The History of the Post Office, from Its Establishment Down to 1836

by Herbert Joyce

But, in consideration of his contract being renewed, there was another and far more important condition, which Allen undertook to perform. This was to convert tri-weekly posts into posts six days a week, and to take the whole expense upon himself. Accordingly, in 1741, the post began to run every day of the week except Sunday between London and Bristol, between London and Norwich, and between London and Yarmouth; and of course all the intervening towns participated in the benefit. In 1748 a further instalment followed. This time it was the Midlands and the west of England that were to be benefited; and on and after Monday the 26th of December the post went on the three days on which it had not gone hitherto to Birmingham, through Oxford, and to Exeter through Bristol. In 1755, the beginning of another septennial period, the six-day service was widely extended. Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham, Shrewsbury and Chester, Warrington, Liverpool, and Manchester were among the towns which were now to receive letters from London on every day of the week except Sunday. From Liverpool and Manchester the cross-post service to almost every part of the kingdom was at the same time improved. At the close of the nineteenth century, postridden as some of us think ourselves to be, we may find it sometimes difficult to believe that less than 150 years ago there was not a town in the kingdom which received a post from London on more than alternate days.

And yet Allen's activity, untiring as it was, went only a short way to regain for the Post Office the popularity it had lost. Various causes had contributed to this result. The chief of them, however, as it was the earliest in point of time, was of itself enough and more than enough to account for the distrust and hostility with which the Post Office appears to have been regarded towards the middle of the last century. As early as 1735 members of Parliament had begun to complain that their letters bore evident signs of having been opened at the Post Office, alleging that such opening had been frequent and was become matter of common notoriety; but it was not until six years later, in the course of inquiries which were being made into the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole during the last ten years of his administration, that the state of the case became fully known. It then transpired that in the Post Office there was a private office, an office independent of the postmasters-general and under the immediate direction of the Secretary of State, which was expressly maintained for the purpose of opening and inspecting letters. It was pretended, indeed, that these operations were confined to foreign letters, but, as a matter of fact, there was no such restriction. The office appears to have been established in 1718, and its cost, which was defrayed out of the secret service money, had since increased more than tenfold, and now reached the prodigious sum of £4700 a year. The establishment, exclusive of a door-keeper, consisted of nine persons, with salaries ranging from £200 to £1000; the head of the office or "Chief Decypherer," as he was called, being Dr. Willes, Dean of Lincoln. It was in June 1742 that these shameful facts became known, through the report of a committee of the House of Commons; and, in the August following, Willes was gazetted Bishop of St. Davids.

To ourselves it may seem strange that the State monopoly of letters should have survived so terrible a revelation. It must be remembered, however, that in the middle of the last century the Post Office, owing mainly to the heavy charges it levied, had hardly become matter of general concern; that public opinion, as we now understand it, was only beginning to exist; and, above all, that the very conditions under which Post Office work was done precluded the idea of privacy. These conditions were absolutely inconsistent with the sanctity which now surrounds a letter. Letters were divided into two classes,—single and double; and to determine whether a letter was the one or the other demanded a close scrutiny, a scrutiny such as could not be exercised except by the strongest light that candles could give. In 1719 it had been laid down that a letter, however small, was to be charged as a double one if two or more persons joined in writing it. How could it be ascertained that the whole of a letter was in one and the same handwriting except by prying? Even the law itself, by the meagre protection it vouchsafed to letters, discouraged the idea of sanctity. For an offence of the pettiest kind, as for instance for stealing a pocket-handkerchief in a dwelling-house, the penalty was death. For opening or embezzling a letter the highest penalty which the law allowed was a fine of £20. It is significant of the change which has since taken place in the public sentiment that while in the case of almost every other description of offence the penalty has been enormously reduced, in the case of opening and embezzling letters it has been enormously increased.

Horace Walpole, writing more than twenty-five years later, never tired of mentioning the elaborate precautions he had taken to secure his correspondence against inspection. "I shall send this letter by the coach," he says, "as it is rather free-spoken and Sandwich[47] may be prying." "I always say less than I could, because I consider how many post-house ordeals a letter must pass"; and similar observations occur in a hundred different places. All this was sheer nonsense. It tickled the exquisite vanity of the man to affect to believe that his correspondence was of sufficient importance to attract the attention of the State. And yet truth compels us to admit that the infamous practice which the committee exposed did not cease with the exposure. The Treasury, while grudging every 6d. expended on the posts, continued regularly to remit more than £4000 a year for the maintenance of their inquisitors in Lombard Street; and it was not until George the Third had sat some years on the throne, probably under the Rockingham administration, that the corps was finally disbanded.

Apart from the grave cause of offence we have mentioned, it is a curious fact that during the last eighteen or twenty years of George the Second's reign hardly anything occurred in which the Post Office was concerned that did not in one way or another cause dissatisfaction to some section of the community. The Post Office, no doubt, was often to blame, sometimes deeply so; but even where this was not the case, where no blame attached either to itself or to any other office or person, it in no single instance, so far as we are aware, escaped a certain amount of obloquy.

