Tradition hath it that Miss Hannah More, the celebrated authoress and philanthropist, when residing (1770) at Wrington, near Bristol, in the churchyard of which place her remains now repose, made an arrangement with the postman of the period whereby on passing along the road near her residence he was to signal to her when any event of importance had occurred. Her sitting and bedroom windows commanded a view of the walk near which the postman had to pass, so that she could see him coming, and she always hurried down to the wicket-gate in readiness to meet him when he put up his flag. A son of the postman, now alive, remembers well that his father told him that he had given the signal on the death of Queen, Caroline. It was outside the
postman's function, to wave the red flag with which Mistress Hannah, had provided him, but Post Office matters were not carried on so strictly in those days as under the present regime. The Wrington postman obtained the news about important passing events from the mail-man who rode through the village on his way from Bristol to Axbridge. George Vowles, who died twenty-six years ago, at the ripe age of 88 years, was the mail-man who conveyed to the villages on his way the news of the battle of Waterloo, brought down from London by the mail coach, which had been decorated with laurels and flowers in honour of the great event.
CHAPTER XVIII.
GENERAL FREE DELIVERY OF LETTERS.
No stone has been left unturned in the endeavour to afford a free delivery of letters at the door of every house in the district; and at last all houses and cottages, even in the remotest localities, have been reached, and the woodman, the gamekeeper, and the lone cottager now receive a daily visit from the postman. In visiting out of the way places of the kind with a view to arranging a delivery, the surveyor has to look out for dogs. A certain warren house in this district affords a typical case. It is far from the ordinary haunts of man, and was without an official delivery on account of its extreme inaccessibility. The approach is through a deep gorge, known as Goblin Combe, and the path to the house is precipitous. The gamekeeper residing there had to send to a farmhouse a mile and a quarter distant for his letters, which the obliging farmer had consented to take in for him. The attempts of the staff to arrange a method of
delivery by postmen had long been baffled. At the time when the writer went to view the place there was a rumour in the neighbourhood that, owing to serious depredations by poachers, fierce dogs roamed the enclosed warren; and on passing out on to the warren from the wood corner, there was observed standing on a wall near the house what in the distance and misty morn, appeared to be a large bloodhound, and so the advance had to be made warily. The attendant rural postman was armed with a riding whip, on which his grip tightened, for he had already been four times bitten by dogs, as the scars on his hand testified, and he desired to guard himself against another attack. At last, as the place was neared, the object of distrust was found to be—a large goat! Another out-of-the-way place in the same neighbourhood, also unserved by the postman, was a woodman's house in a dense wood, which, with its bowling-green, is said once to have been used by "Bristol bloods" of old time as a safe retreat where they could indulge in a little business connected with the prize ring and cock fighting. That the Duke of Norfolk's liberal policy in Her Majesty's Diamond Jubilee year has proved a boon
and a blessing to many residents in isolated spots is indicated, for instance, by what a poor woman living in a wild district stated. She had recently to trudge the whole way from her house to Bristol, a distance of eight miles out and eight miles back, while a letter which would have obviated her journey had been lying undelivered for days at a Post Office only two miles off.
Blaize Castle, which is within four miles of the Head Post Office, was singularly enough almost the last habitation in the Bristol district which was granted a free delivery of letters daily, for until 1898 the postman in his official capacity had never penetrated to that rock-elevated and remote part of the Blaize Woods where the castle stands. That reproach to the Bristol district has now been removed, and the custodians of the castle have obtained their rights as citizens of the great kingdom in having their letters delivered at the door daily by the Postmaster-General's representative. It was a difficult matter to find out all the houses at which the postman did not call, and this particular castle, which is now only occupied by caretakers, was not notified by the rural postman, as the