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

by Herbert Joyce

And yet, despite these exertions to maintain its superiority, the Post Office was not to remain in undisputed possession of the Irish traffic. Private steamers had begun to ply between Liverpool and Dublin, and the fares by these steamers were lower than by the Post Office packets from Holyhead. As a natural consequence, the passenger traffic to which the Post Office looked to recoup itself for the heavy expense to which it had been put in replacing sailing packets by steam packets was diverted to Liverpool.

Nor was it only in the matter of passengers that the Post Office lost by the competition. Its reputation also suffered. The mails for Ireland left Liverpool at three o'clock in the afternoon, before the Exchange was closed, and reaching Holyhead by way of Chester and Llangollen at six o'clock on the following morning, did not arrive in Dublin until the afternoon. The private steamers, on the contrary, did not leave Liverpool until the business of the day was over, and arrived in Dublin on the following morning. Hence comparisons were drawn not favourable to the Post Office; and it by no means tended to allay dissatisfaction that the owners of the private steamers were refused permission to carry the mails. This they had offered to do, in one case for nothing more than exemption from harbour and light dues; but at that time, strange as it may appear to us with our present experience, it was a fixed principle with the Post Office that private firms even of the highest eminence were not to be entrusted with the carriage of the public correspondence. Accordingly it was decided that between Liverpool and Dublin the Post Office should run its own packets, and the new service began on the 29th of August 1826. The opening was marred by a lamentable disaster. Early in September the Francis Freeling packet, a recently-built cutter named after the secretary, and reputed to be the finest vessel of its kind afloat, foundered during a heavy gale and all the passengers and crew were lost.

The new service, while an unquestionable convenience to the public, did not altogether satisfy the Post Office. It is true that, as a consequence of the increased accommodation, the letters for Ireland passing through Liverpool nearly doubled in number; but this satisfactory result was not without alloy. During the past few years the art of building as applied to steamboats had made rapid progress; and not only were the packets on the Liverpool station larger than those stationed at Holyhead, the horse-power of the engines being 170 in the one case as against 40 in the other, but they were altogether better equipped. The fares by the Liverpool route as fixed by the Post Office were also relatively lower, and to any one proceeding from London or the large manufacturing towns of the North the distance to be travelled by road was shorter. As a consequence, the diversion of traffic from Holyhead to Liverpool, notwithstanding the longer sea voyage, proceeded still more rapidly than when the steamers from the latter port were in private hands; and the Holyhead service, which had for some years produced a clear profit of many thousand pounds a year, was now carried on at a loss.

To the Post Office authorities, indeed, there was in connection with the four packet stations in communication with Ireland only one thing which gave them unqualified satisfaction. It was this—that to the Post Office belonged the credit of being first to demonstrate by practical experience that, to use Freeling's words, "steam vessels could force their way at all seasons of the year and in weather in which no sailing vessel, be her qualities what they might, would attempt to put to sea." Whether the claim is well founded or not we have no means of judging; we only know that it was made.

By land, at the beginning of the present century, communication with Ireland was in a more backward state than it was by water; and since the Union a very general opinion had prevailed that this communication should be improved. It would perhaps be too much to say that the British Post Office proved obstructive in the matter; but there can be no doubt that it did not lend the assistance it might have done, and the reasons are obvious. In the first place, a little soreness existed. No sooner had the Act of Union passed than the Government decided that between London and Dublin there must be an express in both directions daily. This, as the postmasters-general pointed out, would cost more than £4000 a year, and, as it was not required for Post Office purposes, the Post Office should not bear the cost. Accordingly the question as to the source from which the cost should be defrayed was reserved for future consideration; but after the express was well established, the Post Office received notice that it must defray the cost itself, and it continued to do so for twenty years and more. This was always a sore point with Freeling, and he constantly adduced it as an instance of unremunerative work.

Another reason which kept Lombard Street back from assisting to improve the communication with Ireland was that the British and Irish Post Offices approached the subject from different points of view. With the British Post Office the main object, an object which in its judgment was sufficiently well attained already, was the transmission of letters; with the Irish Post Office, as indeed with that section of the public which could best make its voice heard, the main object was the transport of passengers. Yet a third reason, we can well believe, was the conviction that for any improvement that might be made, though primarily for the sake of Ireland, the British and not the Irish Post Office would have to pay. These three reasons, we cannot doubt, were at the root of the manifest indisposition displayed by the British Post Office to meet what had gradually become a very general demand.

The first strenuous effort to induce the authorities in Lombard Street to improve the communication with Ireland was made in 1805, the prime mover in the matter being John Foster, the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer. At this time the mail-coach between London and Holyhead went by a circuitous route through Chester. Foster maintained that it should go direct through Coventry and Shrewsbury. By Coventry the distance was 264 miles, and by Chester 278 miles—a difference, in point of time, of more than two hours.

It was alleged that by the shorter route other delays which now took place might be avoided; but how important was a saving of even two hours may be judged from the fact that the time of the mail-coach leaving Holyhead was fixed with reference, not to the arrival of the packet from Dublin, but to the arrival of the coach in London. All the mail-coaches were timed to reach London early in the morning, so that the letters they brought might go out by the morning delivery. To effect this object, the mail-coach by the Chester route had to leave Holyhead at seven o'clock in the morning, an hour by which it was barely possible for the packet from Dublin to have arrived. During the whole of the year 1804, for instance, the Dublin mails arrived at Holyhead in time to catch the coach to London on only twelve occasions; and, of course, when the mails did not catch the coach, they had to remain idle at Holyhead until the following morning.

If, argued Foster, the route be by Shrewsbury and Coventry, the coach can leave Holyhead so much later that the occasions on which the Dublin mail does not arrive in time to catch it will be not as now the rule but the exception. Freeling set the suggestion aside as impracticable. The coach, he maintained, must go through Chester. At Chester centred all the correspondence from the great manufacturing towns of the North, from Liverpool and Manchester, from Hull, Halifax, and Leeds, indeed from all parts of Yorkshire and many other counties besides. Was this correspondence of no account? Or was it suggested that a second mail-coach should be established? Already the Post Office was paying many thousand pounds a year for an express service between London and Holyhead which it did not require. Could it in reason be expected to incur the further expense which a second mail-coach would involve? The thing was impossible, and the project could not be entertained.

Foster, though silenced for the time, was not convinced. In 1808 the subject was mooted again. Clancarty, who had recently been appointed joint postmaster-general with O'Neill, had arrived in London, prepared to argue the point with all the energy of his energetic nature. Foster was unable to come; but he had sent a memorandum which no one who was not thorough master of the subject could have produced. A meeting was appointed at Lord Hawksbury's office. Freeling poured out all the old objections, and proceeded to contend, as he had contended three years before, that the project was impracticable. But one was present there who did not believe in impracticabilities. This was the new Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Arthur Wellesley. Wellesley's opinion was emphatic—that all other considerations must be made subordinate to the one grand purpose of facilitating communication between the two capitals of London and Dublin. Freeling had encountered a stronger will than his own. What had been impossible before was possible now, and that very evening arrangements were begun to be devised for accelerating the Irish mails.