The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

by James Wilson Hyde

The greater portion of the diamonds found in Griqualand West, in South Africa, are sent weekly to England through the Post-office, made up in packets, which are forwarded as registered letters—the value of these remittances being collectively from £60,000 to £100,000. In April 1880, the sailing of the mail-steamer from Cape Town having been delayed until the day after the arrival of the up-country mails, the bag containing the registered correspondence was left in the registered-letter office of the Cape Town Post-office; not, however, locked up in the safe, where it ought to have been, but carelessly left underneath one of the tables. During the night the office was broken into, and the whole of the diamonds stolen, valued at £60,000. Who the robbers were appears never to have been discovered, and they have doubtless since been in the enjoyment of the fruits of their villainous enterprise. As it is the practice of people in the diamond trade to insure packets of diamonds sent by them, the senders did not suffer anything beyond inconvenience by this robbery; but the insurance companies were involved in the loss, and had to pay claims amounting to £60,000.

The following is an account of a robbery attempted upon a postman in London in July 1847, as officially reported at the time:—

"An attempt was this morning made to murder or seriously to maim Bradley, the Lombard Street letter-carrier, with a view of obtaining possession of the letters for his district. He was passing through Mitre Court, a narrow passage between Wood Street and Milk Street, when the gate of the Court was closed and locked behind him with a skeleton key by, it is believed, three men, who followed him a few yards farther on in the passage. On Bradley getting to a wider part of the Court, one of them felled him to the ground by a heavy blow from a life-preserver; he attempted to rise, but was again knocked down in a similar manner. He then felt that they tried to force from him his letter-bags, but fortunately the mouths of them were, for security, twisted round his arm. They continued their blows; but Bradley retained sufficient consciousness to call out 'Murder!' so as to be heard by some of the porters in the adjoining warehouses, who ran to see what was the matter, but unluckily the villains escaped. Poor Bradley is most seriously injured—so much so that he may be considered in some danger."

An idea of the amount of property the thieves would have obtained had Bradley not held the bags tightly (even under such circumstances), may be formed from the fact that he had in his possession thirty-seven registered letters containing property, besides all the other letters for Messrs Overend, Gurney, & Co., Robarts, Curtis, & Co., Glynn & Co., the London and County Bank, as well as those for thirty-four other houses in Lombard Street. It was believed at the time that the value of the property in Bradley's possession amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

A daring robbery of a Berlin postman occurred not very long ago, when the outrage was accompanied by a still more atrocious crime—the murder of the postman. The man was one of a class who deliver money remittances at the addresses of the persons to whom they are sent, under a system which prevails in some countries of the Continent, and he had with him cash and notes to the amount of some £1500. The robber and murderer, a man of great bodily strength, had so arranged that a small remittance would fall to be delivered at his address on Monday morning—an occasion when a large number of remittances are received; and on the postman reaching the place, and proceeding to pay the requisite sum, the occupier of the premises felled him with a hammer, and with repeated blows killed him outright. It was evident from the circumstances that the murderer had duly planned the outrage, for the room rented was near to the starting-point of the postman, so that he should not have paid away any portion of his charge when he reached the room. The body of the poor postman was found afterwards cold and stiff, lying in a pool of blood, with his empty and rifled bag beside him; and the weapon with which the perpetrator had achieved the murder, remained there as a witness of the crime. The murderer was said to have previously served in a cuirassier regiment. Before decamping, he had turned the key in the door of his room; and the discovery was only made after a search by the Post-office authorities at the addresses at which the postman had to call, on his failing to return later in the day.

Some years ago the following extensive robbery of letters occurred in London. An unusually large number of complaints were found to be reaching the General Post-office, of the non-receipt by merchants, bankers, and others carrying on business in Lombard Street and its neighbourhood, of letters containing bank-notes, cheques, advices, and important correspondence, sent to them from all parts of the kingdom. The circumstance naturally gave rise to careful inquiry on the part of the Post-office authorities, with the result that suspicion fell upon a young postman of nineteen years of age, through whose hands many of the missing letters would in ordinary course have to pass. Certain Bank of England notes, which had been contained in some of the letters, were found to have been cashed; and the names endorsed upon them, though fictitious, were in a handwriting resembling that of the young man suspected. Thereupon he was arrested and searched, when in a pocketbook on his person were found two £5 notes, which had been forwarded from Norfolk to a banking-house in London, but had failed to reach their destination. In a pocket in his official coat were found also some thirty-five letters of various dates, which he had neglected to deliver, to the inconvenience or loss no doubt of the persons addressed; but the most astonishing part of the business is, that when his locker or cupboard at the General Post-office was examined, about 1500 letters were found there which he had stopped, the dates upon the envelopes showing that his delinquencies had extended over several months. This young man, upon being tried for the offences named, was convicted, and with the usual severity observed in similar circumstances, the judge passed upon the prisoner a sentence of six years' penal servitude.

