A HISTORY OF
POSTAL AGITATION

NEW SIX SHILLING NOVELS

THE SEAFARERS

By J. Bloundelle-Burton

NELL GWYN, COMEDIAN

By F. Frankfort Moore

AN IMPERIAL LIGHT-HORSEMAN

By Harold Blore

A LOYAL LOVER

By Mrs. Lovett Cameron

BECKY

By Helen Mathers

THE TIGER’S CLAW

By G. B. Burgin

THE ACCUSED PRINCESS

By Allen Upward

MARCELLE OF THE LATIN QUARTER

By Clive Holland

THE GENTLEMAN PENSIONER

By Albert Lee

A LEGEND OF EDEN

By Harry Lander

LYONA GRIMWOOD, SPINSTER

By L. Higgin

PHARAOH’S BROKER

By Ellsworth Douglass

A HISTORY OF
POSTAL AGITATION

FROM FIFTY YEARS AGO TILL THE
PRESENT DAY

INCLUDING A FEW FORGOTTEN PAGES IN THE
WIDER “HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES”

BY
H. G. SWIFT

I have eaten your bread and salt,

I have drunk your water and wine;

The deaths ye have died I have watched beside

And the lives that ye led were mine.

…

I have written the tale of our life.

…

—Kipling’s Departmental Ditties.

LONDON
C. ARTHUR PEARSON, LIMITED
HENRIETTA STREET
1900

CONTENTS

A HISTORY OF
POSTAL AGITATION

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY—THE CAUSES OF DISCONTENT AND THE RISE OF POSTAL AGITATION

The long continuance of agitation and disaffection in the postal service would seem almost to entitle the public to the belief that the Post-Office is a place where the Englishman’s privilege, which is to grumble, is systematically maintained and indulged in as a recreation. Possibly to many it might seem to justify some such cynicism as that the Post-Office is a public institution whose employés make mild conspiracy their serious business in their working hours, and deliver letters and send telegrams only as a pastime.

The spirit of unrest, at last finding expression in organised agitation, has for so long been associated with the Post-Office that that department has come to be regarded in the public mind as not merely a vehicle of general convenience, but principally as a hot-bed of discontent. In strange contrast to that serene contentment and peaceableness which so distinguishes the rest of the Civil Service, the Post-Office has continued to stand out, with its familiar declaration of grievances, a single discordant note in the harmony. The Temple of Mercury in St Martin’s-le-Grand has been found from time to time the scene of angry discord, and the caduceus of the messenger of the gods, with its twining snakes, receives a new significance as a postal emblem. The ground about, that should be expected to yield nothing but the perennial golden harvest, is found to be given over to weeds, and the production of a crop of nettles.

Until recently almost, discontent in a Government department was thought a form of moral disease, and agitators were hunted as assiduously as was the Colorado beetle. There are doubtless many among the public who actually entertain some such view in regard to postal servants. There are many again to whom the Post-Office is represented by the principal living emblem in livery, the postman; and him perhaps a few tolerate as something of a nuisance, to whom they have to give a forced contribution annually to bring up his wages, or whom custom compels them to bribe into civility and a proper observance of his duties. For beyond the fact that discontent has prevailed more or less in the postal service for many years past, the public know but little of the inner workings or of the conditions which produce this symptom. It may be that the postman, being such a familiar, and to the majority a more or less welcome figure, filling the public eye, as he does, shares only with the Postmaster-General the distinction of representing the greatest public working institution in the world. What lies behind the outward and visible working of the vast and complicated piece of machinery, neither the man in the street nor his peers care much about, because it is hidden away from the light of day. The numerous army of postal workers, which comprise the indoor staff—those who sort letters and those who send telegrams—are as little thought of as the unseen crew of stokers below, engaged in their inglorious, but none the less useful, task of keeping the furnaces agoing.

The history of labour in the Post-Office has been a history of restraint and repression on one side, and of determined, persistent, and, in the end, more or less successful resistance on the other. The awakening of the trades-union spirit, and the manifestation of discontent, so long as it confined itself to a few London letter-carriers, was not formidable enough to excite either the anxiety or the animosity of the department. Discontent, disorganised, sporadic, and uncertain in its utterance, could either remain ignored or dealt with summarily.

