She was not a great reader of the newspapers, but persons on her round looked to her as an oracle, and derived information from her as to passing events. Hannah naively says that, as regards Christmas boxes, she fared very well in olden times, but they were not so plentiful in her later years. Hannah, through her devotion to her father when he was alive, and through her
assiduous attention to her duties as a humble servant of the Crown, had gained the respect of all those who knew her, both in her native village and on the long round she daily had to traverse. As she served the Post Office throughout her long life (her memory carrying her back to the days when the letters reached Bitton by mail coach and a "single" letter from London cost 10d.), it is gratifying that in her old age, when unable to continue to do her daily round, the Lords of the Treasury, under her exceptional circumstances, granted her half-pay pension, a sum which, with her savings, will serve to maintain her until the end of her days. The writer has had few more pleasurable duties than that which he undertook of presenting Hannah, in her neat and trim cottage, with her first pension warrant.
At the celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in the village, the opportunity was taken, in the midst of the festivities, to make a presentation of an elegant marble clock and purse to Miss Brewer. The inscription ran: "Presented during Her Majesty's Diamond Jubilee, together with a purse of money, by the inhabitants of the postal
district of Bitton, Gloucestershire, to Miss Hannah Brewer, postwoman, upon her retirement, having served this office from the commencement of Queen Victoria's reign."
Even Post Office surveyors are sometimes the subject of little jokes on the part of their subordinates. An assistant surveyor, when testing a rural postman's walk, said that if he had arranged the round originally, he should have taken a shortcut across the fields to a certain little hamlet so as to serve it before instead of after a more distant place, when the postman drily said that he should not have done anything of the kind, as there was a rhine about 18 ft. wide and very deep, which could not well be got over or through, and, turning to the surveyor, he remarked: "Evidently you never were a postman." The humour of this incident lies in the fact that the surveyors have always been drawn from the élite of the Service. A certain imperious surveyor visited a sub-office for the purpose of reprimanding the sub-postmaster for some delinquency, and after soundly rating the individual he addressed, and refusing to hear a single word in explanation, he, when his harangue was
over, was coolly informed that he had made a slight mistake, as the circumstance referred to another sub-office altogether.
On a certain occasion recently, on entering a Post Office the writer heard proceeding from a back room a voice, recognisable as that of the sub-postmaster, shouting out a greeting in his (the writer's) Christian name: "Come in, Robert." Well, the sub-postmaster thought he saw through the partly-curtained glass in the door a friend of that name, and meant no disrespect to his surveyor-postmaster.
On calling at another little Post Office on a Saturday, the aged sub-postmistress was washing her stone floor—down on her knees in business-like attitude. Without looking up, her greeting to the writer was: "Halloa! I thought you had been to Jericho. You have not been to see me for such a long time!" That salutation was rather embarrassing; but on getting to the perpendicular the old lady was the confused party, as she had thought her visitor was a local resident who occasionally looked in to have a cheery word with her.
It would seem that postal improvements in the Bristol district have been carried almost as far as is needful; indeed, in one district, not seven miles from the city, contemplated improvements whereby letters would be delivered an hour earlier in the morning and might be posted two hours later at night, and a day mail in and out be afforded, were declined by the parish authorities in council and by memorial from the villagers generally. In this rural hollow the people are very clannish, and rather than let their postwoman suffer a loss of two shillings a week, which the change involved, they were content to forego improved postal facilities, and were not greatly stirred by the "lasinesse of posts" as, according to history, was King James of old.