A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day

by H. G. Swift

Accordingly he desired that the memorialists be informed that if their present conditions of service were not suitable to them they were at liberty to seek for other employment. And further, he would understand it to be their intention to do so unless within three days they asked, in writing, for permission to remain. This permission, however, he should not give to those who, having signed the memorial, bore an “indifferent character,” and were “not recommended by their superior officers for retention in the service.” He understood that among those who signed the wicked memorial there were a number of younger men who had “no claims on the department, either on the score of service or otherwise”; and for daring to become dissatisfied already, their names were to be brought specially before him, in order that he might consider whether any, and if so, which of them, should be retained in the service as an act of grace. His lordship furthermore implied that the precious privilege accorded to the more poorly paid of being allowed to add to their miserable incomes by overtime, should relieve them of any cause for complaint in regard to insufficient wages. His reference to their “liberty to seek for other employment” was the bitterest mockery to men who had given so many years to the public service, and for the first time gave expression to that heartless theory of the department that the best cure for grievances was the dismissal of those who dared to complain of them; for that practically was its meaning.

Such was the message of Lord John Manners to the men who had been guilty of asking for a redress of their grievances and a small increase of pay. Such was the manner in which he requited the confidence reposed in him by his humble subordinates, and such was the manner in which he set about redeeming the fair promises of the party which had so sustained the agitation while they were in opposition. The Postmaster-General’s minute was almost as vile an instrument as that with which the late Government had contemplated crushing combination and smothering the claims of the aggrieved by prosecution, only that their heart failed them at the last moment. It was virtually a demand for the heads of the ringleaders. It provided a warranty for wholesale dismissal, and placed a weapon in the hands of minor officials which, apart from their inclination, they were fully authorised and expected to use against a certain number.

They were told that they were to consider they had relinquished the service, but applications to be retained would be considered, though there would be no guarantee. As was only natural in the circumstances, the men, thinking of their wives and families, and knowing that refusal to accept the humiliation meant instant dismissal, complied, and wrote their applications as directed. An overseer was sent round to collect them into a bunch, and then it was the poor men found themselves, as if drawn into an ambush, basely betrayed. Their last lingering confidence in the honour of the aristocrat who made blue blood only the criterion of nobility was rudely shattered. The whole thirty men who as representing their fellows had been induced to sign the memorial were suspended from duty, with the prospect of dismissal, the forced humiliation of their applications notwithstanding.

A fortnight before Christmas one hundred and forty men of the sorting force were called up before the Controller for admonishment. These included the thirty suspended men, who were taken last. They were all admonished in much the same terms in the name of the Postmaster-General, and to the majority it was intimated that the granting of their applications would depend on their future conduct. But five of the men, those regarded as more or less prominent in the recent agitation, were to be dismissed; and the five condemned men were accordingly marched out of the office, with a bitter winter and the world before them.

Lord John Manners triumphed, and the smaller officials had their revenge. There was no doubt about that; the men went back to their duties thoroughly cowed. It must have been a glorious hour for the Postmaster-General, and doubtless he felt that he had routed the enemies of society for ever. And so that the victory of the Postmaster-General should be fully complete, a subscription to provide the dismissed sorters with a Christmas dinner was stopped by order of the authorities. Cowed as the men were, an attempt was made to send round a subscription-sheet, but the movers were warned of the consequences, and they were officially terrorised into doing nothing for the victims of Lord John Manners’s discipline.

Several Parliamentary friends of the postal cause immediately set to work to induce the Postmaster-General to reverse his harsh decision. Particularly assiduous was Mr. A. J. Mundella, but he was doomed to get nothing but humiliation for his pains. Mr. Mundella used the whole weight of his personal influence with the Postmaster-General and the permanent authorities, only to find himself bandied about from one to the other till his sensitive nature became wounded and disgusted. The studied discourtesy shown him by the permanent officials especially he made a matter for some complaint inside the House, as he felt that more consideration than had been accorded him was due to his position and dignity as a public man.

These arbitrary dismissals destroyed the last vestige of confidence in the Tory party for some years to come among the letter-sorters. If the men had been dealt with merely for signing and sending forward a memorial, there was no justification for such harsh punishment. There would have been no justification for any kind of punishment, beyond the refusal to accede to their request. But it was rendered too patent to every one that it was seized on simply as a pretext for taking a revenge for the part they had played in the recent agitation. There was no discipline that demanded such a cowardly reprisal. It was worthy only of the narrow-minded aristocrat whose principal claim to distinction was his cherished little drop of blue blood, and whose contempt of the masses, of all who worked for their living, and all that was plebeian, was rendered shamefacedly notorious by his published lines. For Lord John Manners was the author of that silly and impudent pretence at an epigram—which shook the world with laughter, and covered the writer with derision and scorn—even from critics of his own party. His disgraceful lines, which ran—

“Let Arts and Commerce, Laws and Learning, die,

But leave us still our old Nobility!”—

of which he was so distinguished an ornament—were as much a perpetration on decency and the canons of poetry, as his very first act as an administrator was arbitrary. Where he had failed as a poet his party had generously given him a chance to succeed as an autocrat. And his one idea of autocracy presumably was to persecute the weak, as the only way to convince them he was powerful.