The Authorized History of the Royal Mail
PENGUIN BOOKS
To Anne-Catherine
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Allen Lane 2011
Published in Penguin Books 2012
Copyright © Royal Mail Group Ltd, 2011
The Post Office trademark is used by kind permission of Post Office Ltd
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
978–0–14–197322–7
List of illustrations
List of maps
List of plates
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Donald Brydon CBE, Chairman of the Royal Mail Group
Introduction
PART ONE
Arm of the State
Chapter 1 ‘A thing above all things’, 1512–1659
1. People’s posts and the King’s Posts
2. A royal monopoly
3. A General Post Office
Chapter 2 A network for the nation, 1660–1764
1. Postal plots and cash for the Crown
2. Loyal servants, bold rivals and a Penny Post
3. By-posts, cross-posts, farms and black markets
4. Ralph Allen’s business run from Bath
Chapter 3 Coaches and communications, 1764–1829
1. Custom and corruption
2. An impresario’s dictatorship
3. Francis Freeling’s revenue machine
Chapter 4 Rowland Hill and postal reform, 1830–64
1. Capitalism and the clamour for cheap mails
2. Hill’s uniform penny postage
3. The colourful career of Stanley Gibbons
4. Trains, Trollope and transformation
5. Hill’s legacy: the limits of ‘economical reform’
Chapter 5 In a league of its own, 1864–1914
1. A postal kingdom of railways
2. An industrial labour force and a first bureaucracy
3. Frank Scudamore and the telegraph scandal
4. The Golden Age of Blind Postmaster Fawcett
5. The great telephone imbroglio
6. Henniker Heaton and imperial penny postage
7. Postal unions and non-stop inquiries
PART TWO
War and Peace
Chapter 6 ‘Men to trenches, women to benches’, 1914–21
1. Postmen soldiers and soldiers’ postmen
2. Postal suburbia on the Western Front
3. The Post Office Rifles
4. Courtesy and condescension
5. Old soldiers, new unions
Chapter 7 From ancien régime to modern age, 1921–39
1. The break with Ireland
2. Struggling with a poor connection
3. The autocratic rule of Evelyn Murray
4. Wolmer and the renewal of postal reform
5. Union opposition and coalition politics
6. The Bridgeman Report and a quiet coup
7. Stephen Tallents, PR and the GPO Film Unit
8. Kingsley Wood and the Empire Air Mail Scheme
Chapter 8 Pillar of the nation, 1939–49
1. Confronting Armageddon
2. Revenues, recruits and almost a Women’s Corp
3. Computers for Bletchley, airgraphs for the troops
4. Councils and concessions
PART THREE
No Ordinary Business
Chapter 9 Bright hopes blighted, 1949–64
1. Dreaming of partnership
2. The brave new world of the Rattler
3. Pursuing the universal postcode
4. A spreading disaffection
5. Inspector Osmond and the Great Train Robbery
Chapter 10 Getting out of the civil service, 1964–9
1. The very model of a modern Postmaster General
2. Tony Benn and the Queen’s head
3. The ‘Break’ and the ‘Split’
4. ‘A uniquely suitable opportunity’
5. The launch of the two-tier post
Chapter 11 A dismal decade, 1969–79
1. The Chairman who never was
2. The 1971 strike and its aftermath
3. Impossible odds
4. Crisis and the Carter Committee
5. Industrial Democracy versus a captain of industry
Chapter 12 Once more unique, 1979–87
1. The Split with telecoms, and with William Barlow
2. Man in the middle
3. Of markets and marketing
4. Less peace, more efficiency
5. Beyond the call of duty
6. Dearing’s daring design
Chapter 13 Thwarted ambitions, 1987–2002
1. Falling out of step
2. Goodbye to Girobank
3. The DRAS dispute and a radical proposal
4. Taking stock of Counters
5. Launching Parcelforce, and salvaging it
6. ‘The one that got away’
7. Record profits but a dearth of investment
8. Death by a thousand plans
9. Dating the Dutch
Chapter 14 No end of a crisis, 2002–10
1. Back from the brink
2. POCA, pensions and Postcomm
3. A long and loaded pause
Illustrations
Appendices
A. Charting the growth
B. Masters of the Post
C. Thomas Witherings’ letter to the Mayor of Hull
Notes and references
Sources and bibliography
Credits and permissions
This book was instigated by the late Lord Dearing, Chairman of the Post Office from 1981 to 1987 and chief architect of what became the Royal Mail Group. He remained a passionate champion of the postal service until the very end of his life – he died early in 2009 – and he lobbied former colleagues and their successors for years to have its past captured in a modern and wide-ranging history. I was appointed as the author in June 2008 and am indebted to the Board of the Royal Mail Group, both for entrusting me with the commission and for allowing me to write with complete editorial freedom just as Lord Dearing had always intended. I was fortunate that the project was overseen from the start by Jonathan Evans, initially as the Royal Mail Group’s Company Secretary and subsequently, in his retirement, as a Trustee of the British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA). He organized the commissioning process, in close consultation with Lord Dearing, and carried things forward after the latter’s death. I am extremely grateful to him for all his constant support and encouragement, which ran from providing a first response to the initial draft of every chapter to assisting with appendices and the work of late revisions and corrections. In the latter stages of the book’s preparation, his role was complemented from within the Royal Mail by his successor, Jon Millidge. I am also indebted to Adam Crozier, who as Group Chief Executive until 2010 gave the project his enthusiastic backing, and to the current Chairman, Donald Brydon, who was quick to endorse it after his arrival in 2009. The latter took a lively interest in the progress of the book, while never wavering in his determination that it should indeed be an independent history.