It was only when agitation assumed much larger dimensions that it began to arouse that mingled feeling of apprehension and aversion which in itself became the means of aggravating still further those very evils which the authorities aimed at suppressing. Time and again the authorities, while complaining of the heat, yet added fuel to the fire.

Unionism in the Post-Office has ever been regarded as something verminous, something to be stamped out, something impertinently out of place in a Government office, and its leaders treated as breeders of sedition. And this has been so many years after the principle of trades unionism has at last been reconciled to Respectability and folded in her arms.

Slowly, step by step, labour in the Post-Office has gained something of a recognition of its value; but it has been forced to fight its way ofttimes with manacled hands and tape-tied feet. Happily, however, the story of postal agitation and the spread of combination throughout the postal service is not made up entirely of failures, contumacies, inflictions, and punishments. That combination in this branch of the public service has had to fight hard for its very existence from the beginning till now is perfectly true. It has been uphill work throughout, and its wounded have been left by the way. But in its struggle against the forces of bureaucracy it has snatched a victory here and there; it has received rebuffs, and even now and again courted defeat, but it has had its exultant moments of victory too. And, on the whole, there is little to regret that the fight so far has been fought; for where men have a principle at stake perhaps, to paraphrase a great dead poet, ’tis better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at all.

That the department has given as little heed as possible to the claims of postal servants, and far less sympathy, goes without saying. It has to be remembered that it is a public department, and, generally speaking, in a public department its niggardliness is in inverse ratio to its power of profit producing. It requires no argument to prove that a public institution such as this, run on the old conventional lines of red-tape and routine, and for the most part in the leading-strings of a watchful Treasury, would never spontaneously better the condition of its servants. If the same holds good generally as regards the relations between capital and labour, between the private employer and his man, it is more particularly so in a public department. Experience has proved that a betterment of the conditions of labour among the working staffs of public bodies as a rule have had to be forced from the authorities by every legitimate method which agitation can devise, by persistent petitioning, by deputation, by public meeting, often by taking the war into the enemy’s country, and getting M.P.’s to beard the Postmaster-General and the Treasury heads in their official lair, or by tracking them down in the House of Commons. And even then, after all this expenditure of force, there is often nothing but disappointment in return.

That it is not always the administrators of a public department who are to blame so much as the rule and the method which usage and convention have fossilised, must in all fairmindedness be allowed. It is easy to believe and understand that the various heads of departments, though never guilty of the unpardonable indiscretion of showing the smallest sympathy for agitation as such, none the less do often deplore the necessity of enforcing certain rules and regulations which act to the detriment of the men or which are productive of individual cases of hardship.

This point has only been touched on to show that the grievances which have given rise to agitation in various times have not been so much due to the action of officials as to the rules which they have had to administer. Hemmed in by such conditions, and bound to follow the customs prescribed by tradition and laid down by departmental etiquette, the natural inclination is to hold the reins tightly, to sit close, never to give way for fear of appearing weak, and never to willingly grant a concession merely because their private conscience may tell them there is some reason and justice in the demand. In such a situation the responsible public official has to face a higher tribunal than his own conscience. It is always fairly safe to refuse concession, but it is dangerous to grant it until you are compelled to. When the public, the press, and Parliament unite in saying such and such a demand must and shall be conceded, then it is time to act, not before. You bow with a good grace, and salaam and say, “Am I not my master’s servant?” And the public and the press and Parliament think none the less of you for your firmness, interpreting your stubbornness as zeal for the public service, though they would have turned to rend you for your incompetence had you given way sooner. Such to some extent is the trying position of those in authority in public departments, they needs must only when the devil drives, and not a moment before. They are more or less in the position of a constable whose duty it is to keep back a clamorous crowd testing a right of way; zeal and duty and anxiety for his position keep him firmly at his post till his superior and the law give him the nod and he has to fall back.

