Mail Coach and Train.
When railways were in their infancy part of the journey of a mail was sometimes performed by coach and part by train. At the point where the railway began the coach was placed on a truck, which was coupled to the train.
To put the matter briefly, the rate for a single inland letter in 1837 was 4d. for 15 miles, 6d. for 30 miles, 7d. for 50 miles, and so on up to 1s. for each additional hundred miles: in certain places only was there a local penny post, and in London there were twopenny and threepenny posts. Each person in the United Kingdom received on an average only five posted packets a year. This was the year when the change from mail coach to mail train was most marked. A mail was conveyed from London to Liverpool and Manchester in 16½ hours: the secret of the speed was that the mail was carried by coach from London to Birmingham, and there put on the railway which was open to Liverpool and Manchester. The last of the mail coaches, that from Norwich and Newmarket, arrived in London on the 6th January 1846.
The Reform Bill had been passed, a reforming Government was in power, and measures of social amelioration were being discussed in all quarters. Trade and commerce were making strides, the habit of travel was growing with the people, and the need for simpler and easier methods of communicating with one another was urgent. There was a grand opportunity for a postal reformer. And the need of the time brought forth the man.
There had been postal reformers before Rowland Hill. First of all in time and distinction was Witherings, who lived in the middle of the seventeenth century. He became Master of the Posts in 1637, and he introduced a far-reaching system of postal rates, which before had been extremely casual and excessive. He made the Post Office a paying concern. He created the Post Office as we know it to-day. Then there was Dockwra, who established a penny post for the London district which existed 120 years. Only in the price had this reform any relation to Sir Rowland Hill's scheme, which was based on the idea that a uniform charge should cover any distance travelled. Dockwra's system was of course limited to short distances. Another great name in Post Office history is Ralph Allen, the Postmaster of Bath in 1719, who organised a system of cross posts all over the country. And in the first chapter I mentioned the achievements of Palmer, who established the mail-coach service.
Rowland Hill was born in 1795 at Kidderminster, and he began life as a schoolmaster. Very early he showed great talents as an organiser: his bent was towards mathematics, and he became secretary of Gibbon Wakefield's scheme for colonising South Australia. In this capacity his attention was specially directed to the abuses of our postal system. He approached the study of the system as an outsider: indeed until after his reform had been carried he had not been inside the walls of the General Post Office. He collected statistics, and it was the discovery that the length of a letter's journey made no appreciable difference to the cost of that journey which led him to think of uniformity of rates. He showed, for instance, that the cost of the mail-coach service for one journey between London and Edinburgh was about £5 a day. He then worked out the average load of the mail at six hundredweight, the cost of each hundredweight being therefore 16s. 8d. Taking the average weight of a letter at a quarter of an ounce, the cost of carriage over the 400 miles was 1/36 part of a penny. Yet the actual postal charge was 1s. 3½d.
From the first the plan of Rowland Hill gained the support of the people, but he had to face a long and bitter opposition from the official chiefs of the Post Office and from the vested interests which were threatened by his action. Lord Lichfield, the Postmaster-General at the time, said, as an argument against the idea, that the mails would have to carry twelve times as much in weight as before, and therefore the cost would be twelve times the amount they paid. “The walls of the Post Office,” he exclaimed, “would burst, the whole area in which the building stands would not be large enough to receive the clerks and letters.” Increase of business would mean a loss, not a gain, and Lord Lichfield had not the optimism of the old Irishwoman who, when endeavouring to sell her fowls, exclaimed, “I lose on every fowl I sell, but thank the Lord I sell a lot.”