I would like to express here my sincere thanks to all those who agreed to be interviewed for the book: Michael Allen, Malcolm Argent, Neville Bain, Millie Bannerji, Sir William Barlow, Alex Bell, Bill Bishop, Howard Brabrook, Alan Brown, Colin Browne, Donald Brydon, Ian Cameron, Norman Candy, Danny Carty, Christopher Chataway, Bill Cockburn, Jerry Cope, Adam Crozier, Roger Darlington, the late Lord Dearing, Richard Dykes, Jonathan Evans, Mary Fagan, Lord Freud, Mark Good-ridge, Gerry Grimstone, Billy Hayes, Bill Hedley, Lord Heseltine, Daniel Hodson, Richard Hooper, Alan Huggins, Kate Jenkins, Alan Johnson, Allan Leighton, John Mackay, Michael Mire, Roger Morrison, Sir Bryan Nicholson, Tom Norgate, the late Denis Roberts, John Roberts, David Sibbick, Morag Macdonald Simpson, Brian Thomson, Henry Tilling, Paul Tolhurst, Alan Tuffin, Sam Wainwright, Nigel Walmsley, Derek Walsh, Dave Ward, Sue Whalley, John Woodthorpe and Ken Young. Observations and direct quotations from the interviews, sourced in the notes and generally introduced in the text with a simple ‘He recalled …’, have all been checked with the interviewees to confirm their accuracy. Transcriptions of the interviews were expertly provided by Nicki Brown and her team, to whom I am once again indebted. Several individuals kindly read substantial sections of the book at a draft stage and I am especially grateful to Sir William Barlow, Harry Bush, Danny Carty, Gerry Grimstone, John Mackay, Henry Tilling and Ken Young for their generous help in this way. The full text was also read by some non-postmen whom I should like to thank individually. David Thomas made many helpful suggestions on behalf of the (eagle-eyed) general reader; and Philip Waller suggested many elegant historical asides, just as he used to do at Merton College, Oxford forty years ago when he was my tutor and I was a postmaster (the college’s term for a scholar, never satisfactorily explained but sadly nothing to do with the Royal Mail). I am also very grateful to Alan Huggins, Curator of Philatelic Collections at the Royal Philatelic Society London, who enabled me to pull together the stamps shown on the back cover of the hardback in remarkably short order and advised on the relevant passages of the text. And I must thank Professor Martin Daunton, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and the author of an earlier study of the Royal Mail since 1840, who gave the book a close reading at a late stage and generously suggested several valuable additions and amendments. The errors that remain are of course entirely mine.
Among the always helpful and considerate guardians of the postal archive at the BPMA, I would like to thank the past and present staff of the reading room who made it such a congenial place to work: Barry Attoe, Jamie Ellul, Claire George, Emily Gresham, Anne-Grethe Jensen, Penny McMahon, Zoe van Well and Claire Woodforde. I owe special thanks to the archivists Louise Todd and Helen Dafter, who together with Jonathan Evans and Claire George painstakingly prepared the data and charts that are included in the appendices. Gavin McGuffie helped with my catalogue inquiries, Barry Attoe kept track of my requests for text illustrations and plates, and Martin Devereux photographed selected contents from the archive for me. Other photographs for the plates I was able to borrow from the Communication Workers Union (CWU), for which I must thank Norman Candy. My thanks, too, to Sian Wynn-Jones for her ready assistance at the BT Archives, and to the friendly staff of the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University for all their help with my work on the archives of the UPW (and its successors). Among fellow inmates of the BPMA Reading Room, Peter Sutton was generous with his knowledge of the modern records while researching for his doctoral thesis on postal mechanization, and Tom Norgate patiently illuminated several aspects of that thorny subject for me. My own research was also made a great deal easier by my having ready access to any number of on-line resources – and for this I must thank Professor Miles Taylor, Director of the Institute of Historical Research at London University, whose award of a Senior Research Fellowship early in 2009 lifted many tiresome subscription barriers. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge here the kindness of Professor Richard Roberts, Director of the Centre for Contemporary British History at King’s College London, who was responsible for introducing me to the Royal Mail Group at the outset.