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Government officials have steadfastly pursued a policy of resistance to all claims for reform emanating from the subordinate staff. And this policy has been rendered the easier by such resistance being shown through that abstract entity known as the “Department,” which may mean one man or twenty, removing as it does the necessity for any particular individual, from the Secretary downward, to show his hand or reveal his identity. This is the system which made possible Dickens’s famous piece of satire anent the “Circumlocution Office.” It also provides a justification for Sydney Smith’s equally famous dictum regarding corporations, and, of course, Government departments—that they “have neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned.”

Certainly, it holds generally true as an important and significant fact of postal history, at any rate, that the authorities have never allowed a claim except grudgingly. And a due appreciation of this fact will conduce to a better understanding of the events which follow.

That this species of official obstinacy is not altogether peculiar to the postal service may be abundantly proved by reference to the records of other public departments. The postal authorities have sinned in very good company; and, to be fair to both sides of the question, let it be said that on the whole the sins of omission and commission have doubtless been dictated as much by a virtuous desire to save the public funds as to enhance their own credit. That at least is a saving virtue which is always conveniently placed to the credit of every permanent and public official, even when he has carried his zeal to excess. Allowing such a defence to stand without cavilling or questioning, still the fact remains that in their zeal for the public service the rights, the privileges, the convenience, the creature comforts, the health, and, it might be said, the very lives of many of the staff under their control have often been sacrificed in the past. Yet there have been exceptions, and it will be seen that the tens of thousands comprising the rank and file of the lower grades of the service have some reason to hold in grateful esteem the memory of one Postmaster-General at least—Professor Henry Fawcett. The high-souled qualities of Henry Fawcett, the blind Postmaster-General, are even now as familiar as is the recollection of that lamentable infirmity which only roused him to “wrest victory from misfortune.”

Generally, however, there have been two opposing principles at work throughout. And with two such positive and negative principles—the desire of the postal workers to assert those rights already accorded to almost every other class of labour, and the determination of the officials that such aspirations must be suppressed as dangerous—it was only to be looked for that open discontent would manifest itself sooner or later, and presently assume a more or less definite shape.

The faults and shortcomings almost necessarily incident to such a system of administration as has been indicated, its failure to move with the requirements of the times, its too conservative hesitation to compromise with the growing spirit of reform, its refusal to make allowance for the universal tendency to combine manifested among all classes of labour outside, its cheese-paring economy carried into the question of pay and prospects, were enough in themselves to beget a feeling of unrest and uncertainty culminating in one of open discontent and agitation. But these were only the first elements contributing to combination and defence of principle. Then it was that stubborn refusal to give way on the part of the authorities developed into scarcely-disguised hostility to the men and their claims. They held the citadel of privilege, and the waves of reform might beat against the granite walls of St. Martin’s-le-Grand but they would make no impression. Certainly they were not to be moved from their position by the mutterings of a few hundred malcontents inside who had become infected with the absurd ambition to better their working conditions, and who actually aspired to the wages of a skilled mechanic. Not while they had the power and the license to construe respectful petitions into impertinent demands and respectful remonstrances into insubordination and constructive treason. It would have been too much to have met such demands in a spirit of conciliation and compromise, and, so early in the day, would have been going against every workable tradition of departmentalism. The fact that a Government situation was a guarantee of permanent employment so long as they did not complain should, it was thought, in itself be sufficient to induce the men to accept every humiliation the department chose to put on them. In its desire to govern according to its conception of a benevolent despotism it too commonly provided its employés with a grievance, or a succession of grievances, arising from its attempt to shape their workaday lives by rules of military discipline and restrictive regulations better fitted for a penal settlement than for free men and citizens of selected character and intelligence.

Such was the attitude of the department and the general conditions of the postal service when the earlier would-be reformers essayed to urge their plaint, and, in the most legitimate manner, to strike a blow for freedom. The men who have been alluded to as those who were first to engage in agitation and the first to incur the as yet unknown danger of arousing the resentment of officialdom against such daring innovations, it must be acknowledged, made up in moral fibre what they lacked in experience and methods of organisation. At any rate, they deserve to be remembered kindly by those who afterwards benefited by their efforts. They were the first to cut away the undergrowth, and to make the straight and solid path possible. If fault be found with their methods, it has only to be said that their mistakes were such as generally come in the experimental stage of almost every enterprise.