This unfortunate result first shews itself in the case of the Falmouth and Lisbon packets. During the war with Spain it had only been necessary, as a defence against some Spanish privateers which infested the Channel, to provide the Dover and Harwich packets with arms and to make a small addition to their complement of men; but in 1744, when Spain was joined by France, a good deal more had to be done. The Dover and Calais packets, after the six months' grace allowed by the treaty of Utrecht, were taken off; the packets to the West Indies which had been discontinued since 1711 were revived; and the Falmouth and Lisbon packets were put on the same footing as during the last war. This the merchants trading with Portugal, an important body representing forty-eight firms, protested was not enough. The packets, they argued, afforded the only available means for remitting gold to Lisbon in exchange for commodities, and should, therefore, be of at least 300 tons and carry 100 men. It was true that this would be in excess by about seventy tons and forty men of what was provided during the last war; but the fact that during the last war some of the packets fell into the hands of privateers was of itself a proof that they were not of force and burthen sufficient. Besides, we had then an army in Spain, and the number of soldiers and passengers passing to and fro made fewer sailors necessary. Moved by these arguments, the Duke of Newcastle decided to comply with the merchants' request; but Pelham, on learning that the building and equipment alone would cost £34,800, revoked the Duke's decision. His Majesty's opinion he declared to be that the main object of a packet was to carry letters, and that for the carriage of letters light and swift vessels were the fittest. This, it will be remembered, was the opinion which had been expressed by William the Third more than fifty years before, and events had proved its soundness. Nevertheless, the merchants were highly displeased; and, of course, at that time they were no more able than they are now to distinguish between a refusal which originated with the Post Office and one that was imposed upon it by superior authority.

But the merchants—and here we speak not of those alone who traded with Portugal—had other and more serious cause of complaint. Their foreign letters were not delivered until twelve o'clock in the day, and, if a mail arrived by as much as a few minutes after twelve, it was not at the earliest delivered until the same hour on the following day. And if on this day a second mail chanced to arrive shortly before noon, the letters by the first mail were kept back so as to be delivered with those of the second in the evening. Thus, foreign letters received at the Post Office in Lombard Street a few minutes after mid-day on Saturday might not be delivered even in Lombard Street itself until the evening of Monday. To make matters worse, the foreign ministers residing in London had their letters delivered soon after the mail arrived, so that any persons whom these ministers might please to favour enjoyed an undue advantage.

The merchants now urged that this might be altered. Did not Sir Harry Furness, they asked, during the last war obtain permission to have his letters delivered immediately after the arrival of a mail? And was not this permission afterwards revoked on the ground that it had led to abuse? Matters were better managed abroad. At Amsterdam, for instance, if a mail arrived as late as nine o'clock in the evening, the letters were delivered to those who might call for them at any time before midnight, or else sent out for delivery early the next morning. At Rotterdam—this also was urged as an instance of better management—the English letters were never delivered till twelve hours after the mail had arrived, about which time those which had come by the same mail would be in course of delivery at Amsterdam. Equality of treatment was thus secured, and neither city had priority of intelligence. At Hamburg, again, as soon as a mail arrived—if in the day, a notice to that effect was fixed up at the Post Office and at the Exchange, the letters being delivered about three hours later; and if at night, the clerks were called out of bed, so that the letters might be sorted and ready for delivery the first thing in the morning. Sundays, moreover, were not excepted. As regards foreign gazettes, too, these all over Europe were delivered within a quarter of an hour after their arrival; yet in London the merchants had to wait for them many hours. And this was all the more hard to bear because the clerks in the Post Office, to whom gazettes were addressed, received them at once and communicated the contents to their friends. What could be more calculated to promote fraudulent insurance, one-sided bargains, and a system of overreaching generally? Such was the representation made by the merchants; and they concluded by asking that henceforth, except on Sundays, no longer interval should be allowed to elapse between the arrival and delivery of a foreign mail than was absolutely necessary for the purpose of sorting. The postmasters-general had no choice but to refuse the request. To have granted it would have defeated the object with which the Treasury were maintaining an office of their own within the Post Office building.

About this time, three or four years short of the middle of the century, the Post Office got into disgrace with travellers. Under the provisions of the numerous Turnpike Acts which had recently passed, the trustees of the roads were to measure distances and to erect milestones; and on these provisions being carried into effect the statute mile proved to be shorter, much shorter, than the reputed or Post Office mile.[48] So great indeed was the difference that the Post Office may be said to have been almost ridiculously out of its reckoning. Thus, from London to Berwick-upon-Tweed the distance, according to Post Office computation, was 262 miles; according to measurement, it proved to be 339 miles. To Holyhead the actual distance proved to be 269 miles; the Post Office had computed it at 208 miles. To Manchester the distance, according to the Post Office, was 137 miles; the actual distance was 165. Bristol, which proved to be 115 miles from London, had been reckoned as 94; Birmingham as 89 instead of 116; Warwick as 67 instead of 84; and so it had been throughout the kingdom. In every case the Post Office mile proved to be an unduly long one; and of course, as soon as milestones were erected authoritatively recording the statute miles, the postmasters charged accordingly. This change excited many murmurs. The traveller to Warwick who, at the rate of 3d. a mile, exclusive of a guide, had hitherto paid for the use of a horse 16s. 9d., had now to pay 21s. To Birmingham he had now to pay 29s. instead of 22s. 3d.; to Bristol, 28s. 9d. instead of 23s. 6d.; and so on.

The King's messengers fought hardest against the innovation, but without success. Finding the expense of their journeys to Berwick and Holyhead appreciably increased, they appealed to the Treasury for redress, and the Treasury invited the postmasters-general to explain under what authority they had raised their charges. The postmasters-general replied, as they had replied scores of times before on occasions of complaint from the public, that they had really nothing to do with the matter; that it was the postmasters who made the charges; and that in the opinion of the Attorney-General these officers were clearly entitled to be paid according to the new measurements. It had been expressly provided by Act of Parliament that all persons riding post should pay after the rate of 3d. for every British mile, and the British mile was a known statute measure common to all His Majesty's dominions. The Treasury were not satisfied, and insisted that the King's messengers should be charged according to the old scale. But this, as the postmasters-general pointed out, was not feasible, the Act of Parliament by which they were governed making no exception in favour of particular persons, but on the contrary enacting that all persons without distinction should pay at the rate of 3d. a mile.