Appendix B sets out a full list of all the political and executive heads of the postal service since c. 1512 and of its largest trade union, now the CWU, citing individuals with a full note where appropriate of their titles and honours. These are only sparsely (and a little inconsistently) used in the main text. Many senior figures in the Post Office collected a knighthood before the end of their careers. Keeping track of all the awards would have been tiresome for the reader, but I hope their omission – and the frequent omission of other people’s titles, too – will cause no offence.
Turning my completed manuscript into a long book with extensive illustrations and some substantial appendices was a process that drew heavily on many people’s time and diligence. In addition to those whom I have already thanked, I would like to acknowledge gratefully the assistance I received from many members of the Royal Mail Group’s own staff, including in particular Sue Laban, Shan Lawrence, Peter Restarick, Martin Rush and David Simpson. And it is a pleasure to thank everyone at Penguin who saw the book through to publication. My thanks especially to Shan Vahidy for all her calm and patience, not least in fielding my regular calls for help over several months, but also to Jenny Fry and Natalie Ramm, and to Richard Duguid and his production team along with my copy editor, Mark Handsley. Above all, I owe a huge debt to my editor, Stuart Proffitt, without whose red pen and wise counsel this would be a poorer book indeed. Lucky the author who can turn to such a sympathetic but demanding reader while there yet remains time to pause and think again.
One final acknowledgement is no less sincere for striking a familiar note. This book could never have been written at all without the understanding and forbearance of my wife Anne-Catherine, and it is dedicated to her with my heartfelt thanks for all her constant support.
by Donald Brydon CBE, Chairman of the Royal Mail Group
The environment for postal services has been changing so rapidly and so profoundly in recent years that one might be forgiven for supposing that the past has less and less to tell us about the present. Not so. This book makes startlingly clear just how relevant the history of this huge and complex organization is to the issues of today. Royal Mail has played an important role in the economic development of our country, making social mobility practicable, and at the same time, through local post offices, helping maintain social cohesion. Uniquely, Royal Mail stands as a business enterprise with a major social purpose.
Before he began work on this history, the Board of the Royal Mail granted Duncan Campbell-Smith unrestricted access to its archives; it has not, however, sought to influence what he has written, or the opinions he has expressed, in any way. The book is therefore the work of an independent historian, who has written a history which thousands of past and present members of Royal Mail will find fascinating, and which will be of widespread interest to the general reader. He has a remarkable story to tell as he links Royal Mail’s evolution to the wider historical context, not least during the two great wars of the twentieth century. Even in this decade Royal Mail has had employees working in Afghanistan, as twenty-first-century conflicts also require effective personal communications.
In recent years Royal Mail has come under pressure from two directions: public policy designed to stimulate competition, and the revolution of the electronic age. The promotion of competition in a declining market within the context of a fixed delivery obligation has set major challenges for Royal Mail. Its future will be determined in large part by how policy-makers and Royal Mail itself respond to them.
The book is also a story of what might have been, and a catalogue of nettles left ungrasped. A recurrent theme is how elusive it has been for generations of managers, politicians and union leaders to find common ground in shaping the future of the enterprise. I hope that, in providing such clarity about the evolution of Royal Mail, this book will better inform all those who have responsibility for its future.
