The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

by James Wilson Hyde

Lack of interest in the mails did not, however, stand in the way of their turning the post to account in favour of their visitors; for in another official report the following observation is made on the subject of franking: "The Post-office is not of the consequence or recommendation to an inn which it used to be before the restriction in franking took place; and a traveller, now finding that my host at the public office is deprived of that privilege, moves over to the Red Lyon."

When mail-coaches came to be put upon the road, the necessity for having postmasters other than innkeepers forced itself upon the authorities, so that there should be an independent check upon the contractors, and a better regulation of the arrival and departure of the mails, with less chance of excuse for delays; and thus a change was brought about in the status of country postmasters.

But postmasters in the old days do not seem to have been uniformly happy in their posts. The following from a surveyor's report of December 1792, relating to the postmaster of Wetherby, in Yorkshire, shows this, and no doubt describes the case accurately. The Wetherby office had been made more important by some rearrangement of posts, with the result which the surveyor thus pathetically brings under notice: "The Postmaster-General's humanity, I humbly apprehend, would be very much affected if they knew exactly the situation of this poor deputy. He has now experienced the difference between his former snug duty and the very great fatigue of a large centre office, and labour throughout almost the whole of every night since the 10th October 1791. Also the very heavy expenses incurred thereby for assistance, coal, candles, paper, wax, &c., without any addition to his salary. To add to his distresses—for he is not rich" (who ever heard of a rich postmaster?)—"he has been so closely pressed from the Bye-letter Office for his balance due there as to have been compelled to borrow money to discharge them, at the very time that he could not obtain any account from the General Office, nor warrants for payment of as large sums due to him."

It is not difficult to picture this poor postmaster of Wetherby, tied to duty all night long arranging his mails by the light of a guttering candle, and smarting under financial difficulties; the Head Office squeezing him for revenue with one hand, and holding back what was due to him for his services with the other.

Sometimes country Post-offices would be the scene of small gatherings late at night, waiting the arrival of the mail, as was the case at Dumfries in 1799, when some few of the inhabitants would wait up till ten, eleven, or twelve o'clock to receive the English newspapers, so eager were they to peruse them.

Similar anxiety to be first in possession of commercial or political news conveyed through the newspapers was no doubt common to all business centres at the period referred to; though in our own age such information is largely anticipated and discounted by the telegraph, and in this respect the circumstances have changed. Senex, in 'Glasgow Past and Present,' humorously describes the scene enacted at the Tontine Coffee Rooms, in Glasgow, during the French War, at the close of last century, on the arrival of the mail. He says:—"Immediately on receiving the bag of papers from the Post-office, 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, and making a sudden rush into the middle of the room, he tossed up the whole lot of newspapers as high as the ceiling. 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."

Again, when a mail was passing through a town between stages in the middle of the night, the postmaster, awoke by the postboy's horn, would present himself at an upper window and take in his bag by means of a hook and line, his body shivering the while in the cold night blast.

An instance of such a proceeding is given by Williams in his history of Watford, where the destinies of the post were, at the time, presided over by a postmistress. "In response," says he, "to the thundering knock of the conductor, the old lady left her couch, and thrusting her head, covered with a wide bordered night-cap, out of the bedroom window, let down the mail bag by a string, and quickly returned to her bed again." Coming thus nightly to the open window in her night dress could not have been without its risks to a delicate creature like the postmistress.

These postmasters required looking after occasionally, however, for they sometimes did wrong. In 1668 the postmaster of Edinburgh got into trouble by levying charges of 1d., 2d., or 3d. upon letters over and above the proper rates, and he was peremptorily ordered to discontinue the practice.