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

by H. G. Swift

Before the transfer the telegraph business of the country was divided amongst three principal companies, “The Electric,” “The United Kingdom,” “The British, Irish, and Magnetic,” and, for London only, “The Metropolitan District Company.” They had no connection with each other, but it seems that the men in their employ indifferently rambled from one to the other on the mere strength of having been formerly employed anywhere as a telegraphist. The class of men for the most part so employed was a very mixed one, and consisted largely of those who had “come down in the world,” often men of birth and education, and those shipwrecked from other vessels. They seemed to be an independent, Bohemian lot, and somewhat nomadic in their habits, for not infrequently those dismissed or resigned from one company, with little difficulty took a seat in another of the three. The conditions were much about the same, and the salary equally poor, averaging about £1 a week. But though the salary was low, and the prospects ill defined and unsatisfactory, it was understood that there were other means of making money in a small way. There was apparently a looseness and a happy-go-lucky style of freedom obtaining among the telegraph companies of this period that enabled the operators to make for themselves certain privileges which ultimately became their rights. Their salary was low, but in course of time it was to some extent compensated for by the acquisition of perquisites, and small emoluments. These often consisted of keeping the offices open after hours, and making their own charges, levying taxes for porterage on messages, taking allowances for string, paper, and other material. In some cases these privileges and emoluments accruing to the senior men were farmed out among the juniors to save time and trouble. A company’s operator might occasionally constitute himself a temporary agent for his company in his spare time after ordinary hours of duty, charging sixpence extra on each message, and this the companies rather encouraged than otherwise. The men were on free and easy terms with most of the business men in their locality, and presents and Christmas-boxes of a substantial nature often came to them in the form of provisions, &c., in recognition of services rendered in emergency. There was generally a telegraph office at the more important railway stations throughout the kingdom, and the railway officials commonly extended privileges to the telegraph companies’ operators. Railway fares were scarcely taken into account in the cost of living, and a telegraph operator attached to a telegraph office on any company’s line experienced little difficulty in obtaining a free pass for almost any distance.

Such a precarious system of remuneration for their services was almost as unsatisfactory for them as it proved to be for the telegraph-using public; and it is doubtful if such a state of things could have lasted much longer when the requirements of the service broadened and developed.

When it became known in 1868, through the passing of the Telegraph Act in that year, that the companies and the men together were to be swept into the Post-Office, it was very naturally expected that there would be some improvement in their prospects, even if no immediate benefit were offered them. The men, therefore, in anticipation that their future under Government service would be somewhat improved, put themselves on their best behaviour, and stiffened themselves up a little more.

As was only to be expected among such an independent body of men, who, through all their career in the service of the old companies, had been allowed much liberty and discretion and those few privileges only possible in their employ, dissatisfaction soon followed on disappointment, when it was learnt that, after all, nothing was to be gained from the transfer. High hopes had been entertained by the telegraph clerks by the occurrence of one passage in the 1868 Act, to which great weight and importance had been attached. The clause read: “Such Officers and Clerks upon their appointment shall be deemed to be, to all intents and purposes, Officers and Clerks in the Permanent Civil Service of the Crown, and shall be entitled to the same but no other privileges.”

Instead of which, while there was no improvement in salary, all the little privileges and chances of emoluments were of necessity withdrawn. They were subjected to a far more rigorous rule of discipline than they had in their free-born manner been accustomed to in their former employment. In the old companies many averaged £2 a week at least, though there was no fixed rate of salary; but when the Government took them under its paternal care, there was no consideration made for what they had lost or left behind. The companies had been bought over lock, stock, and barrel, and the human machines, despised but indispensable, were thrown in as chattels and makeweight. The estates had been bought, and with them the serfs living on the land; and, being useful only to make the estates pay, they were, in the usual logic of the circumstances, least considered. The average wage was only 17s. or 18s. a week; there were no meal reliefs for provincial men; there was compulsory excessive overtime, in some cases for nothing, and in most cases next to nothing.