8 February 2011
While the bombs were still falling on wartime London in 1944, officials at the Post Office’s headquarters near St Paul’s Cathedral ordered an overhaul of their Records Department. Sorting through boxes of nineteenth-century correspondence, they came across an exchange of letters involving the Controller of the Money Order Department in 1868, a Mr Jackson, who had written to his superiors explaining that he had a problem with mice nibbling at paid money orders kept in the office for clerical processing. Mousetraps, alas, had proved no solution and Jackson requested permission to buy cats for his department. The official response came back:
Mr Jackson. Three cats may be allowed on probation. They must undergo a test examination and should, I think, be females. It is important that the cats be not overfed and I cannot allow more than a shilling a week for their support. They must depend on mice for the remainder of their emolument and if the mice be not reduced in number in six months a further portion of the allowance must be stopped. Can any statistics as to mice be furnished from time to time?1
This was not written with tongue in cheek. A shilling a week for a cat – or sixpence a week in rural offices – remained the official emolument from 1868; it still applied in 1944. Precedents were always treated in the Post Office as matters of enormous consequence, whatever the context. Once enshrined in the rule book, they could endure for generations. Almost certainly, they would give rise to a stream of numbers like those statistics as to mice. These would be used as a basis of regular reviews, to be drawn upon from time to time for an official report. Today, reviews and reports in their hundreds are neatly filed at the British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA). In various guises, they account for a good proportion of the nation’s postal records, a continuous paper trail that few other individual British archives, public or private, can rival. They fill more than two miles of shelving and stretch back to the days of Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York (and Postmaster General) – during whose reigns the ‘Clerks of the Roads’ organizing the nightly mails from London were already busily accumulating ‘the Custom of the Office’, a set of unwritten but comprehensive rules never to be challenged lightly. (The first book of accounts appears to date from 1667 – not coincidentally the year after the Great Fire of London, which incinerated the Restoration Post Office’s first headquarters in Threadneedle Street.2)
From the start, the demands of the postal service necessarily entailed a profound attachment to the importance of routine: this was a working environment in which stability and continuity were all. The conservatism of the Post Office’s culture was almost proverbial by the early nineteenth century. It was even more deeply embedded, after the 1840s, by the way in which the constant expansion of a huge, quasi-industrial workforce was handled. In the Victorian Age, discipline was imposed via what an early trade unionist described as ‘a snob’s inferno’ of job grades and pay scales.3 Their complexity rewarded long and patient service. Since any departure from the rule book could risk having that service cut short, this was a culture that left no room for anyone to wing it on a busy day. Nor was it thought at first to be compatible with any form of trade unionism. Like the early railway companies, the Post Office was initially deeply hostile to any union activity at all. It could never be immune, though, to the wider social and political changes of the day. Trade unions were evolving quickly by 1900, and huge adjustments had to follow. In the first half of the twentieth century, ex-servicemen returning from two world wars filled the postmen’s ranks and imbued them with the British Army’s traditional respect for a strict demarcation of responsibilities. Ironically, this reinforced the disciplines of the Post Office in many ways, but now they were increasingly to be monitored by the unionized workforce itself, especially after 1945. Most postal workers had no choice but to top up low basic weekly wages with overtime earnings. These were effectively allocated in the second half of the century by local union officials, in line with their own latter-day version of the Custom of the Office. Enforced by weight of precedent rather than legal contract, the overtime regime imposed another hefty bias against experiments of any kind. Modern technology and computers enabled the network (eventually) to cope with an astonishing rate of growth in mail traffic – finally peaking, it would seem, in recent years – but they made far less impact on the culture of the Post Office than had been expected by most outsiders, or at least by those oblivious to its history.
Terms and titles need some explaining. The inaugural ‘Master of the Posts’, Brian Tuke, took up his duties almost exactly five centuries ago, in the opening years of the reign of Henry VIII. He spent over three decades turning the idea of courier relays at the monarchy’s disposal into a system based on local ‘posts’.* The first of those five centuries was well past before all mails came to be properly Royal by dint of a monopoly granted by Charles I in 1635. Even then, no one spoke of a Royal Mail, referring rather to the Post or the activities of the Letter Office, or the General Post Office as Cromwell’s republicans named it. Only when the words Royal Mail became a familiar sight on the enamelled paintwork of high-speed coaches after 1784 did this become a common term for the Post Office. Thereafter, the two names were often treated as interchangeable – except in Whitehall, where officials invariably stuck to ‘Post Office’ – and the issue still causes confusion more than two centuries later. In 2001 an attempt was made to reserve ‘Post Office’, logically enough, for the exclusive use of the nation’s post offices. Royal Mail was to be strictly the name of the service delivering letters and parcels. But logic also required a new name for the parent company embracing both entities – and the innocent if ill-advised choice of Consignia brought down such obloquy on the heads of those responsible for it that the old confusion was quickly reinstated. This book is mostly about the mail services – though telephones before the establishment of British Telecom play a part in the story, as do some other non-mail activities like the Post Office Savings Bank – so what follows is a history of the Royal Mail or of the Post Office (and occasionally even the GPO), according to whichever label seems most appropriate in the context. It begins in the period before either name was thought of, and it concludes today just as the two of them may be on the brink of parting company, or at least of acquiring different owners. It is the story of an institution long cherished as part of that hallowed cloth, the national fabric. Its physical presence on our streets, roads and country lanes has been emblematic of British society in all kinds of ways for generations.
An engrained regard for tradition and established practice is one consistent feature of this story, but the counterpoint has been a long and remarkable chronicle of growth and of periodic upheavals that have each been transforming in their day. How to accomplish essential changes in the face of an exceedingly low tolerance for risk? That has been the challenge confronting a good number of the Royal Mail’s masters. Those masters have included both those with formal authority over the service and those with a powerful influence over it, from within or without. Many have been autocratic civil servants, at the head of a department of state set apart from Whitehall and functioning as a kind of civilian shadow of the armed forces. Some have been dynamic businessmen, lured into the service from the commercial world to flex their management skills in an unfamiliar setting. Others, of great importance since the end of the nineteenth century, have been leaders of the postal trade unions, especially the Union of Post Office Workers (evolving from UPW in 1920 to the Union of Communications Workers in 1981 and the Communications Workers Union in 1995). In Westminster and Whitehall, there have been ambitious politicians serving as Postmaster General, or since 1969 as the head of a ‘sponsoring’ government department with its own officials – shadowed at all times by those grey eminences Their Lordships of the Treasury, and their modern successors in Whitehall with less grand titles but no less power. Finally, there have been the consumer watchdogs and statutory regulators whose impact since the turn of the millennium is a conspicuous feature of this history’s closing pages.