The following curious instance of the wholesale misappropriation of post-letters also came under the notice of the Post-office authorities in London a few years ago:—

A man was observed one day carrying off some boards from a building in course of erection in the Wandsworth Bridge Road, Fulham, and being pursued by a constable, he dropped the timber and made off. The man was, however, captured and taken to the police-station, whereupon the place where he lived was searched for other stolen property. His habitation was situated upon a waste piece of ground on the banks of the Thames, the erection being of wood built upon piles, and so placed as to be almost entirely surrounded by water. Here this man, who was a barge-owner, and who was passing under an assumed name, had lived in isolation for about a year; the position selected for his home being one calculated to afford him that complete seclusion from social intercourse which would seem to have been his aim. In the course of their examination of the contents of the hut, the police found not only more stolen timber, but various other articles, the chief of which, in the present connection, were a large lot of post-letters, mail-bags, and articles of postmen's clothing, besides milk-cans and a case of forty rifles. As the inquiry proceeded, it became known that the prisoner was a Post-office pensioner, having been superannuated from his office of postman some three years previously, after having served in that capacity a period of fifteen years. It would seem that his official delinquencies had extended over some six or eight years; but so far as the letters showed, theft in the ordinary sense could hardly have been the man's purpose, inasmuch as the letters had not been opened, with one exception, and in this instance the person for whom the letter was intended could not be found. The motive underlying this free departure from the ways of honesty seems to have had its root in simple acquisitiveness; the hundredweight of letters, book-packets, &c., the old mail-bags, discarded uniforms, and waste official papers (not to mention the thirty milk-cans, supposed to have been picked up when going his rounds as a postman, and the case of rifles), having been turned to no profitable account. Had the superannuated postman opened the letters found in his premises, the punishment which would have followed would necessarily have been severe. As the case stood, however, he was merely charged under the Post-office Acts with their unlawful detention, and sentence was passed upon him of eighteen months' imprisonment with hard labour. It seems astonishing that this postman should have had the folly to retain about him so long the evidences of his errors, which might at any time have been brought up against him; but, perhaps, the feeling prompting this may be akin to that which leads criminals to visit the scenes of former iniquities, even when incurring the risk of discovery, and if discovered, of certain punishment.

The following is a case of robbery which occurred in 1883, as reported by the newspapers of the day, the culprit being quite a young person:—

"The most destructive and important case of robbery in connection with Mr Fawcett's plan, introduced some two or three years ago, for facilitating the placing of small sums, by means of postage-stamps, in the Post-office Savings Bank, came before the Bristol magistrates to-day, when Ellen Hunt, a domestic servant, about sixteen years of age, was charged with stealing a large number of letters, some of them containing cheques, the property of the Postmaster-General. Mr Clifton, who prosecuted, said the robberies were of a very extensive character, and might have been fraught with the direst consequences. They had been discovered in a singular manner, no money having been missed: but a large number of circular letters, addressed by the Bristol clerk to officials requiring to be sworn in connection with the School Board election this week, miscarried. Inquiries were made by the Postal authorities, when it was found that all these circulars had been posted at the Redcliffe district office, where the prisoner was the servant of the postmaster, Mr Devine. It was the custom of Mr Devine to place the key of the letter-box in a secret place for the use of himself and his assistants; but the prisoner discovered it, and the circular letters were found in her possession with the postage-stamps off them. They had been removed for payment into the Post-office Savings Bank on the forms by which a shilling's worth of postage-stamps saved up by school-children and others is now accepted by the Savings Bank department of the Post-office; but the most serious part of the case was the fact that in the prisoner's box were discovered the bundles of opened letters now produced by Detective Short, and containing cheques already discovered to the amount of £74, 16s., all of which had been sent through the same Post-office. The charge was laid under the 27th section of the Act, but formerly a prisoner would have been liable for such an offence to transportation for life. Some evidence having been given, the girl, who was hysterical throughout the hearing, was remanded. Apparently no effort had been made to deal with the cheques, but the detective stated that the numerous letters had been opened."