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

by Herbert Joyce

There was only one person that had the slightest influence with Walsingham. This was Daniel Braithwaite, who, holding nominally the situation of clerk to the postmasters-general, was really their private secretary. Braithwaite was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Of consummate tact and judgment, and endowed with a peculiar sweetness of disposition, he contrived during difficult times to tone down asperities and to accommodate many a dissension which promised to become acute. Passing through his hands a harsh admonition was turned into a gentle reproof, and an imperious command into a courteous message. But under this softness of manner and a deference of language so profound that even Walsingham quizzed him on the number of "Lordships" he would introduce into a single letter, there lay concealed a solidity of character which few would have suspected. Honest Braithwaite he was called, and well he deserved the epithet. By a simple inquiry, a request for information or the expression of a doubt, he would nip some wild project in the bud, and, where occasion required, he would not hesitate to speak his mind freely. A young man, Stokes by name, who had been appointed to assist Braithwaite, had miscopied a date in one of Walsingham's numerous drafts, or rather, feeling sure that the date as it stood was wrong, had altered it to what he believed to be the right one. Walsingham, who was absent from London at the time, wrote back that Stokes was to be suspended. Braithwaite's sense of justice was shocked, and he refused to carry the order into effect. "If a mistake in copying," he wrote, "deserves so severe a punishment as suspension, what am I not to fear for disobedience, and yet I really cannot execute the task your Lordship has imposed upon me. For God's sake, my dear lord," he proceeded, "let me most earnestly entreat you to mitigate the severity of this sentence, and, if a reprimand at the Board is not sufficient, give poor Stokes a holiday and impose the fine for a substitute upon me. At any rate," he added, "pray leave the case to be decided at a Board or refer it to Mr. Todd." Walsingham did refer the case to Todd, but not before he had sternly demanded of his refractory henchman whether he had never read Beccaria on Crimes and Punishments. "No," replied Braithwaite, "I have not read Beccaria on Crimes and Punishments; but Beccaria, say what he may, will never convince me that it can be right to punish a mistake as though it were a crime." Honest Braithwaite! He prevailed in the end, and stood in Walsingham's confidence even higher than before.

At a Board meeting on the 20th of July 1787, less than a fortnight after taking up his appointment, Walsingham in the presence of the captains who were ashore, and who had been summoned to London for the occasion, gave notice of his intention to reduce the packet establishment at Falmouth. That establishment consisted of twenty-one boats of 200 tons each, and manned by thirty men. It was proposed that for the future there should be twenty boats of 150 tons each, and with a complement of eighteen men. These boats would cost about £3000 apiece to build, and would not be the property of the Government. The Government would simply hire them, giving as the price of hire £1350 a year, which was to cover everything, wages and victualling included. The owners would also have the passage money, estimated at £150, for each boat. Large as this reduction was, the Treasury desired that it should be carried further, that only the boats to America should be of as much as 150 tons, and that those for the West Indies and for Lisbon should be of 100. The captains, who had not relished the proposed reduction even to 150 tons, were half-amused and half-indignant. Why, they asked, should the boats for America be the largest? Were hurricanes unknown in the West Indies? And could not the Bay of Biscay boast of tremendous seas? Boats of 100 tons would be positively dangerous. No passenger would go by them; nor would any merchant trust them with bullion, from the freight of which the Post Office derived a considerable income.

The postmasters-general had also on their side the result of experience. In 1745, when the packet service to the West Indies, which had ceased in 1711, was re-established, boats of 100 tons had been tried and had proved to be altogether insufficient. Moreover, it was in the highest degree important, as a means of checking smuggling, that the boats should not be restricted to one route. The intention was that they should be interchangeable, so that their port of destination should be uncertain; and to this end the tonnage of one should be the tonnage of all. The Treasury appear to have remained unmoved by these representations. At all events no decision was received; and Walsingham, after waiting for what he no doubt considered an unreasonable time, took silence for assent and proceeded to carry his recommendations into effect.