They saw that if they were to obtain better treatment and fairer prospects, as befitted their new character as Government servants, they would have to fight for it. This they commenced doing by means of petition. But these petitions were either ignored or refused, and not the slightest concession was made. The compulsion to bring up their starvation pittance to a normal wage by an excessive amount of overtime, poorly paid for—often no more than threepence an hour—with also excessive punishment by the imposition of extra duty, without pay, for the most trifling errors, soon proved that they had jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire. While the telegraph service was divided among a number of private companies, and while the telegraph clerks remained a limited class, they could play on the rivalry among the companies, and had things pretty much their own way when a grievance oppressed them. But under the new conditions of service they found that on the score of their serving the Crown instead of a private concern, they were expected to accept conditions and treatment which would not have been tolerated for a month under the old system. The eight hours’ day was reduced to a mere farce by the compulsion to earn anything approaching a decent livelihood only by means of miserably-paid overtime. They found that they were expected to pay dearly for the honour of serving a Government monopoly, and that, moreover, they were at the mercy of the department because it was a monopoly. Their hopes and expectations, based on the explicitly-worded clause in the Telegraph Act of 1868, were almost from the first moment of their entrance through the portals of the Post-Office dashed to the ground. They saw that the public and themselves had been hoodwinked by the specious promises held out to the old companies’ servants. They therefore decided to put the public in full possession of the facts of their case; and if they could not obtain redress from the department which had so far betrayed their confidence, they would revert to other and more drastic means. The old companies’ men were not so tame and submissive as perhaps the authorities had anticipated. They regarded the clause in the Telegraph Act as undoubtedly covering themselves, and at least, if it did not entitle them to being placed on an equality with the lower or second division of the Civil Service—upon which they maintained the framers of the Act intended them to be placed—they should be accorded better treatment in minor respects.

The scant hospitality the new comers had received at the hands of the authorities for months rankled deeply within them. They found that they had been delivered into the house of bondage; and Mr. Frank Ives Scudamore, and the others of the authorities who wore their honours so thick upon them for effecting the transfer of the mighty business, were hard and inconsiderate taskmasters where their humbler servants were concerned. The disappointment increased with the realisation that the department repudiated its promise and its obligations as contained in the Act, and the mutterings of discontent swelled in volume.

The first attempt at organisation for redress was made in 1871, the year following the transfer. If they came in like lambs, they preferred to go out, if they went out at all, like roaring lions. During the few months they had been in the employ of their new masters the thousands of company men had found a ready means of intercommunication and an exchange of news and ideas. Men became familiarised with each other from a distance all over the country, and the electric current of discontent ran freely along the wires from every large centre. In every large office throughout the kingdom there were eager spirits waiting for the opportunity to do something towards promoting the agitation and establishing a common line of action. They had the very instrument in their hands which most favoured their desire and their plans. The mine was laid; it wanted but the electric spark of a united purpose to fire the train. Exactly how the mine was prepared and sprung perhaps will never be definitely known. It was communicated from several of the large towns that the aggrieved men were animated with a single purpose and desire; each did their share in the way of convening meetings among the staff, in making collections for a general fund, and giving mutual help and encouragement. As is always the case, the leaders came forward as the occasion demanded it; but it is somewhat difficult to assign the authorship of this first movement to any particular individual. The agitation was less the result of any personality or quality of leadership than it was the spontaneous response to a widely-spread sense of injustice. One curious result of the unanimity of feeling, and the spontaneity of its translation into action, was that almost every town in turn afterwards claimed to have taken the initiative, and to have produced the arch agitator who originated the movement. At this time of day the claim of Manchester is almost universally allowed. Manchester from the first moment uprose as a mountain of discontent; it produced both men and money for the agitation, and became the seat of the memorable strike. But for long afterwards, before the fragments came to be pieced together into historic orderliness, and while the discussion which always succeeds the battle was proceeding among the late participants, it was contended that Bradford had an almost equal claim. There was one man at Bradford office, a counterman, a man of superior attainments, a gentleman by birth and education, who, realising the situation, conceived the possibility of a universal agitation among telegraphists, if not all postal servants who had wrongs to be righted and grievances to be redressed. He was not the only one who shared this dream at that time; and possibly, had it come a couple of years later, when the postmen’s agitation was in full swing, it might have been realised to an extent which would have proved even more embarrassing to the Government than it did. Ashden was the name of the Bradford man, whose ambition was equal to his discontent, and with a courage that outweighed both. He thought it necessary to complete the organisation without delay, and to this end at once threw himself into the fray, and tacitly assumed the leadership of the Bradford contingent. There was a series of the usual back-stair meetings, and others more or less secret, but a meeting on a more pretentious scale was held outside the town at a place called Smithy’s Bridge. This was an exclusive if not altogether private gathering, only a chosen dozen or so being present. It was in reality a conference of the powers, for it consisted principally of delegates from the centres of disaffection and the prominent agitators of those places, including Mulholland and Hacker of Manchester, and Norman of Liverpool. They met to decide on some common plan of action in response to the desire on every hand. It was shortly after the meeting at Bradford that the Telegraphists’ Organisation was formally founded.

In the meantime, however, the same discontent begotten of irritation and disappointment at the manner of their modest claims being ignored found a voice at Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, Dublin, and various other places. The decision come to at Bradford was taken away to each of these centres and there discussed and pondered over, and resulted in a small conference at Manchester being held in a room at the Railway Tavern, while a similar meeting was held at Liverpool at the Clock Tavern, London Road. At each of these communions Ashden made his influence felt and helped to mould the plan of future action.