Sir Rowland Hill: The Story of a Great Reform

by Eleanor C. Hill Smyth

Facsimile of Manuscript Page (in Sir Rowland Hill's handwriting) of the Draft of his Pamphlet on Post Office Reform. See 3rd Edition (1837) page 49.

When, in 1834, Rowland Hill joined the Association formed for the total abolition of the odious “taxes on knowledge” there was a duty of 1s. 6d. on every advertisement; a paper duty at 1-½d. the lb.; and the newspaper stamp duty was at its highest—4d. This last burden—undoubtedly a war-tax—was reduced once more to 1d. only in 1835, when we had been at peace for twenty years. So easy is it to lay a war-tax on the nation: so difficult to take it off again. Weighted after this fashion, how could journalistic enterprise prosper? The Association was of opinion that if the Press could be cheapened newspapers would increase, and advertisements multiply, while the fiscal produce of journalism would be as large as ever. In estimating this probable expansion Rowland Hill applied a principle on which he subsequently relied in reference to postal reform, namely, that the increased consumption of a cheapened article in general use makes up for the diminished price.

The Revenue for the financial year which ended with March 1836 had yielded a large surplus; and a reduction of taxation was confidently looked for. Thus the time seemed ripe for the publication of my father's views upon the postal question; and he set to work to write that slighter, briefer edition of his pamphlet which was intended for private circulation only.

It was in this year also that he made the acquaintance of one of the greatest of all those—many in number—who helped to carry his proposed scheme into accomplished fact—Robert Wallace of Kelly, Greenock's first Member of Parliament and the pioneer postal reformer of the nineteenth century. From the time Mr Wallace entered Parliament, at the General Election which followed the passing of the great Reform Bill of 1832, he took the deepest interest in postal matters, and strove to reform the Department with a persistency which neither ridicule could weary nor opposition defeat. He was in the field two years before Rowland Hill; and while thus unconsciously preparing the way for another man, was able to accomplish several useful reforms on his own account.

In 1833 Mr Wallace proposed that postage should be charged by weight instead of by number of enclosures, thereby anticipating my father as regards that one suggestion. But nothing came of the proposal. He was more fortunate when moving for leave to throw open to public competition the contract for the construction of mail-coaches, which, when adopted, led to an annual saving of over £17,000. He also secured the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry into the management of the Post Office. The Commission was established in 1835, continued to work till 1838, issued ten Reports,[70] and by its untiring efforts was, as my father always maintained, justly entitled to much of the credit of his own later success. Mr Wallace was, of course, to the fore in the Commission, and gave valuable evidence in favour of the establishment of day mails, which subsequently formed a feature of Rowland Hill's plan, and was eventually carried into effect with great advantage to the public and to the Revenue. To Mr Wallace we also owe the boon of registration of letters. He likewise pleaded for a reduction of postal rates, and of more frequent communication between different centres of population. In Parliament, during the session of 1836, and in the last speech he made there before the publication of Rowland Hill's pamphlet, he urged the abandonment of the manifestly unjust rule of charging postage not according to the geographical distance between one place and another, but according to the length of the course a letter was compelled to take.[71] As regards the question of reduced postal rates, he said: “It would be proper not to charge more than 3d. for any letter sent a distance of 50 miles; for 100 miles, 4d.; 200 miles, 6d.; and the highest rate of postage ought not to be more than 8d. or 9d. at most.”[72]

A detailed plan of wholesale reform (as was my father's) Mr Wallace never had, and he no more dreamed of postage stamps—though the suggestion of these has been sometimes attributed to him as well as to other men—or of prepayment than he did of uniformity of rate. He was an older man than Rowland Hill, and of higher social standing; yet was he so incapable of jealousy or other petty meanness, that when the younger man, on completion of his scheme, laid it before the veteran Scotsman, the latter threw aside all other plans and suggestions, took up the only practicable reform, and worked for it as heartily as if it had been his own.

To Mr Wallace every would-be postal reformer turned with unerring instinct as to his best friend; and it was through the instrumentality of this public benefactor that Rowland Hill had been furnished with sundry Parliamentary Blue Books containing those statistics and other valuable facts, mastery of which was essential to the completion of his pamphlet, since it was necessary to understand the old system thoroughly before destroying it.

“As I had never yet been within the walls of any post office,” wrote my father of Mr Wallace's friendly act, “my only sources of information for the time consisted of those heavy Blue Books, in which invaluable matter too often lies hidden amidst heaps of rubbish. Into some of these [books] I had already dipped; but Mr Wallace, having supplied me by post with an additional half-hundred-weight of raw material,[73] I now commenced that systematic study, analysis, and comparison which the difficulty of my self-imposed task rendered necessary.”

Basing his calculations on the information drawn from these and other volumes, Rowland Hill found that, after the reduction of taxation in 1823, the price of soap fell by an eighth, tea by a sixth, silk goods by a fifth, and coffee by a fourth. The reduction in price was followed by a great increase of consumption, the sale of soap rising by a third, and that of tea by almost half. Of silk goods the sale had more than doubled, and of coffee more than tripled. Cotton goods had declined in cost during the previous twenty years by nearly a half, and their sale was quadrupled.[74]