The first act for establishing a general post-office in all her majesty’s dominions was the 9th Anne, c. 10. This act, which remained long in force, was the foundation of all subsequent legislation. By its provisions a general post and letter office was established in London for Great Britain, Ireland, North America, the West Indies, or any other of her majesty’s dominions, or any country or kingdom beyond the seas. To this end chief offices were established in Edinburgh, at Dublin, at New York, and in other convenient places in her majesty’s colonies of America and the islands of the West Indies. The whole of these chief offices were to be under the control of an officer to be appointed by the queen by letters patent under the great seal, by the name and style of Her Majesty’s Postmaster-General. The improvements introduced by this act increased the importance of the post-office and added to the available revenue of the country. For ten years no further steps were taken to develop the service; but in 1720, Ralph Allen, immortalized by Pope, appeared on the scene, and he was destined to be one of the great improvers of the establishment. Mr. Allen, who at this time was postmaster of Bath, and who from his position was aware of the defects of the system, proposed to the government to establish cross-posts between Exeter and Chester, going by way of Bristol, Gloucester, and Worcester, thus connecting the west of England with the Lancashire district. The Bath postmaster proposed a complete reconstruction of the cross-post system, guaranteeing improvement to the revenue and increased accommodation to the public. The Lords of the Treasury granted him a lease of the cross-posts for life, his engagement being to bear all the costs of the new service and to pay a fixed rental of £6000 per year. The contract was several times renewed to Allen, the government on each occasion stipulating that the service should be extended. In this wise, in 1764, the period of Allen’s death, it was found that the cross-posts had extended to all parts of the country. Notwithstanding the losses he suffered through the dishonesty of country postmasters, Allen estimated the net profits of his contract at the sum of £10,000 annually: so that at the end of his official life he had made nearly half a million sterling. He bestowed a considerable part of his income in supporting needy men of letters. He was the friend of Fielding, of Pope, and Warburton. Fielding has drawn his character in the person of Allworthy, and Pope has celebrated his benevolence in the well-known lines,—
“Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame,
Do good by stealth and blush to find it fame.”
On Allen’s death the cross-posts were brought under the control of the postmaster-general, and the success of the amalgamation was so complete that at the end of the first year profits to the amount of £20,000 were handed over to the crown. In subsequent years the proceeds continued to increase still more rapidly, so that when the by-letter office was abolished in 1799 they had reached the sum of £200,000 per annum.
In the time of George I. the whole London post-office establishment, which at present numbers several thousand officers of different grades, was worked, without counting letter-carriers, by a staff of thirty-two persons only.
The treasury warrants—warrants directed to the masters of packet service, towards 1701—franked, as Mr. Lewins observes, the strangest commodities. Among others, fifteen couple of hounds going to the King of the Romans, two maid-servants going as laundresses to my lord ambassador Methuen, Doctor Chrichton, carrying with him a case and divers necessaries, two bales of stockings for the use of the ambassador to the court of Portugal, and four flitches of bacon for Mr. Pennington, of Rotterdam. Nor were these the only abuses. So little precaution was used in the reigns of George I. and George II. that thousands of letters passed through the post-office with the forged signatures of members. Even in the early part of the reign of George III. it was related, in the investigation of 1763, that one man had in the course of five months counterfeited one thousand two hundred dozens of franks of different members of Parliament. In the year 1763 the worth of franked correspondence passing through the post-office was estimated at £170,000. In 1764, when George III. had been four years on the throne, it was enacted that no letter should pass franked through the post-office unless the whole address was in the M. P.’s handwriting with his signature attached. In 1784, frauds still continuing, it was ordered that franks should be dated, the month should be given in full, such letters to be put into the post on the day they were dated. From 1784 to the date of the penny postage, no further regulations were made as to the franked correspondence, the estimated value of which during these years was £80,000 annually.
