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

by H. G. Swift

“Sir,—I am desired by Mr. Gladstone to acknowledge the receipt of your letter. He is not at present aware of any intention to change the legal status of civil servants, or that public opinion has opened the question of such a change, which is quite apart from the discussion of ordinary administrative improvements.—I am, sir, your obedient servant,

“Spencer Lyttelton.”

Mr. Gladstone’s reply to the questions put was at the time regarded as unsatisfactory because of its vagueness, but the concession of free meeting granted in the following August showed that he contemplated the act of justice.

Some strictures having been passed on Mr. Cremer, M.P., for his alleged refusal to attend this meeting, and the matter being brought under his notice, that gentleman sent an invitation to Clery to attend a forthcoming meeting of his constituents in Shoreditch, so that he, Clery, might repeat his original charges against him of neglect of duty, &c., bringing with him “as many postmen as he was capable of influencing.” Clery promptly replied to the letter accepting the invitation with all becoming gravity, and enclosing a copy of the resolution he wished to move at the meeting. The meeting, which was held at the Shoreditch Town Hall, found Clery present; and Mr. Cremer, seeing the matter had passed beyond a joke, introduced him from the platform and expressed the hope that they would accord him a fair hearing. The resolution proposed by Clery was “that in the opinion of this meeting of the electors of Shoreditch, Mr. Cremer should have attended the public meeting recently held in the Memorial Hall, to advocate the political freedom of civil servants, or have given a satisfactory reason for his absence.” The moving of this resolution in a crowded meeting of the M.P.’s constituents was the signal for an uproar which was maintained throughout the subsequent proceedings, opinion and feeling being pretty equally divided. Whether the resolution was lost or carried was never accurately known.

But there were other matters also demanding the attention of the sorters; there were workaday conditions to be improved, and the growing danger of sweating and over-pressure to be combated. Mr. Arnold Morley, with all the fair professions of Liberalism, had in November 1892 been pleased to receive a deputation from an organised committee of the unemployed, requesting him to abolish overtime, and to pay fair wages to all classes of employés, and on that occasion he had expressed himself as desirous that “the Post-Office should set an example to other large employers of labour.” As the Postmaster-General had been known to father such a liberal sentiment, it engendered the hope that at least in matters of internal economy and working surroundings, he would not refuse to make improvement where it could be shown that need for such improvement existed. The enormous increase of business in the Post-Office of recent years had given rise to new and peculiar grievances and hardships not contemplated or made allowance for sufficiently in any previous remedial scheme. It was not so much insufficiency of pay, the method of promotion, or the pension prospect, but more immediate and more pressing were the questions of inadequacy of staff, unhealthy conditions of work, and harassing hours of attendance. Added to these were the growing necessity for medical department reform, and the scandal of secret and confidential reporting. Neither of the schemes of Mr. Fawcett or Mr. Raikes had done more than touch the outside fringe of these matters. True, the telegraphists and sorting clerks suffered from similar grievances, but it was a question of degree of intensity. No other class of the service suffered to such an extent from pressure and overcrowding as did the sorters at this period. Based on these considerations, a memorial was prepared and forwarded to the Postmaster-General in March 1893. But they had to wait some months for a reply; and in the meanwhile it was thought desirable to strengthen their Parliamentary policy, and to foster their Parliamentary friends. Mr. Cremer, M.P., had forgiven the Shoreditch incident, and promised to join in with their other pledged supporters in the House, Sir Albert Rollit, Professor Stuart, Sir Charles Russell, Lord Compton, Mr. John Morley, and the rest.

Of all their alleged Parliamentary advocates, however, perhaps Mr. Murray Macdonald was at this time the most painstaking and consistent. Mr. Macdonald had sought every opportunity to bring on a discussion of postal claims generally, but had several times been defeated in his endeavour. It was then arranged through him to hold a conference of M.P.’s and postal representatives for a full discussion of the case, which it was anticipated must presently be brought before the House. With this end in view, Mr. Murray Macdonald asked the Postmaster-General privately if he would guarantee that postal representatives might take part in this conference without risk to their prospects or position. But Mr. Arnold Morley squelched the intention by replying that such a course would be “contrary to the regulations.”

Sooner than they expected came the Postmaster-General’s reply to the March memorial dealing with pay, pensions, hours of duty, conditions of work, &c., and the extra promptitude of the reply was perhaps explained by its containing a refusal on every single point.

The uncompromising attitude of the Postmaster-General served only to stimulate postal servants generally to the adoption of a vigorous Parliamentary policy, and sorters, sorting clerks, and telegraphists were now more than ever coming to join hands on questions of common interest. This feeling of relationship was perhaps fostered not only by a sense of common adversity, but by the fact that the telegraphists’ friends in the House were also, for the most part, the friends of the sorters and sorting clerks. The Parliamentary friends of the postal cause were now representative of every shade of party politics, and included men of widely divergent views. The question of Civil Rights for Civil Servants was one that enabled men like Sir Albert Rollit, Professor Stuart, Mr. William Saunders, and Mr. Keir Hardie to stand side by side on the same platform; and this was actually the case on the occasion of a meeting held at the Memorial Hall, June 8, 1893. With such advocates as these and many others in the House to champion their cause, it seemed that the coveted Royal Commission could not now be far off, or at any rate the existence of such a solid phalanx of Parliamentary support must surely overcome all the objections that could be centred in a single Postmaster-General, even with a more powerful personality than that of Mr. Arnold Morley.

But in spite of all the combined activity of telegraphists, sorters, and sorting clerks, things in the Post-Office continued only to drag their slow length along towards the hoped-for goal of improvement.