Her Majesty's Mails Part 13

[141] An attempt was made at further centralization a few years ago, when it was proposed to reduce the chief offices of Edinburgh and Dublin to the position of offices in other large towns, a measure which had the effect of rousing the people of the sister-countries to arms. The Commissioners of Post-Office Inquiry who sat in 1855 reported against the proposal, considering the present system to possess advantages to the public over those accruing from the suggested change.

[142] For information relative to the necessary qualifications, examinations, &c. of candidates for appointment in the metropolitan or provincial offices, see Appendix (C).

[143] The following list of Postmasters-General before this period, taken from a return made to the House of Commons, March 25, 1844, may not be uninteresting to some of our readers. After Sir Brian Tuke, the first "Master of the Postes," we find his successors to have been Sir William Paget, one of Henry VIII.'s Chief Secretaries of State, and John Mason, Esq. "Secretary for the French Tongue." "The fees or wages" of each of these functionaries are given at 66_l._ 13_s._ 6_d._ a-year. The reader will be familiar with the Postmasters-General under Elizabeth, James I., Charles I. and the Commonwealth. Coming to the reign of Charles II. we find Philip Froude, Esq. acting for the Duke of York from 1678 to 1688.

WILLIAM AND MARY.

Sir Robert Cotton; Thomas Frankland, Esq. 1690-1708

QUEEN ANNE.

Sir Thomas Frankland; Sir John Evelyn 1708-1715

GEORGE I.

Lord Cornwallis; James Craggs, Esq. 1715-1720 Edward Carteret, Esq.; Galfridus Walpole 1720-1733

GEORGE II.

Edward Carteret, Esq.; Lord Thomas Lovel 1733-1739 Sir John Eyles; Lord Lovel 1739-1744 Lord Lovel alone (now Earl of Leicester) 1744-1759 Earl of Besborough 1759

GEORGE III.

Earl of Egmont; Hon. R. Hampden 1762 Lord Hyde; Hon. R. Hampden 1763 Earl of Besborough; Lord Grantham 1765 Earl of Sandwich; Lord de Spencer 1768 Viscount Barrington; Hon. Henry Carteret 1782 Earl of Tankerville; Hon. H. Carteret 1784 Lord Carteret; Lord Walsingham 1787 Lord Walsingham; Earl of Chesterfield 1790 Earl of Chesterfield; Earl of Leicester 1794 Earl of Leicester; Lord Auckland 1798 Lord Auckland; Lord Charles Spencer 1801 Lord Spencer; Duke of Montrose 1804 Earl of Buckinghams.h.i.+re; Earl of Carysfort 1806 Earl of Chichester alone 1814 Earl of Chichester; Marquis of Salisbury 1816

When the Earl of Salisbury died in 1823, a successor was not appointed, the joint office being abolished, princ.i.p.ally through the exertions of the late Marquis of Normanby.

[144] See Appendix (A).

[145] For further information respecting this and all the other metropolitan offices, see Appendix (D). Extracts from the Revenue Estimates of 1864-5.

[146] The closing of the Birmingham old Savings' Bank, for example, must have greatly increased the work of the central office, and this will follow as a consequence if in other large towns the example of Birmingham be followed.

[147] Large as this staff undoubtedly is, it would have been larger but for timely changes in the system of keeping accounts. In 1855 the Civil Service Commission suggested various improvements in the organization, which resulted in a decrease of officers attached to some of the branches.

[148] Postmaster General's _Second Report_.

[149] See Appendix (A).

[150] _Head-office_ is the official term given to the independent post-towns, and such as are only subordinate to one of the three metropolitan offices. _Sub-offices_ are, of course, under the head-offices. _Receiving-offices_, at which letters are received, but not delivered, are also under the authority of the head-office of the neighbourhood. Those post-offices at which money-orders are issued and paid are designated _Money-order Offices_, and include all the head-offices and a large number of sub-offices, and a few receiving-offices. _Packet-Offices_ are those at which the regular mail-packets (s.h.i.+p-letters may be received or despatched. at any port) are received and from which they are despatched. London and Southampton are packet-offices for the Continental Mails, the East and West Indies, and South America. Liverpool, and Queenstown take the United States and Canada. The mail-packets for the Cape of Good Hope and the West Coast of Africa sail to and from Devonport.

[151] For further information respecting these offices, see Appendix (D), _Revenue Estimates_; also, for a statement of the amount of postage collected in our largest towns, see Appendix (E).

