Great inconvenience had resulted also from the slight control possessed by the Post Office over the Service. In 1857, for example, the contract with the West Indian Packet Company was renewed without the knowledge of either the Postmaster-General or of Rowland Hill. The absence in the contracts of stipulations as to punctuality likewise had ill effects. The most punctual service at this time was that between Devonport and the Cape of Good Hope, as the Union Steamship Company, into whose contract such stipulations had been introduced in strong form, made during 1859 every one of its voyages within the appointed time.
Investigation of the Packet Service accounts showed how abundant was the room for diminution of cost. The annual charge to the Home Government for conveying the mails to and from Honduras was, as a consequence, readily cut down from £8,000 to £2,000, and eventually to £1,500. There had always been a heavy loss on the foreign and colonial service. That to the Cape of Good Hope and Natal was reduced in six years from £28,000 to £5,400 per annum. Much of the merit of this diminution of cost, as regards the Packet Service, was always attributed by my father to his youngest brother Frederic; and while that department remained under the latter's control the large annual loss was reduced by more than £200,000—one-half the sum—by the cutting down of expenditure, the other half by increased yield from the correspondence. The cost to the British taxpayer was further lightened by calling upon the colonists, who had hitherto been exempt from all such charges, henceforth to bear their fair share of the expense. Thus both punctuality and economy were insisted upon.
About 1857 a persistent demand arose for a mail service to Australia by the Panama route, the Press vigorously taking up the agitation, and the Government being accused of “red tapeism” because they did not move in the matter, or not until the outcry grew so loud that it was deemed expedient to apply to the shipping agencies for tenders. Being one day at the Athenæum Club, Rowland Hill met a friend, a man of superior education and varied knowledge, who had long held an important post in the Far East, almost on the shores of the Pacific. “Why,” asked this friend, “do you not establish an Australian mail by the Panama route?” “Why should we?” was the counter-question. “Because it is the shortest,” replied the friend. At once Rowland Hill proposed an adjournment to the drawing-room, where stood a large globe; the test of measurement was applied, and thereupon was demonstrated the fallacy of a widespread popular belief, founded on ignorance of the enormous width of the Pacific Ocean—a belief, as this anecdote shows, shared even by some of those who have dwelt within reach of its waters.[196]
But convincing friends was of far less moment than convincing the public; and Rowland Hill drew up a Report on the subject which, backed by the Postmaster-General, Lord Colchester, had the desired effect of preventing, for the time being, what would have been a heavy and useless expenditure of public money.[197]
It is found that great public ceremonies affect the weekly returns of the number of letters passing through the post. Sometimes the result is a perceptible increase; at other times a decrease. The funeral of the great Duke of Wellington was held on the 18th November 1852, and “all London” was in the streets to look at it. The weekly return, published on the 22nd, showed that the number of letters dispatched by the evening mail from the metropolis on that memorable 18th fell off by about 100,000. The next day's letters were probably increased by an extra 10,000. The revolutionary year, 1848, also had a deteriorating influence on correspondence, the return published in 1849 for the previous twelvemonths showing a smaller increase than, under ordinary circumstances, might have been expected.
In 1853 Docker's ingenious apparatus for the exchange of mail-bags at those railway stations through which trains pass without stopping was introduced. The process is described by the postal reformer as follows:—“The bags to be forwarded, being suspended from a projecting arm at the station, are so knocked off by a projection from the train as to fall into a net which is attached to the mail carriage, and is for the moment stretched out to receive them; while, at the same time, the bags to be left behind, being hung out from the mail carriage, are in like manner so struck off as to be caught in a net fixed at the station; the whole of this complex movement being so instantaneous that the uninformed eye cannot follow it.” It was this inability to understand the movement which led to a ridiculous error. On the first day of the experiment people assembled in crowds to witness it. At Northallerton “half Yorkshire” gathered—according to the mail inspector—and many were under the impression that the outgoing set of bags they saw hanging to the projecting arm in readiness for absorption by the passing train, and the incoming set hanging out from the mail carriage, ready to be caught in the net fixed at the station, were one and the same thing. Though what useful purpose could be served by the mere “giving a lift” of a hundred yards or so to one solitary set of bags is rather hard to perceive.