For all who ran it, from its first century to its fifth, the glory of the Post Office lay in the fact that its established routines and close-knit collegial relationships at every level could be harnessed to pull off astonishing feats of organization. Stable yards and innkeepers all over the country were somehow coordinated to serve the needs of the Post Roads network from the days of the travelling post-boy to the mail coach era. Officials in the magnificent postal headquarters at St Martin’s-le-Grand (opened in 1829) oversaw an exponential growth of the mails in the wake of tariff reform and the advent of steam trains. Between 1850 and 1914, the service expanded its paid workforce from about 25,000 to 230,000, pioneered the employment of women and reshaped itself around the railways to lift the annual volume of the nation’s mail traffic from about 500 million items to not far short of 6 billion. In the twentieth century, perhaps its most celebrated triumphs were linked to the world wars, building the equivalent of whole new postal surburbia in northern France for the first and providing a giant new communications infrastructure across southern England for the second. It also managed its way through thickets of corporate restructuring in the 1930s and again in the 1980s that would have tested the mettle of most commercial enterprises. ‘Will it work?’ asked the 1980s Chairman, Ron Dearing, of a colleague as they teed up a radical reorganization of the Post Office in 1985. ‘Chairman,’ came the reply, ‘this business runs on personal friendships: we can make anything work.’4
Not all the masters grappled with change as bravely and successfully as did Ron (later Lord) Dearing. Five centuries of unremitting progress would be unique indeed. Several extended periods of drift and indecision punctuate the history, linked in a couple of cases to individuals mocked by their contemporaries for being notoriously averse to change. The travails of the unreformed Post Office in the post-1815 era and the beleaguered state of the nascent posts-telephone-and-telegraph administration of the 1920s eventually brought the careers of Francis Freeling and Evelyn Murray, both long-serving and in many ways distinguished public servants, to inglorious ends. But fallow years and signs of public disaffection with the posts have historically been the cue for the biggest changes of all. Crises of confidence in the Post Office have several times seen power over its affairs handed to extraordinary outsiders, who arrived with their own vision of how the institution might be galvanized anew – and whose drive, in at least three cases, was the basis of everything that followed. Ralph Allen (1693–1764) built up the rural posts of Georgian England. John Palmer (1742–1818) launched the inter-city coaches of the Royal Mail. Above all, Rowland Hill (1795–1879) imposed uniform penny postage and set the great expansion of the Victorian Age on its way.
Rowland Hill’s impact was remarkable, but is often misunderstood. He was adamant that the modern service he did so much to create should be a quasi-commercial business. His legacy was overtaken in the 1860s by an expanded vision of the Post Office that stretched well beyond the mails and grew into a multifaceted public service that constituted, for most of the population, almost the entirety of the state’s presence in their daily lives. This broader role presented the late Victorians with a thorny problem, when it came to deciding whether or not the Post Office should take over the nascent telephone industry in the 1880s, as it had done the telegraph business in the 1860s. A consensus was needed on where exactly the line should be drawn between the free market and state-run enterprises. While the philosophers of laissez-faire liberalism (notably John Stuart Mill) were clear on this, however, the politicians allowed the issue to become woefully confused. Not for the last time, their indecision rebounded badly on the Post Office. A takeover was agreed in the end – the telephones were nationalized in 1912 – but only after decades of confusion that ensured the Post Office was hopelessly ill-prepared to run the combination of posts and telephones that emerged after the First World War.
This book is a history of the Royal Mail, not British Telecom. The evolution of the telephone industry from the 1920s onwards is here increasingly relegated to the margins. In one crucial respect, though, telephones remained of central importance. Active lobbying in support of a separation of the telephone arm was a powerful catalyst for periodic reappraisals of the proper status of the postal service, too. This came quite close to prompting a disestablishment of the Post Office as an entity semi-independent of the state at the start of the 1930s – perhaps along the lines of the BBC, with state funding but a governance structure that carefully distanced all executive authority from the government of the day. (Another instance of much the same approach was the London Passenger Transport Board, designed by Herbert Morrison as Labour’s Transport Minister in 1931, which set up a public body with an independent board of directors, chosen by five ‘appointing trustees’.) Cautious reformers settled instead for a less radical approach. Then, from the mid-1930s until well into the 1950s, considerations of national security precluded any possibility of having either telephones or posts run by anyone other than the state. But the idea of denationalizing the telephone industry was back by the early 1960s, again helping to prompt questions about the Post Office as a whole. The Wilson government’s failure – despite the best endeavours of a notably energetic Postmaster General (and hugely entertaining diarist), Tony Benn – to address these questions with the seriousness they deserved was a costly oversight, made worse in the 1970s by some crackpot initiatives foisted on the Post Office by Conservative and Labour administrations alike. The Thatcher Government, after some initial hesitation, broke with years of indecision and finally stripped out the telephone industry as many had urged in the 1920s. Once British Telecom had been successfully privatized in 1984, it was not long before the Post Office itself came to be seen as a candidate for privatization. Here was a proposal that would stir up arguments as passionate as any of those provoked by the postal reforms of the nineteenth century.