[152] The staff of the largest provincial offices usually consists of clerks, sorters, stampers, messengers, letter-carriers, and rural post-messengers. The _clerks_ are now princ.i.p.ally engaged on clerical duties, attending to the public on money-order business, &c. or in connexion with registered letters or unpaid-letter accounts. In offices where the staff is smaller, the clerks also engage in sorting and despatching letters. In many small country towns females are employed as clerks. The _sorters_ are princ.i.p.ally engaged in sorting duties.

_Stampers_ and _messengers_ do duties such as their designations denote.

_Letter-carriers_--the familiar "postmen" of every household--are almost exclusively engaged in delivering letters, &c. from door to door.

_Auxiliary letter-carriers_ are those only partially so employed, princ.i.p.ally on the largest, or early morning delivery. _Rural post-messengers_ is the official name for "country postmen," who make daily journeys among the villages and hamlets surrounding each town, delivering and taking up letters on their way.

[153] For fuller information on this head, see Appendix, to the Postmaster-General's _First Report_, pp. 71-4. The following forms part of a later Doc.u.ment (_Ninth Report_, 1862-3), and is interesting enough to be quoted entire: "Owing to the successful measures which the Department has adopted by means of bonds, frequent supervision, and care in the selection of persons admitted into the service, and afterwards promoted therein, very few losses have occurred, of late years at least, through defalcation. More than twenty years ago, however, a postmaster who owed the office 2,000_l._ but who had given security for only a part of that sum, absconded, leaving an unpaid debt of upwards of 1,000_l._ The recovery of the debt had long been considered hopeless, but a short time ago a letter was unexpectedly received from the postmaster's son enclosing a remittance in payment of part of his father's debt, and expressing a hope that after a time he should be able to pay the remainder--a hope which was soon realized, every farthing of the debt having now been discharged, in a manner most creditable to the gentleman concerned."

CHAPTER II.

ON THE CIRCULATION OF LETTERS.

In order to give the reader a proper idea of the channel through which ordinary correspondence flows--the circulation of letters in the Post-Office system--it will be necessary to devote a long chapter to the subject. We therefore propose to post an imaginary letter in the metropolis for a village in the far away North, following it from its place of posting till we finally see it deposited in the hands of the person to whom it is addressed.

THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE.

The General Post-Office, the great heart of the English postal system, is a fine and, now that so many district offices are opened in London, very convenient building. On the ground-floor the different offices attached to the Circulation and Mail departments are located. Upstairs we find the Secretary's department, that of the Receiver and Accountant-General, and other branches of the Circulation Office.

Approaching the large hall of the General Post-Office, through one of the three-columned porticoes, we post our letter, and as it is now nearly six o'clock P.M. we stand aside, for a few minutes only, to witness one of the most stirring scenes in the metropolis. Throughout the day, one side of the hall presents a busy enough scene, and its boxes, open for the receipt of correspondence for all parts of the world, are constantly beset with people. Not only do these huge slits still gape for letters, but the large windows, closed through the day, are thrown wide open as a quarter to six chimes from the neighbouring clocks. It is then that an impetuous crowd enters the hall, and letters and newspapers begin to fall in quite a literary hail-storm. The newspaper window, ever yawning for more, is presently surrounded and besieged by an array of boys of all ages and costumes, together with children of a larger growth, who are all alike pus.h.i.+ng, heaving, and surging in one great ma.s.s. The window, with tremendous gape, is a.s.saulted with showers of papers which fly thicker and faster than the driven snow. Now it is that small boys of eleven and twelve years of age, panting, Sinbad-like, under the weight of huge bundles of newspapers, manage somehow to dart about and make rapid _sorties_ into other ranks of boys, utterly disregarding the cries of the official policemen, who vainly endeavour to reduce the tumult into something like post-office order. If the lads cannot quietly and easily disembogue, they will whiz their missiles of intelligence over other people's heads, now and then sweeping off hats and caps with the force of shot. The gathering every moment increases in number and intensifies in purpose; arms, legs, sacks, baskets, heads, bundles, and woollen comforters--for whoever saw a veritable newspaper-boy without that appendage?--seem to be getting into a state of confusion and disagreeable communism, and "yet the cry is still they come." Heaps of papers of widely-opposed political views are thrown in together; no longer placed carefully in the openings, they are now sent in in sackfuls and basketfuls, while over the heads of the surging crowd were flying back the empty sacks, thrown out of the office by the porters inside. Semi-official legends, with a very strong smack of probability about them, tell of sundry boys being thrown in, seized, emptied, and thrown out again _void_. As six o'clock approaches still nearer and nearer, the turmoil increases more perceptibly, for the intelligent British public is fully alive to the awful truth that the Post-Office officials never allow a minute of grace, and that "Newspaper Fair" must be over when the last stroke of six is heard. _One_, in rush files of laggard boys who have purposely loitered, in the hope of a little pleasurable excitement; _two_, and grown men hurry in with their last sacks; _three_, the struggle resembles nothing so much as a pantomimic _melee_; _four_, a Babel of tongues vociferating desperately; _five_, final and furious showers of papers, sacks, and bags; and _six_, when all the windows fall like so many swords of Damocles, and the slits close with such a sudden and simultaneous snap, that we naturally suppose it to be a part of the Post-Office operations that attempts should be made to guillotine a score of hands; and then all is over so far as the outsiders are concerned.