The economical results which had been looked for were not immediately realised. The boats hitherto in use may not perhaps have been built with the view of facilitating smuggling; and yet, crowded as they were between decks with cupboards, they could hardly have been better adapted to the purpose. In the new boats no receptacles were to be allowed in which clandestine goods could be concealed; the holds were to be only large enough to contain the stores and provisions for the voyage; the seamen were no longer to remain unrestricted as to the size and number of their boxes; and in other respects stringent regulations were laid down to prevent illicit traffic. Finding what they called their ventures stopped, the crews of the packets refused to go to sea without an increase of pay all round. These ventures, they contended, had been recognised from time immemorial and went in place of so much wages. How else would it have been possible for them, many of them men with wives and families, to subsist on a pittance of 23s. a month? The Post Office was forced to yield to the demand; and as the immediate result of his first essay in the cause of economy, Walsingham had the mortification of seeing the cost of the packet establishment increased by more than £2300 a year.

From Falmouth Walsingham turned his attention to other ports where packets were stationed. At Dover and at Harwich the establishments were too small to admit of any reduction. At the latter port, indeed, what little change took place was on the side of increase, the victualling allowance being raised from 7-1/2d. a day for each man to 9d., so as to be uniform with that given at Falmouth; and for the same reason the seamen's wages were raised from 23s. a month to 28s.

With Holyhead the case was different. Here Walsingham had resolved upon making a reduction, and it was only on an earnest remonstrance from the Marquis of Buckingham, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, that he abandoned his intention. The Holyhead packets were at this time five in number, and they were of seventy tons each and carried twelve hands. Walsingham held that this tonnage and complement of men were more than enough; and Buckingham maintained a directly contrary opinion. Between England and Ireland, he urged, the number of passengers was increasing every year, and surely this was not a time to lessen the confidence of the public in the security of the packets. The danger of navigation in those seas could not, he felt sure, be appreciated. He had himself crossed the Channel in all weathers. Once he had been nearly lost, and not on that occasion alone he had seen the crews, though at their full complement, absolutely prostrate with their exertions. Could it be known that, for purposes of passenger traffic, the captains of the Holyhead packets had recently built and fitted out at their own expense a sloop named the Duchess of Rutland; and that for this sloop, which, although vastly superior in point of accommodation to any one of the packets, was of no higher tonnage, the complement had been fixed at twelve hands? This would shew what was the opinion on the point of those who were most competent to judge. The fact, moreover, that Ireland had undertaken to pay to Great Britain the sum of 2d. on every letter passing to and fro placed the English Post Office under a sort of moral obligation not to reduce the amount of accommodation and security existing at the time the undertaking was given. Such were the arguments by which Buckingham prevailed upon Walsingham to abandon his intention. He at the same time hinted that there were other objects to which Walsingham's energies might more properly be directed. "Does your Lordship know," he asked, "that an immense communication of letters is kept up by the Liverpool packets[62] which sail weekly to Dublin?"

One line of packets remains, the line between Milford Haven and Waterford. Here five boats were employed, of which three were of eighty tons and the others somewhat less; and the service was six days a week. This, though the youngest of the packet stations, was by no means the least interesting. It had been opened in April 1787; and in the first year the proceeds from passengers alone amounted to more than £1200. No doubt had been entertained that in the matter of letters there would be an equally satisfactory account to render; but it soon became evident that all hopes on this score must be given up. The Irish Post Office was no longer subject to the Post Office of England; and in the supposed interests of Dublin, which regarded with jealousy the postal facilities enjoyed by the southern towns, advantage was taken of this freedom from control to checkmate the new service. From Waterford the post for Cork had been used to start at two o'clock in the afternoon, an hour most convenient for the packets. Under orders from Dublin it was now to start at twelve; and, as shewing the vexatiousness of the proceeding, an express leaving Waterford as late as four o'clock would overtake the mail at Carrick, a distance of no more than fifteen miles. Under the same orders Limerick was forbidden to send letters by way of Waterford; and the post between this town and Clonmel was reduced from six days a week to three. This was a state of things which, under the system of Home Rule then existing, Walsingham was powerless to remedy. He could only lift his hands in amazement that such perversity should be possible.