The business and financial rationales for transferring post offices or the Royal Mail, or both, to the private sector have now been comprehensively explored for a quarter of a century. Political objections blocked the way in 1987, 1994 and 1998. A fourth aborted sale in 2009 was blamed on market conditions, but was clearly also mired in political controversy. The formation of the coalition government in 2010 revived the prospect of privatization and the debate has been rekindled all over again by the passing of legislation in June 2011 to allow for at least a partial sale at some future date. Disquiet over the idea throughout this period has hardly been the exclusive preserve of the trade unions – though their emergence a century ago irreversibly altered the nature of all political debate over the postal service and their opposition to privatization has been implacable ever since their firm stand against the notion of detaching the Post Office from the civil service in 1931–2. The unions believe they have reasons to fear the potential impact of private-sector ownership on jobs, but they have also rejected it – none more passionately than General Secretary Tom Jackson, at the start of the 1980s – as an assault on an essential feature of British society, fuelled by doctrinaire politics. It is a view still shared today by many people with no interest in the unions’ plight. It reflects an enduring perception of the Post Office as the friendly face of the state, and of local post offices as one of the last bastions of village life in many areas. This legacy of the Victorian era remains entrenched. The history of the intervening century perhaps casts as much light on the travails of the privatization policy as any amount of debate over the strengths and weaknesses of the business case for a sale. What lingers on is an underlying tension between two ideological camps with fundamentally different perspectives.
The two camps would probably take conflicting views of an unusual box sitting in the vaults of the BPMA. When one of the first thousand copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses was found in the London post early in 1923, it was impounded in line with instructions from the Home Office that all copies of the work be treated as obscene material. The book, Copy No. 895, was deposited in the Royal Mail’s archive. It is still there, in pristine condition.5 Collectors at London’s Unaffordable Arts Fair in June 2010 were reportedly interested in paying around £95,000 for a first edition of Ulysses. Some want a Post Office business that would surely dispose of the Joyce in short order and redeploy the profits. Others want a public service that might (continue to) view the idea of selling this piece of postal history as distasteful. What line should now be taken by those who value the traditions of the public service but conclude – as did Rowland Hill, indeed – that only the rigours of a business can truly sustain them? The struggle for a persuasive answer to this conundrum is another of the themes explored in these pages.
Histories of the Post Office, most of them written by former or serving officials, were published fairly regularly prior to the Second World War. In recent decades there have been more biographies of Anthony Trollope, probably its most famous employee after Rowland Hill, than of the Post Office itself. The two most recent scholarly works – Alan Clinton’s Post Office Workers: A Trade Union and Social History (1984) and Martin Daunton’s Royal Mail: The Post Office since 1840 (1985) – both opted for a more thematic approach than most of their predecessors. Howard Robinson’s The British Post Office: A History (1948) took a narrative approach that I have tried to emulate. His elegant work ended with only the briefest sketch of the years after 1914, which is where the weight of this book lies. Like Robinson, I have had to take some liberties with the chronology. Telling one continuous story has involved some unavoidable sequencing of what were actually contemporaneous episodes; it has also meant less attention than they deserve for some aspects of the Post Office that for decades were taken for granted. The social life of the postal workforce or the proud role of the Post Office in the training and education of young people over many generations are only mentioned en passant. The work of the Post Office overseas and its contribution to the spread of postal and cable networks around the world are among several topics only lightly touched upon. In mitigation I can only plead that most features of postal history have already been the subject of excellent specialist studies, some of which can be found in the bibliography. Many subjects even have their own learned societies that have long been producing scholarly studies on a regular basis. Alongside the Postal History Society and the Society of Postal Historians are dozens of others dedicated to promoting research into everything from the local postal histories of British counties to the evolution of postal mechanization. Indeed, tackling a general history at all has sometimes seemed a slightly impertinent undertaking, given the weight of scholarship bearing on so many detailed aspects of postal history. Then there is the whole world of philately. The Royal Philatelic Society London, founded in 1869, has its own library that currently subscribes (astonishingly) to just over 2,200 different periodicals and it has been publishing a continuous journal of its own (The London Philatelist) since 1892. Its members over the decades have produced hundreds of erudite books and papers using stamps and other artefacts to trace all facets of postal history – attesting to the fact that any distinction between philately and postal history is really little more than a simple convenience. (Topics covered in the Society’s 2010–11 programme of exhibitions included POW mails in East Asia during the Second World War, the pre-1914 postal history of Aden and the postal history of the Ottoman port of Smyrna.) Postmarks, postage stamps and address systems are the subject of many individual episodes in this history, from the creation of the Penny Black and the nineteenth-century career of Stanley Gibbons to the story of Tony Benn’s joust at the Queen’s head in the 1960s and the creation of the world’s first all-purpose postal code. But although philately is included in these pages, any even vaguely complete philatelic survey would add many chapters, and this is already a sufficiently long book. If Masters of the Post provides a useful context for more detailed studies – whether philatelic or social, political or technological – it will have met at least one of its objectives.