Among the letter-boxes, scenes somewhat similar have been enacted.

Letters of every shape and colour, and of all weights have unceasingly poured in; tidings of life and death, hope and despair, success and failure, triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow; letters from friends and notes from lawyers, appeals from children and stern advice from parents, offers from anxious-hearted young gentlemen, and "first yesses" or refusals from young maidens; letters containing that snug appointment so long promised you, and "little bills" with requests for immediate payment, "together with six-and-eightpence;" cream-coloured missives telling of happy consummations, and black-edged envelopes telling of death and the grave; sober-looking advice notes, doubtless telling when "our Mr. Puffwell" would do himself the honour of calling on you, and elegant-looking billets in which business is never mentioned, all jostled each other for a short time; but the stream of gladness and of woe was stopped, at least for one night, when the last stroke of six was heard. The Post-Office, like a huge monster, to which one writer has likened it, has swallowed an enormous meal, and gorged to the full, it must now commence the process of digestion. While laggard boys, to whom cartoons by one "William Hogarth" should be shown, are muttering "too late," and retiring discomfited, we, having obtained the requisite "open sesame," will make our way to the interior of the building. Threading our course through several pa.s.sages, we soon find ourselves among enormous apartments well lit up, where hundreds of human beings are moving about, lifting, shuffling, stamping, and sorting huge piles of letters, and still more enormous piles of newspapers, in what seems at first sight hopeless confusion, but in what is really the most admirable order. In the newspaper-room, men have been engaged not only in emptying the sacks flung in by strong-armed men and weak-legged boys, but also in raking up the single papers into large baskets, and conveying them up and down "hoists," into various divisions of the building. Some estimate of the value of these mechanical appliances, moved of course by steam power, may be formed from the fact that hundreds of tons of paper pa.s.s up and down these lifts every week. As many of the newspapers escape from their covers in the excitement of posting, each night two or three officers are busily engaged during the whole time of despatch, in endeavouring to restore wrappers to newspapers found without any address. Great as is the care exercised in this respect, it will occasionally happen that wrong newspapers will find their way into loose wrappers not belonging to them, and under the circ.u.mstances it would be by no means a matter of wonder if--as has been more than once pointed out--Mr. Bright should, instead of his _Morning Star_, receive a copy of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, or an evangelical curate the _Guardian_ or _Punch_, in place of his _Record_ paper.

In the letter-room the officers are no less busily engaged: a number of them are constantly at work during the hours of the despatch, in the operation of placing each letter with the address and postage label uppermost, so as to facilitate the process of stamping. In the General Post-Office the stamping is partly effected by machinery and partly by hand, and consists simply in imprinting upon each letter the date, hour, and place of posting, while at the same time the Queen's head with which the letter is ornamented and franked gets disfigured.[154] It will easily be imagined that a letter containing a box of pills stands a very good chance of being damaged under this manipulation, as a good stamper will strike about fifty letters in a minute. Unpaid letters are kept apart, as they require stamping in a different coloured ink and with the double postage. Such letters create much extra labour, and are a source of incessant trouble to the Department, inasmuch as from the time of their posting in London to their delivery at the Land's End or John O'Groat's, every officer through whose hands they may pa.s.s has to keep a cash account of them. The double postage on such letters is more than earned by the Post-Office. All unfastened and torn letters, too, are picked out and conveyed to another portion of the large room, and it requires the unremitting attention of several busy individuals to finish the work left undone by the British public. It is scarcely credible that above 250 letters daily are posted _open_, and bearing not the slightest mark of ever having been fastened in any way; but such is the fact. A fruitful source of extra work to this branch of the office arises through the posting of flimsy boxes containing feathers, slippers, and other _recherche_ articles of female dress, pill-boxes containing jewellery, and even bottles. The latter, however, are detained, gla.s.s articles and sharp instruments of any sort, whenever detected, being returned to the senders. These frail things, thrown in and buried under the heaps of correspondence, get crushed and broken, yet all are made up again carefully and resealed.