But it was not exclusively or even mainly to the packet establishment that Walsingham's attention was directed. There was no part of the Post Office with which he did not make himself thoroughly acquainted; and in the course of his investigations nothing struck him more than the pitiable condition of the clerks of the roads. The case of these men had been gradually getting worse and worse. It is true that ten years before a part of the salaries and pensions for which they were responsible had been transferred to the State; but the relief thus afforded had been neutralised and more than neutralised by the decrease which had since taken place in their emoluments from the franking of newspapers. Of these emoluments, indeed, little now remained. In the seventeen years from 1772 to 1789 the notices served upon the Post Office by members of Parliament to send newspapers into the country free had risen from a little more than 2000 to 7000, and the number of newspapers which these 7000 notices covered amounted to no less than 65,760 a week. In the face of such competition the special privilege enjoyed by the clerks of the roads was practically valueless, and Walsingham and Carteret clearly discerned that to compensate them for the loss of their emoluments by an increase of salary was an act dictated no less by justice than policy.

The case indeed was urgent if a catastrophe were to be averted; and Carteret, whose experience led him to believe that the salaries would not be increased with the consent of the Treasury, proposed to increase them without. Walsingham was shocked at the audacity of the proposal, and read his colleague a homily on the constitutional proprieties. "I know," replied Carteret, "we shall have the power of increasing salaries with the consent of the Treasury, but many may starve before that consent comes." Even Walsingham admitted the gravity of the occasion; and with the full knowledge that at this time no representation from the Post Office reached the Treasury which did not come under Pitt's own observation, the two peers, after recommending a substantial measure of relief, concluded their letter thus: "We shall find ourselves compelled, if the present weight of Parliamentary and official duties shall make it impossible for your Lordships to give us the authority we request in the course of a week, to take it upon ourselves to issue the money at our own risk, or the persons who are the object of this relief will be unable to attend their duty, and the business of the office will be literally at a stand." Whatever Pitt may have thought of the somewhat unusual terms of this address, he allowed no sign of dissatisfaction to escape him, and the authority sought was given.

As long as Walsingham confined his attention to the packets and the clerks of the roads, there was no danger of a collision with Palmer. Palmer, on the contrary, offered his congratulations to Walsingham on the improvement which he had been instrumental in making in these officers' condition. It was when Walsingham gave an instruction which even indirectly affected the inland posts that Palmer's jealousy was aroused. This he regarded as his own peculiar domain, a domain upon which even the postmasters-general themselves were trespassers; and a trespass or what he considered as such he never lost an opportunity of resenting. The earliest and not the least curious illustration of these pretensions appears in the case of the King's coach. In the summer of 1788 the King repaired to Cheltenham for the purpose of drinking the waters, and Walsingham, who was above all things a courtier, had arranged that during the royal visit a mail-coach should be stationed at that town for the exclusive use of His Majesty. The coach was to be a new one, sent down from London for the occasion, and the leading contractor on the Cheltenham road, one Wilson by name, was to provide the horses. The royal visit at an end, the contractor's bill was sent in, and Palmer, in forwarding it to Walsingham, professed to be extremely dissatisfied with the magnitude of the charge. On the sale of the horses and harness alone, after only a month's use, there had been a loss of £550. "Nothing," he said, "could have been more absurdly or extravagantly conducted." But the thing was done. It would be useless to dispute the payment. Besides, it would "soil the compliment" designed to His Majesty. "We must," he added, "take more care next time, for, had it been properly settled, the loss at most could not have exceeded £300."