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

by H. G. Swift

It was decided to band themselves together in the form of an association for mutual support and benefit, to be known as the “United Kingdom Postal Clerks’ Association.” Like a gathering snowball the new postal organisation increased in dimensions, and rolling onward from Liverpool, presently included Manchester, Birmingham, and similar towns of importance, picking up the smaller places like crumbs by the way.

Within a year the Postal Clerks’ Association had gone over the whole length and breadth of the land, and extended from the north to the south, and from the west to the east. Besides this their association was now represented in four or five of the most important towns in Ireland. The only parallel to this extraordinary response to the call for combination was that among their fellow-servants, the telegraphists, when the Postal Telegraph Clerks’ Association was formed in 1881.

The hardships suffered by the postal clerks at this period were as real and as acute as any that beset either of the other bodies of the service. Their grievances were general and particular. The hardship of compulsory Sunday labour pressed on them severely. This question of enforced labour on the Sabbath had been one which affected the service throughout, and had been made the grounds of the first agitation and the first public protest against postal administration. Postmen, telegraphists, and sorting clerks alike were the victims to this compulsory system; but with the sorting clerks, especially in some districts, the evil had grown to exaggerated proportions. In some offices, for example—Limerick, Cork, Aberdeen, Norwich, Worcester, and many other places—the clerks, in very large numbers, were regularly employed on duty every Sunday, and without receiving any remuneration. In a great many offices they were kept on duty three weeks out of every four, and only in a few instances were they off duty more than two Sundays in every month. It was a grievance with them that they were compelled to relinquish their day of rest, but it was doubly a grievance that they were denied payment for the time and work given. In many of the leading provincial offices the evil became accentuated, and at Manchester, Leeds, Exeter, York, and numerous other places where the staff of postal clerks represented in the aggregate 400 or more, they were graciously permitted, if the duty allowed, to take a Sunday off once in every four weeks. When it is remembered that these men, whatever their religious convictions or conscientious objections, were compelled to give this time for absolutely no remuneration, it certainly seemed monstrous in a Christian land.

This grievance of Sunday duty, however, was only one among a long catalogue, which had lengthened still with the progress of time. The system of promotion created a feeling of irritation and discontent throughout their ranks, though this was by no means a grievance peculiar to them. As with other branches of the service also, the gravest discontent prevailed among them in regard to the scales of pay, but as aggravating this there was the unequal system of classification, whereby a clerk in one office might be, and very often was, placed at a disadvantage in respect to pay and promotion, as compared with another at a similar office. The wages of a second-class sorting or postal clerk were 22s. 8d. a week; but in many instances their work involved the very highest responsibilities, including the care and despatch of money-orders, stamps, registered correspondence, besides payment of pensions, Savings-Bank accounts, and similar duties. Superior in point of grade and responsibilities, they were yet, in monetary respects, inferior to postmen. Not only this anomaly, but junior clerks having, as was often the case, to perform the duties of others above them in grade, had no allowance of any description for so acting; and thus it frequently happened that juniors were constantly kept, on the shallowest pretext, on more responsible duties than their poor salaries would justify.

At this time it was the general practice to deduct one-half of salary when away on sick-leave; and this was regarded as a distinct hardship, as in no other section of the service, so far as was known, was so large a proportion of salary forfeited through enforced absence from causes of illness. They very justly claimed that a deduction of one-third only would more adequately meet the case of unavoidable sickness. Another cause of annoyance to them was the extremely slow rate of promotion, ten and twenty years being a fair average of the period of waiting for dead men’s shoes. The analogous question of superannuation affected them very keenly. The Playfair Commission of a few years before had recommended that when a man had given thirty consecutive years of service and wished to retire, ten years might be added to his time in calculating the allowance due to him, and that he should be allowed to resign without either being sixty years of age or wholly incapable from infirmity. But among the sorting or postal clerks there had occurred many cases of infirm men being harshly treated in this respect, and not allowed to retire either through passing the age limit of sixty years of age, or being broken down in health. They were in a position to allege that men had been compelled to attend to their duties when in truth they were physically incapable of properly attending to them. Another sore point with the postal clerks was that a very large proportion of them were unestablished, though they were compelled to perform all the duties of permanent officers better paid, and while they had no guarantee that their years of service would not be peremptorily dispensed with by the whim or caprice of an individual supervisor. Those who were established further complained that promotions to postmasterships which more rightly belonged to them as postal servants were unfairly distributed to telegraphists, this practice seriously diminishing their legitimate outlet of promotion. These were the principal and salient features of their indictment against the department at this period. But there were many other points, such as proper remuneration for Christmas duty, Bank holidays, Queen’s Birthday, &c.; the inadequate period of annual leave; “split” duties, or duties being spread over a large proportion of the day and necessitating several attendances; the severity of night duty; and other things quite as familiar to the telegraphists, the postmen, and sorters elsewhere.

