A schoolboy who was given the task of writing an essay on the Post Office used these words: “The Post Office contains the whole world's circumstances, or welfare, day after day, as a mother shuts all her chickens under her wings. A man would not reveal his very secreate words to his wife or to any one, but he trusts them to a weak envelope in the Post Office.” This boy was perhaps wiser than he knew. For there is no institution existing in the country which comes so near to the hearts and homes of the British people as the General Post Office. Created primarily for the despatch and delivery of letters, it has developed into a vast organisation which is at once the carrier of the people's correspondence and parcels, the people's bank, and the agency by which all communications by telegraph and telephone are conducted. To tell the story of that organisation, how from the smallest beginnings in the Middle Ages it developed into the Post Office of the present day, would be a delightful task, but my intention is rather to relate its modern triumphs and to deal with its history so far as it helps us to understand the position of things to-day.
It is usual, in telling the story of the Post Office, to go as far back as Greek, Roman, and Jewish times. In almost every book and article on the subject we are reminded that Ahasuerus sent letters into all provinces concerning his wife Vashti, and that Queen Jezebel has at least one urbane action to her credit in that she despatched the first recorded circular letter. Then we are reminded that Cicero and Pliny were accomplished correspondents, and that St. Paul wrote letters which have had a wide circulation. But these instances usually belong to the history of letter-writing and have little relation to our subject. It is obvious that so soon as letters began to be written in any nation they must have been despatched by some means or other to the persons for whom the communications were intended. Ancient history has many instances of posts specially created for the delivery of perhaps only one letter. The story of the Post Office can only properly begin at the time when the first efforts were made to systematise what was already a prevailing habit of the people.
The history of the British Post Office as a system can be divided into three periods. There was the age of the post-horses and postboys, extending from the time of the Tudors far into the eighteenth century. There was the age of the mail coaches, the romantic age of the General Post Office, full of stirring deeds and adventures. Indeed the title “His Majesty's Mails” would have accurately described the whole of the business transacted by the British Post Office during these centuries. Lastly there is the age in which we are living, the age of the mail train, which has produced a wide extension of the duties of the Department, and the despatch and delivery of letters is now only one of its activities. There is possibly another age in the near future of which we can already distinguish the dawn, that of the airship and aeroplane, but we are dealing in these pages with only accomplished facts.
There is little doubt that the first posts organised in this country were simply for the transmission of public despatches, and though from time to time attempts were made by private individuals to organise posts of their own, these efforts met with but little success, and in 1637 it was ordered by proclamation that no other messengers or foot posts were to carry letters except those employed by the King's Postmaster-General, unless to places untouched by the King's posts. This order marked the beginning of the monopoly which ever since has been in the hands of the Government.
The word “post” comes to us from the French; in early English records the carrier of the post is called a runner or a messenger. We assimilated the word under the Tudors, and the first man to be described as Master of the Posts was Brian Tuke, appointed by Henry VIII. in 1509. In this reign there was a service more or less regular between London and Berwick and between London and Calais. The Dover road is probably the oldest mail route in the kingdom. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries services were gradually extended to Scotland, Ireland, and the West of England.
The posts were slow and unreliable. The roads of this country were for several centuries in a wretched condition, and travelling was difficult and dangerous. The causeway or bridle-track ran down the middle of the road, while “the margin on either side was little better than a ditch, and being lower than the adjoining soil and at the same time soft and unmade, received and retained the sludge.” The authorities were chiefly concerned to preserve the causeway, for the mails were carried by runners or postboys on horseback. The maximum speed for the postboys allowed by the Master of the Posts was seven miles an hour: there was no authorised minimum, and the speed, including stoppages, rarely exceeded four miles an hour. Moreover the postboys were undisciplined and a source of infinite trouble to their employers. The postmaster on the other hand frequently considered that any horse was good enough to carry the mails, and the animals he supplied were a disgrace to the service. The temptations of the wayside inn often also explained the long delays. An official in the early part of the eighteenth century complained that “the gentry doe give much money to the riders whereby they be very subject to get in liquor which stops the males.”
The words, “Haste, Post, haste,” have been found on the backs of private letters written at the close of the fifteenth century, and this was no formal endorsement but an urgent appeal to the lazy postboy to hurry up. “Ride, villain, ride,—for thy life—for thy life—for thy life,” appeared also on letters with sketches of a skull and cross-bones or of a man hanging from a cross-bar. It was thought desirable to frighten the servant of the Government into the performance of his duties.
The towns on the route were bound to supply the horses for the King's posts. The postmasters in each town were the persons immediately responsible for this business, and it is interesting to know that one of the qualifications for the situation was the ability of the candidate to furnish a certificate under the hand and seal of the Bishop of the diocese that he was conformable to the discipline of the Church of England, and he was required to receive the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper three months after admittance to office. The postmaster was frequently the innkeeper: he was the person best able to supply horses; and though his salary was small, the position was probably remunerative, as travellers were drawn to his house.