When the letters have been stamped, and those insufficiently paid picked out, they are carried away to undergo the process of sorting. In this operation they are very rapidly divided into "roads," representing a line of large towns: thus, letters for Derby, Loughborough, Nottingham, Lincoln, &c. might be placed in companions.h.i.+p in one division or "road,"

and Bilston, Wednesbury, Walsall, West Bromwich, &c. in another. When this primary divisional sorting is finished, the letters are divided and subdivided over and over again, with the exception of those for the various travelling sorting-carriages upon the different lines of railway, which remain in divisions corresponding with various portions of the country through which the several mail-trains run. It is into one of these divisions that our own letter falls, to be seen again, however, when we come to describe the Travelling Post-Offices. During the time occupied in making up the mails, the Circulation Branch of the General Post-Office presents a busy scene, yet retains the utmost order and regularity. Hundreds of men are engaged in the various operations of sorting and sub-sorting, yet all proceeds really noiselessly, and as if the hundreds and thousands of letters representing the commerce and intelligence of the English people could not be treated too carefully.

Every now and again the sorter pauses in his rapid movements, and places a letter on one side. In some cases this signifies that he has detected a letter containing a _coin_ of some sort; and when such letters have been posted without being registered by the sender, the Department takes this duty upon itself, charging a double fee on delivery. The number of letters of this cla.s.s detected in London alone during the first six months after the plan was brought into operation, was upwards of 58,000.

Letters which cannot be read, or letters imperfectly addressed, are also thrown on one side and conveyed to another part of the Circulation Branch, where gentlemen whose extraordinary faculty of discernment have gained them the singularly inappropriate name of "blind officers" sit in state.

THE BLIND LETTER-OFFICE

is the receptacle for all illegible, misspelt, misdirected, or insufficiently addressed letters or packets. Here the clerk or clerks, selected from amongst the most efficient and experienced officers, guess at what ordinary intelligence would readily denominate insoluble riddles. Large numbers of letters are posted daily with superscriptions which the sorters cannot decipher, and which the great majority of people would not be able to read. Others, again, are received with perhaps only the name of some small village, the writers thinking it a work of supererogation to add some neighbouring town, or even a county.

Numberless, for instance, are the letters bearing such addresses as "John Smith, gardener, Flowerdale," or "Throgmorton Hall, Worcesters.h.i.+re." Circulars, by the thousand, are posted in London and other large towns without hesitancy, and with the greatest confidence in the "final perseverance" principle of the Post-Office people, with addresses not more explicit than the foregoing. Many country gentlemen would seem to cherish the idea that the names of their mansions should be known equally far and near from their manorial acres, and somehow they seem to inoculate their correspondents with the same absurd notion.

If, however, it be possible to reduce the hieroglyphics on some strange letter to ordinary every-day English, or find, from diligent search in his library of reference, information relative to imperfectly-addressed letters (information which might have been given much more easily by the senders), our readers may be sure that the cunning gentleman of the Blind Office, justly known for his patience and sagacity, will do it, unless, indeed, the letter be "stone blind," or hopelessly incomplete.

As a genuine example of stone-blind letters, take the following, the first of a batch which has been known to pa.s.s through the blind-room of the General Post-Office:--

+-----------------------------------+ Uncle John Hopposite the Church London. Hingland +-----------------------------------+

It would certainly have been a wonderful triumph of skill to have put this letter in a fair way for delivery: for once the blind officer would acknowledge himself beaten; and then the Dead Letter Officers would endeavour to find "Uncle John's" _relative_, intimating to the said relative that greater explicitness is needed if "Uncle John" must be found.

But they manage better with the next letter in the batch.

+--------------------------+ Coneyach lunentick a siliam +--------------------------+

is part of the address of a letter which the sorter no doubt threw away from him with some impatience. The blind officer, however, reads it instantly, strikes his pen, perhaps, through the address, and writes on the envelope, "Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum," and pa.s.ses it out for delivery.

+-------------------------+ Obern yenen +-------------------------+

is seen in an instant to be meant for "Holborn Union." "Isle of Wight"

is, in like manner, written on a letter improperly addressed as follows:--