The news rapidly spread that the City men had gone in to work; and the effect was spontaneous almost everywhere throughout the districts, except at the Eastern District Office. The Northern men and the South-Eastern men, who had taken up a very firm attitude, almost immediately went in. But at one or two other places, Finsbury Park, and Holloway, the men refused to go out on delivery, and were promptly suspended. The only important contingent who took the extreme step in a body were the Eastern District men. These, reinforced by driblets from other sources, made up a body of about three hundred, who by a woeful misunderstanding and want of information had refused to take up their duties. They marched in order to the General Post-Office, expecting there to find the various other districts assembled in triumphant defiance. These misguided men marched in a solid body towards the City, and instead of being greeted as they expected by the welcoming shouts of the whole of the district and City postmen in possession of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, found the grim grey General Post-Office standing amidst solitude and silence. Except for the police on duty, and the few wondering pedestrians, the streets were deserted at that early hour; and then, after standing still and wondering for a few seconds, they understood. It was now close on six o’clock in the morning; they could hear the steady clank, clank of the stamping machines within the great crowded hive, and to these men who had risked all for an ideal, it seemed like intended mockery at their foolishness. They began to realise that they had grasped at the shadow, and lost the substance. Impelled by mingled feelings of hope, despair, and rage, they, as with one accord, wheeled into regimental order, and circled in a moving body round the General Post-Office. Round and round they circled, again and again breaking forth into soulless and dispirited cheers to attract those safe within. Nothing more pathetic can be imagined than those cheers, which were but as a voice crying in the wilderness, and flung back to them in echo from the granite walls towering above them. With the police at their heels, and ruin confronting them, they despairingly kept on the move for one weary hour or more, threading the narrow thoroughfares which irregularly surround the General Post-Office; and the cheers, at first of simulated defiance, now died away in almost a piteous groan. Then at last the City police, taking stern action, prevented them from demonstrating any further; and the wretched heart-broken remnant of the strike army gradually melted away towards the East, whence, in the sunrise, they had emerged so hopeful and so triumphant in anticipation.

During the day the number of men who paid the inevitable penalty of their folly reached nearly three hundred. In the evening there was an attempt at a muster after the battle, and several hundred men again assembled on Clerkenwell Green. Mr. Mahon addressed them, and endeavoured to reanimate them by announcing that the real Waterloo was to be fought on the morrow, when the whole of the London postmen would be called out on strike. Every postman within the Metropolitan area was exhorted to obey the summons.

The morrow came, however; and instead of the general rising and the consequent paralysing of the commerce of the country as was predicted, the postmen, realising the extremity to which they had been pushed and the failure of it, unconditionally surrendered, by going about their duties as usual. The whole movement had collapsed, and the Postmen’s Union was broken up. During the next two days the authorities were inundated with applications from the suspended and dismissed men for reinstatement, and therewith offering abject apology.

In all 435 men were either peremptorily dismissed or suspended with almost the certainty of dismissal. Of these 263 belonged to the unestablished, and 172 to the established class. Mr. Raikes triumphed; but it brought him almost as much worry and bitterness of spirit as a defeat would have done.

The postmen’s strike had ended in even more ignominious failure than had the telegraphists’ strike of twenty years previous. Once more the lesson had been proved that it was suicide for any single section of State servants to attempt to fight with the weapon of a strike a Government with inexhaustible resources, and without the assistance of an enlightened public sympathy on their side.

CHAPTER XVII

CONTINUANCE OF TELEGRAPHISTS’ AGITATION—NATURE OF GRIEVANCES—“TELEGRAPHISTS’ CRAMP”—AN OUTCOME OF THE SUNDAY QUESTION—THE CARDIFF EXILES—CONDEMNATION OF POSTMASTER-GENERAL—THE “NO OVERTIME” PROTEST.

For several years after the introduction of the Fawcett scheme in 1881, the telegraph service had remained in a state of sullen discontent. The formation of the Postal Telegraph Clerks’ Association in the December of the same year in which Mr. Fawcett introduced his measure, did much to keep alive, for the next ten years, the memory of their wrongs. The grievances of the telegraph clerks, notwithstanding Mr. Fawcett’s intention, were still so numerous and so genuine, that on the face of it it seemed questionable whether it had brought them any benefit worth speaking of at all. The same measure of relief which the sorters were clamouring for and agitating because, as they thought, it was being withheld from them, was, from its very inadequacy to meet the justice of their demands, the main cause of discontent among the telegraphists. What the sorters thought it would be a boon to get in its entirety, the telegraphists were now discontented with; and not only were they discontented with the scheme itself for the reasons already shown, but that discontent was still further promoted by the systematic manner in which its few benefits were minimised in their application. The majority of telegraphists were still compelled to bolster up their meagre incomes by means of extra duty, and they were still, after all their agitation, face to face with the hated system of classification and all its attendant evils, irregularity and stagnation of promotion. Since the introduction of the Fawcett scheme the quality and value of their work had greatly improved, while their duties had become yearly more arduous and responsible. Their hours of duty were longer and far more irregular, the pay was insufficient, and daily growing more so when the cost of living and rent was considered, and their privileges were fewer than ever. The few prizes offered by the Fawcett scheme, the few higher promotions from their ranks to the supervising and superintending staff, brought no comfort or satisfaction to the hungry and underpaid army of the lower ranks. Even the overtime, the one means by which they could set up a barrier between themselves and actual want, which, indeed, they were forced to accept to preserve their respectability, was badly paid for and unjustly distributed. Owing to the constant fluctuation in the amount of work, the telegraphists were frequently required to perform overtime at a minute’s notice at almost all hours of the day and night. Overtime became morally and officially compulsory, and it was only by means of it that they could earn a respectable income. In the same manner that the postmen’s Christmas-boxes were used against them as a means of keeping down their wages, so was compulsory overtime, paid for at slender rates, forced on the telegraphists in extension of their nominal eight hours’ day. The confining of a day’s work to eight hours, even had it been allowable, would for the vast majority have spelt privation and poverty. So that a decent week’s earnings, representing what is now known and accepted as a decent living wage, meant for the telegraphist, not the working week of eight hours’ days, but a week of twelve, fourteen, and more hours daily. The extensive and increasing use of code and cipher messages requiring the most delicate discrimination in transmission, the many added responsibilities, the strain on the mental faculties and nervous system continued and sustained during these long working hours, caused in many cases premature breakdown and too early superannuation. An analysis of the superannuation report for 1885-86 showed that of the total number of telegraph clerks pensioned during that period no less than fifty per cent. were compelled to retire at a comparatively early age, owing to affections of the brain and nervous system induced by the constant strain. These facts alone were sufficient to notify the existence of discontent among them. But there were other grievances too numerous to be catalogued, generally speaking, although Mr. Fawcett had enunciated the principle of payment for work according to its quality. The adoption of the Fawcett scheme was made the medium for greatly adding to the responsibilities of juniors, while imposing on the seniors supervising duties hitherto paid for at a higher rate. They felt that the value and quality of their work was far from accurately measured by the department. Whether their work consisted of transmitting ordinary messages in the ordinary manner, or the selected duties appertaining to special events, such as race meetings, political speeches, &c., in which rapid and accurate manipulation was essential, they were all too poorly recompensed and too little regarded.