The primary goal has been to set down for the general reader a coherent narrative that can help explain the Royal Mail’s evolution, especially over the fifth and last of its centuries. At its core over this latter period has been the triangular relationship between the managers of the postal service, the politicians and government officials answerable for it to the electorate, and the union leaders elected to represent the interests of its workforce. For, in reality, the Royal Mail has always had to contend not with one master at a time but a set of them – often at loggerheads, and sometimes locked in open confrontation. It is often said that the core problem for the Royal Mail since Rowland Hill has been its dual nature, as both a public service and a business. This book suggests it might be more precise to say the problem has been its exposure to a long-running contest for control – colourfully manifest before 1800, played out dramatically in the Reform Era of the 1830s and intermittently evident ever since – between those intent on (or resigned to) seeing public service as the priority and those (from Rowland Hill to Allan Leighton) aspiring to run the Royal Mail as far as possible like a business.
Balancing public-service requirements and business objectives has never in itself posed much of an obstacle for economists or lawyers: they have always been able to assess proposed changes to the service/business mix as a relatively simple matter, in theory, of altering rules and regulations. The political difficulties posed by any prospective change have in practice always been much trickier. When the unions in the post-1945 era pressed their dream of a postal service jointly run by managers and workers in unison, ministers and officials baulked at conceding so much power over a service for which they were answerable to the public (and over which officials had wielded power so uncompromisingly until the dawn of the century). When ambitious managers began pressing from the late 1970s for a more businesslike approach under their firm control, ministers baulked again, as did the trade unions – for much the same reason. So long as the wider public seemed likely to hold the politicians accountable for the Royal Mail, it took a bold minister to champion the case for ‘commercial’ reforms. Yet given rapid changes in the operational environment for all national postal services from the 1980s onwards, bold political leadership was exactly what was needed. A few ministers tried to provide it, but found little support from their colleagues. The result, reflecting little credit on either of the main political parties, was an increasingly dysfunctional clash of political and managerial agendas, which impeded the resolution of many innately sticky issues, from mechanization and productivity bargaining to modern marketing and privatization itself. Once the cumulative damage to the efficiency of the postal service was plain to see, the media moved within a very few years from taking pride in the Royal Mail to routinely ridiculing its inefficiencies. As so often in the past, mawkish praise for the Royal Mail as (in principle) a national treasure was no bar to searing and often unfounded criticism of its perceived shortcomings in practice.
At all points in the story told here, across a great swathe of English and British history, the progress or otherwise of the postal service has held up a mirror to contemporary political life in striking ways. The evolution of this one institution tells us much, for example, about the limitations of eighteenth-century government, the organizational genius of the Victorians and the relations between twentieth-century Whitehall and state-owned industry. As this might suggest, the service has shown in every era an extraordinary capacity to reinvent itself in response to changed circumstances; and observers in the mid-1990s, as in the mid-1890s, could still regard the Royal Mail as the world’s pre-eminent Post Office. In how many other industries could the same have been said of a leading British name? The five centuries have ended with a decade of torrid upheaval. Without doubt the postal service is in the throes of yet another reinvention. However it emerges, we can be sure that its history will bear heavily on the outcome.
