In May, 1876, Mr. C. H. B. Patey, Principal Clerk in the Post Office Department, testified that the Post Office was losing $100,000 a year by transmitting 220,000,000 words for the newspaper press at an average price of 8 cents per 100 words. Mr. Patey said 180,000,000 words were being carried at the rate of 4 cents per 100 words, or for $74,180 in the aggregate; and 40,000,000 were being transmitted at the rate of 24 cents per 100 words, or, for $109,795 in the aggregate.[106] Mr. Patey submitted no calculations in support of his statement that there had been a loss of $100,000 on newspaper messages yielding $183,975. But he cited two illustrations from Hull and the Nottingham-Sheffield-Leeds-Bradford group of towns. He stated that the Post Office received $1,600 a year for messages transmitted to six newspapers in Hull, and spent $5,275 on the transmission of those messages. He added that the service supplied to nineteen towns included in the Nottingham-Sheffield-Leeds-Bradford group of towns yielded $21,760, and cost the Post Office $38,270.[107]
In 1876, the Postmaster General, through Mr. S. A. Blackwood, Financial Secretary to the Post Office,[108] asked the Select Committee on the Post Office (Telegraph Department) to recommend to Parliament that the tariff on newspaper press messages be made “24 cents for 75 words or 100 words for each separate town to which each message may be sent, and that the 4 cent copy rate be limited to copies delivered by hand in the same town.” That, it will be remembered, was the proposal made and withdrawn in 1868 by Mr. Scudamore. The Select Committee recommended that the amount of the loss on the newspaper press messages be clearly ascertained, and that the copy rates be raised sufficiently to cover that loss. But Parliament failed to act on the recommendation.
Mr. Patey had supported Mr. Blackwood’s request with the statement, based upon inquiry of postmasters throughout the United Kingdom, that “in a very large number of towns only a small part of the telegraphic news transmitted was inserted in the newspapers. In many cases, on inquiry of the proprietors, it was stated that it was not inserted inasmuch as it was not of interest to the readers. In other cases, because the amount of local news was more than would admit of the special telegraphic news being inserted.” Mr. Patey also had quoted from a recent issue of the Glasgow Herald the statement, that “there was not a leading provincial paper in the Kingdom, the sub-editorial room of which was not littered in the small hours of the morning ankle deep with rejected telegraph flimsy;” and from a recent issue of the Freeman’s Journal: “The fact is, that the Post Office, and the better class of papers as well, are both over-pressed with these cheap duplicate telegrams. We suppose we pay for about ten times as many as we print. Though we get them, and pay for them, so as to insure having the best news from every quarter, we regard them rather as a nuisance, and would be glad to have them reduced in quantity.” And finally, Mr. Patey had argued that the newspaper press was able to pay much more than it did pay, “inasmuch as there had been a tendency on the part of the papers generally, not confined only to the large papers,” to get their news by special messages prepared by their own agents and not sent in duplicate to any extent.[109]
Before the Select Committee on the Revenue Departments Estimates, 1888, Mr. C. H. B. Patey, Third Secretary to the Post Office, stated: “We believe that the tariff under which the press messages are sent in this country causes a loss amounting to nearly $1,000,000 a year.”[110] In August, 1888, in the House of Commons, Mr. Cochrane-Baillie asked the Postmaster General “whether in view of the Report of the Committee on the Revenue Departments Estimates, he could state that the Government would bring in further legislation to relieve the country from the loss incurred by the present arrangement in connection with press telegrams?” The Postmaster General replied that “he was quite in accord with the Committee on Revenue Departments but he feared it would be difficult to effect any change, since the newspaper press tariff was fixed by the Act of 1868, and had been in force for upward of eighteen years.”[111]
Annual loss on Newspaper Messages estimated at $1,500,000
In November, 1893, Mr. Arnold Morley, Postmaster General, stated in the House of Commons that “the best estimate that can be formed by the officials at the Post Office points to the loss on the newspaper press telegrams being at least $1,500,000 a year; and it probably is still more.”[112] In April, 1895, Mr. Arnold Morley, Postmaster General, repeated the foregoing statement, and “maintained it in spite of various statements to the contrary in the newspapers.” He added: “and I should be quite willing to arrange for an impartial investigation such as is suggested by the Right Honorable Gentleman, if I were to receive satisfactory assurances that the press would abide by the result of an inquiry, and would undertake not to oppose the passage of the necessary legislation for a corresponding revision in the charges, if it should be shown that they are insufficient to provide for the cost of the service.”[113] The assurances were not forthcoming; and the newspaper press tariff remained unchanged.
In April, 1900, Mr. R. W. Hanbury, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and representative in the House of Commons of the Postmaster General, a member of the House of Lords, said: “The penny postage realizes an enormous revenue and brings in a profit, but every other part of the Post Office work is carried on at a loss. The whole profit is on the penny letter.”[114]
Betting on Horse Races subsidized
The Telegraph Act of 1868 provided that newspaper rates should be given to “the proprietor or occupier of any news room, club, or exchange room.”[115] The clubs or exchange rooms in question are largely what we should term “pool-rooms,” places maintained for the purpose of affording the public facilities for betting on horse races.[116] In 1876 Mr. Saunders, proprietor of the Central News Press Association, testified that his association would send in the course of a day to the same list of addressees the results of a number of races. The words in the several messages might not aggregate 75 words, and thus his association would be charged for the transmission of one message only. In that way a number of messages would be transmitted “gratuitously.” Mr. Saunders added that, in 1875, the Post Office had transmitted gratuitously for his association 446,000 sporting messages. Mr. Patey, Third Clerk in the Post Office, added that while the Post Office received 4 cents for transmitting from 8 to 10 sporting messages, it had to make 8 to 10 separate deliveries, by messenger boy, on account of those messages which were counted as one; and that each such delivery cost the Post Office on an average two cents. Thus, on a recent date, the Post Office had delivered the results of the Lichfield races to 205 addressees by means of 1,640 separate deliveries, and had received for the service, on an average, one-half a cent per separate message.[117]