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

by H. G. Swift

Thus it will be seen that nearly everything which the agitation had set out to do, all the reforms which it had promised, were left for a future generation. A long period of stagnation had set in, and but for the faint echo of agitation occasionally coming from the telegraphists, the Post-Office, so far as uttered discontent was concerned, might have been wrapped in slumber.

Lord John Manners had departed for good, unwept, unhonoured, and unsung. His advent and departure had witnessed no change in the conditions of the service. Time in the Post-Office dragged its slow weary length along till the year 1881 was reached. That year was to witness a glad surprise for the dejected sorting staff at least. If Lord John Manners was the one man who was to be bitterly remembered as having battened down the hatches on the galley-slaves, set a seal on their freedom of action, and put a premium on official exaction, Professor Henry Fawcett was the one who came at last to offer them a fuller share of air and liberty. Lord John Manners, belonging to the political party which had encouraged their demands, and, in the persons of some of its most prominent men, almost, it might be said, aided and abetted the agitation, so far from carrying out the reforms which had been confidently expected of him, had discouraged their aspirations by means of a whip of scorpions. They had asked for bread, and he had given them something worse than a stone. Professor Henry Fawcett had scarcely been approached, certainly not by those who figured in the late agitation, yet remembering his promises of bygone years, and with a generous desire to meet the necessities of their case, he of his own free will, and almost spontaneously, offered reparation for the long disappointment they had sustained. Mr. Fawcett, though never taking a prominent part, or figuring too largely in the letter-carriers’ and sorters’ three years’ agitation, yet had associated himself with it to an extent, often giving his wise counsel to Booth and the others, and always his sympathy and best wishes for bettering the conditions of the service. He showed that he was not likely to forget now.

Discontent among the telegraphists had reached a somewhat acute stage, and the new Postmaster-General busied himself for some time in arriving at the inner facts of their case. He rose from his study of the telegraphists’ troubles with a conviction that something must be done to meet the justice of their demands. It was not clamour that weighed with him, but a genuine inclination to do the right thing so far as in him lay, and to put in order the household which his predecessors had more or less neglected. He had the fullest desire to mete out justice to the telegraphists, but there was the sister branch of the service to be considered likewise. That portion of the Augean stable was, if anything, in a worse condition, and he decided to ascertain for himself.

One evening, in his quiet simple manner, the blind Postmaster-General presented himself at the General Post-Office unannounced and asked to be taken over the sorting department, and to have things explained to him. The scene was one of bustle and confusion; and the dull roar and the clank of stamping machinery, and the movements of hundreds of men in a confined space, filled the overburdened air. He was conducted to a position on the gallery overlooking the busy, crowded Letter Branch, which to ordinary eyes resembled nothing so much as an overturned ant-hill. Mr. Fawcett’s form and features were not familiar to the majority; but presently the whisper went round that the tall, silent man, seeming to stare down upon them through the big black spectacles which hid his closed eyes, was the Postmaster-General himself. For a few moments strict discipline was forgotten in curiosity, and few could really believe that one who could so intently follow the movements of the throbbing machinery below, as he did, could be wholly blind. They did not comprehend to the full the pathos of it; they did not know that this was only a habit he had schooled himself into to hide his infirmity. Nor did they know that in him they looked on the first Postmaster-General who had come among them with an honest desire to prove their benefactor. It chanced—or it may have been that Mr. Fawcett himself preferred it—that a young junior sorter was deputed to take him over the building. The young man acting as guide succeeded in so interesting him by his manner of describing all that the blind eyes could not see that at last Professor Fawcett asked him his position in the service, and further questioned him as to his pay and prospects. Presumably from what he gathered on that occasion he learnt much that set him thinking. A little while afterwards an official circular announced that the Postmaster-General would be willing to receive a statement of the men’s claims to better pay and prospects.

The issue of such a circular was as unexpected as manna from heaven. It was some days before the letter-sorters could realise their good fortune in having a Daniel come to judgment at last after all their privations. Although the circular was a guarantee of good faith on the part of the Postmaster-General, the men still betrayed a certain amount of timidity in responding to so generous an invitation, until four or five of them, forming themselves into a provisional committee, called a meeting in one of the kitchens, and the basis of a plan was laid down. There were several such meetings with the sanction of the authorities, who could not decently withhold it; there was much cackling before the egg was finally laid, as there usually is. But at last a petition to the Postmaster-General was formulated and sent on its mission. The claims set forth were studiously modest, and comprised a request to rise to fifty shillings a week by yearly increments of two shillings instead of eighteenpence, and a yearly holiday extended to three weeks instead of only a fortnight, and an improved scale of pay for extra duty. This constituted the whole of the demand for the sorters.

