ireland a good deal more was required than to set up an additional coach or to send an existing coach by another and shorter route. The roads of the country were still in a state to make rapid travelling impossible. Much, no doubt, had been done to improve them. Between the years 1760 and 1809 no less than 1514 Turnpike Acts had been passed, and under the turnpike system the roads were better than before. Still the making of them had been entrusted to incompetent hands, and they were constructed on false principles. For the bed or foundation of the roads improper or insufficient materials had been used. Little or no attention had been paid to drainage. Few roads were provided with side channels. Not seldom, indeed, the sides were encumbered with huge banks of mud which had accumulated to the height of six, seven, and even eight feet. Not only had convexity of surface, as a means of carrying off the water, been disregarded, but the road was frequently hollow in the middle and everywhere cut into deep ruts. High hedges and trees were still allowed to intercept the action of the sun and wind, the importance of a rapid evaporation of moisture being as yet unrecognised. Even the roads themselves had been laid out on no fixed principle. Their lines of direction were, almost without exception, identical with the footpaths of the aboriginal inhabitants of the country; and these, doubtless to avoid the bogs and marsh lands, and possibly also for purposes of observation, had invariably followed the hills.
Hence it came to pass that almost every road of any importance was both steep and crooked. Where there were no hills and the roads passed across wet and flat land, they were almost always below the level of the adjacent fields, the mud having been carried away by constant use. While such was the general state of the roads during the first twenty years of the present century, the road between Shrewsbury and Holyhead, over which a mail-coach had been travelling since the summer of 1808, was notoriously one of the worst in the kingdom. "To Kenneage,[88] six miles of narrow road; scarcely room for two carriages to pass, and much out of repair; in winter, the drivers say, the ruts are up to the bed of the coach." "From Kenneage to Capel Curig, road narrow and wants walling to prevent carriages falling down precipices 300 or 400 yards perpendicular." "From Capel Curig to Bangor, side of the road unguarded, and many accidents may happen to passengers by the coach running off the road as the mail passes here in the dark." Thus wrote the assistant superintendent of mail-coaches in 1808, and nothing had since been done to remedy defects.
The mail along this line, of road was now to be carried at a higher rate of speed than before, and, if only on this ground, it would have been necessary at least to remove actual causes of danger. Even before 1817, however, Parliamentary Commissioners had been appointed for the improvement of the Holyhead road; and these Commissioners had summoned to their aid the first of that line of illustrious men who, during the last eighty years, have transformed the face of England. This was Thomas Telford, who had already achieved distinction by the roads he had made in the Highlands of Scotland.
Telford commenced operations in the autumn of 1815; and now for the first time in England, or at all events for the first time since the ancient ways were laid down by the Romans, a road was to be constructed on scientific principles. "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain." This—we say it without irreverence—is what literally came to pass. Easy inclinations, ample breadth, perfect drainings, complete protection, and a smooth and hard surface—these were the distinguishing characteristics of the road which Telford now made between Holyhead and Shrewsbury. A road that had been one of the worst in the kingdom was now the very best. In summer it was not even dusty, and in winter was free from dirt. Frost and rain produced upon it but trifling and superficial effects. To crown all, the Menai Straits were spanned by a noble bridge, where before there had been only an inconvenient ferry.
While Telford was thus raising the business of road-making to the level of an art, John Loudon Macadam was demonstrating of what materials the surface of a road should be made. Macadam had travelled about the kingdom much as John Palmer had travelled about some thirty years before in pursuit of a different object, and, as the result of long observation, he had come to the conclusion that the surface of roads should be made of broken stones; and having in 1816 been appointed general surveyor of roads in the British district he proceeded to put his views into practice. With success to recommend it, the new system spread like wildfire, and "a macadamised road" soon became a household word.
Nor was it to the business of road-making alone that science now lent her aid. What force of traction or power is required to draw carriages over different kinds of road, in what line of direction the power can be best applied—what, in other words, is the proper angle for the traces, and what in the case of hills is the highest inclination up which horses can go at a trot and down which they can with safety be driven at full speed—these were some of the questions which now engaged the attention of the scientific world. Some thirty years before, Walsingham and Chesterfield when postmasters-general had dabbled in matters of the kind;[89] but now they were reduced to the form of mathematical problems and received a mathematical solution.
The excellence of the road constructed between Holyhead and Shrewsbury brought into bold relief the imperfections of the road between Shrewsbury and London. To this road, which, in comparison with the other, had at one time been pronounced good and was now pronounced execrable, Telford proceeded to apply the same principles as before. He raised the valleys, lowered or avoided the hills, and corrected deviations. To give only one instance—an instance taken from the second stage out of London—the old road from Barnet to South Minims ascended three steep and long hills; the new road avoided two of these hills altogether, and at the same time was shorter than the old one by more than 600 yards. And so it was in a greater or less degree all the way from London through St. Albans to Coventry, and thence through Birmingham and Wolverhampton to Shrewsbury.
It should also be mentioned that at this time, while the country roads were hollow in the centre instead of convex, the roads in and about London within a radius of about ten miles were the exact contrary. Here convexity, as a means of carrying off water, had been pushed to so absurd an extent that the road was in the form of a slanting roof, and a carriage, unless kept in the centre, was on a dangerous slope. This, which had been a prolific source of accidents, Telford now altered. The effect of his operations upon the first stage out of London, the Highgate Archway Road as it was called, is perhaps best described in the words of one of the principal mail-coach contractors. Before Telford took this road in hand, he wrote, "It was all we could do to walk up both sides of the archway with six horses, and now we can trot up with our heaviest loads with four."
The road from London to Shrewsbury, in continuation of the one from Shrewsbury to Holyhead, was completed in 1828, and, corresponding alterations having been made in the eight miles of road which connect Howth and Dublin, a line of communication was established between the capitals of England and Ireland such as, until the days of railways, could hardly have been improved. Some few years before, when the Post Office had received orders to accomplish the distance between London and Holyhead in thirty-eight hours, Hasker, the experienced superintendent of mail-coaches, while zealously applying himself to carry the orders into effect, had felt it incumbent upon him as a loyal servant to make a protest in writing against the "extraordinary expedition projected." It would, he urged—and no doubt rightly so as the road then was—be inhuman to horses and dangerous to life. This extraordinary expedition was at the rate of seven miles an hour. Along the Parliamentary Road the distance was accomplished, without hurt to horses and with perfect safety, at the rate of ten miles an hour, and the London and Holyhead coach soon became one of what were known as the "crack" coaches of the kingdom.
Meanwhile the Post Office had shewn its appreciation of Telford's achievement in a remarkable manner. It had imposed an additional charge of 1d. upon every letter carried over Conway Bridge, and a second penny for carriage over the Menai Straits.[90]