My lord, when at their home
I did commend your highness’ letters to them,
Ere I was risen from the place that showed
My duty kneeling, came there a reeking post,
Stewed in his haste, half breathless, panting forth
From Gonerill his mistress salutations;
Delivered letters, spite of intermission,
Which presently they read …
From Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605–6),
Act II, scene iv
One of the most famous letter-writing families in English history predated the existence of any semblance of a Post Office. The Pastons lived in fifteenth-century Norfolk. Over the course of four generations, they rose from being humble tillers of the land to substantial landlords, acquiring several estates in the vicinity of Norwich, which was then one of the largest and wealthiest places in the country. While impressive, there was nothing especially unusual about their rise, but for one thing: from around 1420 to just after 1500, the Pastons made a habit of hoarding their letters. All those exchanged between members of the family were carefully stored away. So too were drafts of letters to third parties and letters received from them – a wide range of other correspondents, ‘bishops or serving men, prisoners or dukes, priests or ribald companions …’1 The result was very unusual indeed. The family accumulated over a thousand private letters. They survive today, most of them in the British Museum, as one of the earliest collections of its kind in the English language and certainly one of the most engaging. The Pastons and their correspondents were writing for practical purposes, not posterity, and alluded constantly to the practicalities of life: the letters amount to a time-capsule from late-medieval England. And no practicality was more important or more regularly discussed in the letters than the arrangements made to ensure their safe delivery.2
Central to the family’s success was the career of Sir John Paston I (who named both of his two oldest sons after him, hence John II and John III). He was a lawyer, born in 1421, who spent much of his adult life in the City wrangling over the title to various Norfolk estates. His wife Margaret ran their properties in his absence. She wrote to him regularly – as did clerks and bailiffs – reporting on business and asking for instructions. So how were these letters and the replies conveyed between Norwich and London? The simplest method was to use a family retainer. Most people affluent enough to write letters could afford servants to deliver them, and the Pastons were no exception. But journeys between London and Norfolk took several days, and were a costly way to send a single missive. There were essentially two alternatives. One option was to find someone heading in the right direction on other business – perhaps ecclesiastical, more often commercial and sometimes just a friend of the family – who could be employed as a messenger. This might be hard in the dead of winter, but was common practice at other times of the year. ‘England was still a land of great fairs, to which people came from far and near. After and during these fairs, the roads were busy with men going to and fro, and many of these acted as messengers, and would leave letters at places as they passed.’3 Many of the Pastons’ letters refer to their services, occasionally using the unavailability of a reliable person as a reason for not having written sooner: ‘if I might have had a messenger ere this time I had sent it you’, as Margaret says (if we adjust her spelling into modern English) of one letter evidently despatched with some difficulty.4 We can be sure letters were never handed lightly to just any intermediary; those to Sir John were frequently entrusted to individuals who plainly knew where to find him (even when he was in the Fleet prison, as on three occasions). Margaret rarely put much of an instruction on the outside of her letters: most of them seem to have been addressed simply ‘John Paston’, though he occasionally provided her with a forwarding address, as in September 1471: ‘I pray you send me word hereof by the next messenger and if it came to Mrs Elisabeth Higgens, at the Black Swan, she shall convey it to me, for I will not fail to be there at London again within this six days’.5 His replies were addressed just as sparsely, scarcely ever citing more than ‘at Norwyche’. But as various editors have pointed out, it is striking how few references either of them ever made to letters that had gone astray.
The other main option for Sir John and his wife, in deciding how to deliver a letter, was to turn to the services of a ‘common carrier’. ‘As early as the mid-fifteenth century, extensive systems of overland carriage, by cart, pack-horse and wain were being provided by carriers.’6 Most treated letters and parcels as a profitable side-line, but for some they were more than that. In most market towns of any importance, there was a carrier licensed by the local worthies to collect letters and deliver them safely along a handful of popular routes. Margaret was chided by her husband on one occasion in 1465 for not pushing the family servants to make better use of this alternative: ‘The bearer of this letter is [a] common carrier, and was at Norwich on Saturday, and brought me letters from other men, but your servants inquire not diligently after the coming of carriers or other men’.7 References to common carriers crop up more often as the fifteenth century wears on, which accords with a general growth of traffic on the main inland trade routes around this time. For letters sent to Calais and well beyond, meanwhile, the Pastons could turn to regular carrier services more reliable and sophisticated than anything to be found within the rest of England. The ties between the City of London and the Low Countries ensured as much.
Fortunes were to be made in the cross-Channel trades centred on the great markets of Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent. Merchants’ letters were travelling reliably in both directions by the later fifteenth century, and linked the City via the Low Countries to the more distant markets of the Hanseatic League in the north and the towns of the Rhine and northern Italy to the south. By the first half of the sixteenth century, each side of the Channel had in place its own trusted postal officials. The Continental merchants had a mostly Flemish contingent in London who ran the ‘Strangers’ Post’. The City had its own ‘Merchant Adventurers’ Post’ with foreign-language speakers stationed on the Continent. Both used the same inns as staging posts for bearers of their mail along the sixty-mile route from London to the Channel ports, travelling overland from the Thames Estuary to Rochester and on through Sittingbourne and Canterbury to Dover, or sometimes Margate or Deal. The surviving correspondence of celebrated merchants like Sir Thomas Gresham – the guiding spirit behind the building in the 1560s of the City’s Royal Exchange, based on Antwerp’s Custom House – includes many references to the regularity of these mails by the middle of the Tudor century.8
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