Mr. Fawcett lost no time in doing what he considered the right thing, and in endeavouring to apply a remedy for all the discontent which had for so long prevailed. He went about constructing his remedial measure in a masterly manner and broad-minded spirit. It might have been expected that he, a professor of the “dismal science,” would have sought for a ready means to evade the importunities of a discontented service. But not so; he broadly recognised that discontent was a symptom, a symptom of a growing polypus beneath the surface, and he sought for a means to eradicate the cause. He apparently spared himself no pains to arrive at the true facts of the situation. The report which he made to the Lords of the Treasury signified much inquiry and many hours of labour. He wrote: “For several months past I have been collecting information from all sources, not only as to the alleged grievances of the staff, but as to the conditions of service and rates of pay of persons in private employment, whose duties seem most nearly to correspond to theirs.”

Here in these few words is told a story of diligence, patient research, and laborious study—all the more wonderful for a sightless man—which it would take a complete volume to adequately accord full justice to. The consideration of this alone should extenuate whatever few shortcomings might be found in his remedial measure, which came to be known as the “Fawcett Scheme.” Such faults, such as they were, were but as the black specks on the white ermine, perhaps the more accentuating the real goodness of his intention.

In response to his solicitations, the Lords of the Treasury accepted his proposals for a revised scale of pay for telegraphists and “sorting clerks,” and on the 13th of June 1881 the scheme was issued. It dealt with the principal complaints from the two branches of the service, the telegraphic and the postal; and referred specifically to inadequacy of pay, arising from stagnation of promotion, the excessive amount of overtime, the small rate of pay allowed for it, and the severity of night duty; the insufficiency of yearly holiday; and a readjustment of pay for work performed on Christmas Day and Good Friday. The scheme apparently intended was to apply to telegraphists and sorters pretty equally, and altogether, if nothing more can be said of it, it was a bold attempt, and the bolder because it was the first attempt of the kind, to bring order out of chaos, to unite in some manner the tangled and disconnected threads of a complex and perplexing problem. It was practically the first attempt to solve a problem teeming with petty jealousies and sectional discontents; a patient attempt to skilfully untie the Gordian knot, which Lord John Manners had only rudely hacked at with the knife of official despotism. It was an honest attempt to fulfil his obligations to a distressed and justly-discontented service with which years before taking office he had professed a sympathy. With him it was the accomplishment of a duty; and it was as such that he laid his proposals before the Lords of the Treasury. It was a forward step in the right direction which ought to have been taken long before it was. Instead of attempting to suppress discontent in the same fashion as his predecessor, he gave to postal servants their first charter of liberty. It was not complete; it was not made to fit the full demands of the case perhaps; few first charters are; but without it, further extensions of postal liberty would scarcely have been possible. If it was only a gleam of light in the darkness, and the beginning of a process of development, where only stagnation had prevailed, it was something; and honour was due to its author for his rare courage.

By the Fawcett scheme the letter-sorters found their position materially improved. They who had dropped agitation, who had been reduced to a condition of timorous servility almost, who had scarcely dared to ask for what they were invited to take, found themselves nearly as well off as those who had fancied themselves entitled to far greater benefits. Everything that the sorters through years of vain agitation had sought to obtain it seemed was now to be granted. The claim to rise to fifty shillings a week, for the asking of which some time before five of their number had been dismissed, was now given them without demur. And what was more, the scheme was dated back to the preceding April, so that some immediate monetary benefit accrued to the majority. In addition to the increases in wages there was to be payment for sacred holidays; a revised system of payment for overtime; the recommendation being that extra duty be paid for strictly in proportion to the amount of weekly wages received; while there were certain other minor advantages, including one which minimised the severity of night attendance. It is unnecessary here to give the whole measure in detail; but such, broadly, were the advantages apparently vouchsafed to the sorting force, the defeat of whose legitimate aims by a former Postmaster-General, and whose rejection had reduced them to a condition of hopeless apathy. The glad surprise, then, with which they especially received the Fawcett scheme may be still imagined.

Yet Mr. Fawcett’s generous attempt to apply a panacea for postal discontent was to some extent doomed to fall short of the effect intended, and this from little fault of his own.