A Hundred Years by Post: A Jubilee Retrospect

by James Wilson Hyde

It was set on foot by some of the post-office clerks on their own account; but it was not till 1838 that it became a recognised business of the Department. Owing to high rates of commission, and to high postage, little business was done in the earlier years. In 1839 less than 190,000 orders were issued of the value of £313,000, while last year the total number of transactions within the United Kingdom was 9,228,183, representing a sum of nearly £23,000,000 sterling.

In the year 1861 the Post Office entered upon the business of banking by the establishment of the Post Office Savings Banks. At the present time there are upwards of 9000 offices within the kingdom at which Post Office Savings Bank business is transacted. The number of persons having accounts with these banks is now 4,220,927, and the annual deposits represent a gross sum of over £19,000,000.

In order of time the next additional business taken up by the Department was that of the telegraphs. Before 1870 the telegraph work for the public was carried on by several commercial companies and by the railway companies; but in that year this business became a monopoly, like the transmission of letters, in the hands of the Post Office. The work of taking over these various telegraphs, and, consolidating them into a harmonious whole, was one of gigantic proportions, requiring indomitable courage and unwearying energy, as well as consummate ability; and when the history of this enterprise comes to be written, it will perhaps be found that the undertaking, in magnitude and importance, comes in no measure short of the Penny Postage scheme of Sir Rowland Hill.

In the first year of the control of the telegraphs by the Post Office the number of messages sent was nearly 9,472,000, excluding 700,000 press messages. At that time the minimum charge was 1s. per message. In 1885 the minimum was reduced to 6d., and under this rate the number of messages rose last year to 62,368,000.

The most recent addition of importance to the varied work of the Post Office is that of the Parcel Post. This business was started in 1883. In the first year of its operation the number of inland parcels transmitted was upwards of 22,900,000. Last year the number, including a proportion of foreign and colonial parcels, rose to 39,500,000, earning a gross postage of over £878,547. The uniform rates in respect of distance, the vast number of offices where parcels are received and delivered, and the extensive machinery at the command of the Post Office for the work, render this business one of extreme accommodation to the public. Not only is the Parcel Post taken advantage of for the transmission of ordinary business or domestic parcels, but it is made the channel for the exchange of all manner of out-of-the-way articles. The following are some instances of the latter class observed at Edinburgh: Scotch oatmeal going to Paris, Naples, and Berlin; bagpipes for the Lower Congo, and for native regiments in the Punjaub; Scotch haggis for Ontario, Canada, and for Caebar, India; smoked haddocks for Rome; the great puzzle "Pigs in Clover" for Bavaria, and for Wellington, New Zealand, and so on. At home, too, curious arrangements come under notice. A family, for example, in London find it to their advantage to have a roast of beef sent to them by parcel post twice a week from a town in Fife. And a gentleman of property, having his permanent residence in Devonshire, finds it convenient, when enjoying the shooting season in the far north-west of Scotland, to have his vegetables forwarded by parcel post from his home garden in Devonshire to his shooting lodge in Scotland. The postage on these latter consignments sometimes amounts to about fifteen shillings a day, a couple of post-office parcel hampers being required for their conveyance.

And we should not omit to mention here the number of persons employed in the Post by whom this vast amount of most diverse business is carried on for the nation. Of head and sub-postmasters and letter receivers, each of whom has a post-office under his care, there are 17,770. The other established offices of the Post Office number over 40,500, and there are, besides, persons employed in unestablished positions to the number of over 50,000. Thus there is a great army of no less than 108,000 persons serving the public in the various domains of the postal service.

A century ago, and indeed down to a period only fifty years ago, the world, looked at from the present vantage-ground, must appear to have been in a dull, lethargic state, with hardly any pulse and a low circulation. As for nerve system it had none. The changes which the Post Office has wrought in the world, but more particularly in our own country, are only to be fully perceived and appreciated by the thoughtful. Now the heart of the nation throbs strongly at the centre, while the current of activity flows quickly and freely to the remotest corners of the state. The telegraph provides a nervous system unknown before. By its means every portion of the country is placed in immediate contact with every other part; the thrill of joy and the moan of desolation are no longer things of locality; they are shared fully and immediately by the whole; and the interest of brotherhood, extending to parts of the country which, under other conditions, must have remained unknown and uncared for, makes us realise that all men are but members of one and the same family.

The freedom and independence now enjoyed by the individual, as a result of the vast influence exercised by society through the rapid exchange of thought, is certainly a thing of which the people of our own country may well be proud. Right can now assert itself in a way which was entirely beyond the reach of our predecessors of a hundred years ago; and wrong receives summary judgment at the hands of a whole people. Yet there is a growing danger that this great liberty of the individual may become, in one direction, a spurious liberty, and that the elements of physical force, exerting themselves under the ægis of uncurbed freedom, may enter into conspiracy against intellect, individual effort, and thrift in such a way as to produce a tyranny worse than that existing in the most despotic states.

The introduction of the telegraph, and the greater facilities afforded by the press for the general distribution of news, have greatly changed the nature of commercial speculation. Formerly, when news came from abroad at wide intervals, it was of the utmost consequence to obtain early command of prices and information as to movements in the markets, and whoever gained the news first had the first place in the race. Nowadays the telegraph, and the newspapers by the help of the telegraph, give all an equal start, and the whole world knows at once what is going on in every capital of the globe. The thirst for the first possession of news in commercial life is happily described in Glasgow Past and Present, wherein the author gives an account of a practice prevailing in the Tontine Reading Rooms at the end of last century. "Immediately on receiving the bag of papers from the post-office," says the writer, "the waiter locked himself up in the bar, and after he had sorted the different papers and had made them up in a heap, he unlocked the door of the bar, and making a sudden rush into the middle of the room, he then tossed up the whole lot of newspapers as high as the ceiling of the room. Now came the grand rush and scramble of the subscribers, every one darting forward to lay hold of a falling newspaper. Sometimes a lucky fellow got hold of five or six newspapers and ran off with them to a corner, in order to select his favourite paper; but he was always hotly pursued by some half-dozen of the disappointed scramblers, who, without ceremony, pulled from his hands the first paper they could lay hold of, regardless of its being torn in the contest. On these occasions I have often seen a heap of gentlemen sprawling on the floor of the room and riding upon one another's backs like a parcel of boys. It happened, however, unfortunately, that a gentleman in one of these scrambles got two of his teeth knocked out of his head, and this ultimately brought about a change in the manner of delivering the newspapers."