It was fifteen years after the death of the kindly and benevolent Allen, the postmaster of Bath, that John Palmer, also of Bath, and one of the greatest of post-office reformers, rose into notice. Originally a brewer, Mr. Palmer was in 1784 the manager of the Bath and Bristol theatres. Having frequently to correspond with and travel to London, Mr. Palmer found that letters which left Bath on the Monday night were not delivered in London until the Wednesday afternoon or night, but that the stage-coach which left through the day on Monday arrived in London on the following morning. He pointed out to the authorities that commercial men and tradesmen, for safety and speed, sent their correspondence as parcels, robberies from carelessness and incompetence of post-office servants being then frequent. Mr. Palmer was ready with remedies for these countless defects. In 1783 he submitted his scheme to Mr. Pitt, who lent a ready ear. The officials, however, were first to be consulted; and they, as is their wont, made many and sweeping objections to changes which they represented not only to be impracticable and impossible, but dangerous to commerce and the revenue. Mr. Pitt, however, as Mr. M. D. Hill says in an article on the post-office, inherited his great father’s contempt for impossibilities. He saw that Mr. Palmer’s scheme would be as profitable as it was practicable, and he resolved that it should be adopted.
Mr. Palmer was installed at the post-office on the day of the change, under the title of Controller-General. It was arranged that his salary should be £1500 a year, together with a commission of two and a half per cent. upon any excess of revenue over £240,000. The rates of postage were now slightly raised; but, notwithstanding, the number of letters began most perceptibly to increase. Several of the principal towns, and notably Liverpool and York, petitioned the treasury for the new mail-coaches. But, though manifest success attended the introduction of the Palmer scheme, yet the authorities were determinedly opposed to the reformer, and he had to contend with them single-handed. In 1792, when his plans had been about eight years in operation and were beginning to exhibit elements of success, it was deemed desirable that Palmer should surrender his appointment. In consideration, however, of his valuable services, a pension of £3000 per annum was granted to him; but this sum fell far short of the emoluments which had been promised to him, and he memorialized the government, but without success. He protested against this treatment, and his son, General Palmer, member for Bath, frequently urged his father’s claims before Parliament; but it was not until 1813, after a struggle of twenty years, that the House of Commons voted him a grant of £50,000. This great benefactor of his country died in 1818. In the first year of the introduction of his plans, the net revenue of the post-office was about £250,000. Twenty years afterwards, the proceeds had increased sixfold, to no less a sum than a million and a half,—an increase doubtless partly attributable to the increase of population, but mainly to the punctuality and security of the new arrangements. Mails not only travelled quicker, but Mr. Palmer augmented their number between the largest towns: three hundred and eighty towns, which had in the olden time but three deliveries a week, had in 1797 a daily delivery. The Edinburgh coach required less time by sixty hours to travel from London; and there was a corresponding reduction between towns at shorter distances. For many years after their introduction, not a single attempt was made to rob Palmer’s mail-coaches, which were efficiently guarded.
In 1836 there were fifty four-horse mails in England, whereas forty years before there was not a third of the number. We remember the annual procession of the mail-coaches on the king’s birthday,—a gay spectacle, which Mr. Lewins is not old enough to remember. Coachmen and guards on that occasion donned a new red livery, and all the coachmen and most of the guards wore bouquets in their button-holes. In the year 1814 the business of the post-office had increased so greatly that better accommodation was sought than was afforded by the office then in Lombard Street. The first general post-office, opened in Cloak Lane, was removed from thence to the Black Swan, in Bishopsgate Street. After the fire of 1666 a general post-office was opened in Covent Garden; but it was soon removed to Lombard Street. In 1825 the government acquiesced in the views of the great majority of London residents, and St. Martin’s-le-Grand was chosen for the site of a new building, to be erected from the designs of Sir R. Smirke.
It was opened for business in September, 1829. From the date of the opening, improvements ceased to be pertinaciously resisted. It was not, however, till the late Duke of Richmond became the postmaster-general, in the ministry of the late Earl Grey, in 1830, that improvements were earnestly forwarded by the head of the department. The duke, a highly public-spirited and patriotic man, was indefatigable in the service of the department over which he was placed from 1830 to 1834. At first his grace refused to accept any remuneration for his services; but at length, in compliance with the strong representations of the treasury lords as to the objectionable nature of gratuitous services, “which must involve in many cases the sacrifice of private fortune to official station,” he consented to draw his salary from the date of the treasury minute already referred to. In 1834, Lord Grey’s postmaster-general submitted a list of improvements to the treasury lords, in which at least thirty substantial measures of reform were proposed. It was under this functionary that amalgamation of the Irish and Scotch offices with the English took place.