It was to find a remedy for this state of things as they affected them that the United Kingdom Postal Clerks’ Association was inaugurated.

Then like a thunderclap came the announcement that the Ridley Commission, whose approach they had so confidently looked forward to, did not intend to visit the Post-Office at all. It was a staggering blow to the postal clerks, as it was to every other body in the service. But so far from demoralising them, it put them on their mettle the more. Their organisation, which the illusive Ridley Commission had been the means of calling into existence, they still had; and they determined to stand by it, and use it for purposes of defence and the furtherance of their claims.

For a few years longer the Postal Clerks’ Association, still growing and consolidating, pushed its claims in the many various ways known to men who want their wrongs redressed. But they never departed from strictly constitutional lines; a few members of Parliament were induced to now and again take up their case as included in the common postal cause; they had their conferences, their meetings, their joint petitions, and their memorials to the Postmaster-General, just as did the telegraphists, the postmen, and others at this period; still, as an association, they remained an exemplar to the rest of the postal service. Their pursuing such strictly constitutional methods, and their attitude as a combination being practically beyond reproach, was in no small measure due to the personality of their secretary, George Lascelles, who was the real leader.

There was an enormous amount of work done one way and another; but their efforts towards obtaining any real material benefit were as fruitless as were those of the other organisations.

Soon after Mr. Raikes became Postmaster-General, as has already been described, a crusade of agitation beset him from all quarters, growing fiercer every day. But the Postal Clerks’ Association was not formed for purposes of agitation as agitation; and it contented itself with remaining as an interested and perhaps a sympathetic spectator. The great wave of industrial agitation following in the wake of improvement in trade everywhere at the beginning of 1890, aroused the telegraphists, the postmen, and the Metropolitan letter-sorters to further exertion in their various ways. And when Mr. Raikes reintroduced the old regulation of 1866, limiting the freedom of public meeting, the postal clerks were not behind in lodging their indignant protest, in common with most other combined bodies. They emphasised the indignation they shared in holding a mass meeting at Liverpool, their head centre. Their good manners had so far not been corrupted by evil communication; but adversity makes strange bedfellows. There were partial jealousies between the sorting clerks and the telegraphists, and both to an extent felt themselves superior to postmen; but in this they were as one. The Cardiff case gave them no good opinion of Mr. Raikes; while their minor difference with the telegraphists was forgotten in their sympathy with them. And, added to this, about this time they were given an axe of their own to grind, and the telegraphists in turn looked on with a sympathetic eye. At the Liverpool Conference of Postal Clerks, held April 1890, the shadow of the official reporter obtruded itself across their threshold. He was introduced to the chairman of the meeting by an official letter, which contained what was tantamount to a demand in the name of the Postmaster-General. The official reporter had to be admitted to take notes, or they had to disband the conference. They were as helpless as was the official reporter himself, who was also a paid servant of the department. The chairman of the meeting, in his opening statement, referred to the fact that for the first time in their history a meeting of officials called for a praiseworthy object were compelled to receive in their midst an unwelcome intruder sent in the name of discipline. Though there was nothing in the constitution of their society that was antagonistic to departmental authority, they had to accept this humiliating and Russianising condition, or forfeit altogether their right of free speech as Englishmen and Britons. This new restrictive rule became particularly hard of digestion to the postal clerks, who had hitherto prided themselves on the absolutely-constitutional lines on which their organisation was run. The introduction of avowed trades unionism could no longer be regarded as a crime in the Post-Office, since Sir Arthur Blackwood, the Permanent Secretary, himself some little time before had publicly stated that there was a growing spirit of this trades unionism which must be made allowance for and taken into account. The postal clerks had so long remained loyally constitutional in their attitude, that the application of the restrictive rule to them they regarded as supererogatory and unnecessary. However, justified or otherwise, they were compelled to accept it in common with the rest of the service.