If it be thought that the happenings and incidents with which they were connected or of which they were the authors are here invested with undue importance, it will be recollected that the men who were identified with those happenings were among the first actors in an interesting little industrial drama. It will perhaps not be lost sight of that the incidents themselves, though insignificant if taken singly, none the less are important links in the chain, and necessary parts of a whole. Some acknowledgment is due to these men if only that they were the humble pioneers of an industrial movement of a special character. Not only this, but because they kept abreast of the tide of progress when it was nothing less than dangerous to do so.

If it be objected that every grievance complained of—the conditions of service, insufficiency of pay prospects and promotion, deprivation of civil liberty and the right of combination reduced to a meaningless farce—have had and still have their counterparts in every other department of the State, that objection in itself scarcely lessens the justification for the action taken by the agitators. The reasonableness or otherwise of their methods is another matter which it is proposed to deal with later on as this narrative unfolds itself. If it be urged that the policy of attempting to force concessions from a Government department has been a more or less selfish and sordid one, it must be conceded also that principle has always entered largely into it. That their sole consideration was not getting the greatest material benefit at little cost, and that it was not with them entirely a question of more bread and butter and less work, is pretty well proved by the risks which postal agitators have run and the sacrifices they have cheerfully made. It has never been an easy matter for a man to demand his just dues in a Government office. The attitude of mind towards the subordinate staffs in the Post-Office has not essentially altered since the days when they publicly hanged men for letter-stealing. That was only a little more than sixty years ago, and if the asperities of administration have been somewhat softened of late years, it is only through the force of public opinion, and because the men have learnt lessons of appeal which render it almost impossible for officialdom to persist in methods of repression for any length of time. It is because the liberty of the working-classes has been so enlarged that they can no longer withhold a modicum of it from postal servants. But there is not wanting the evidence to show that something of the same spirit which, in the olden times, sent working-men to the hulks and penal servitude for attempting to band themselves and their mates together for the purpose of safeguarding their few interests from a greedy and rapacious employer was alive still until quite recently, even if it has altogether died out to-day. The postal servant seeking to better his position or daring to complain still labours under far greater disadvantages than the mechanic or the handicraftsman. A postman, a sorting-clerk, or a letter-sorter, if he be dismissed from his employment cannot pick up his bag of tools and offer himself to the next workshop, for the simple reason that he has no tools, and his trade is one of such a peculiar nature that it is wanted nowhere outside the Post-Office. Nor is a telegraphist much better off in that respect. Dismissal from the service has generally meant very much more to the postal official than to the ordinary artisan. He not only lost his immediate source of livelihood but his future prospects, his hopes of a pension, towards which he had contributed, his character and everything were gone, and he had to face the world afresh and take his stand in the battle of life against those with every advantage over him. And dismissal was particularly easy in the earlier times, when a suspicious and malignant officialdom could construe the smallest sign of disaffection into insubordination. Thus it will be seen it was no child’s play to engage in agitation twenty or thirty years ago, and the men who did so evidently did not enter into it for the love of the game altogether. There must have been something very rotten in the State of Denmark when men were goaded into what was to them desperate methods, and with so many odds against them, just for the sake of improving the conditions of their servitude. It shows that they must have felt their grievances keenly; it shows that in some degree at least that spirit of resistance to wrong and injustice to which we owe so much animated and sustained them throughout. In those days postal agitators stood almost alone, receiving very little sympathy from the press or the public, and equally as little assistance from the various trades unions, simply because postal grievances, which have always been difficult of understanding, were much more so then, and because it was difficult then to make people believe that men in permanent Government employment could have grievances of any kind. That the trades unionists of the country were slow to rally to their assistance or to proffer them practical sympathy is better now understood and made allowance for, for postmen and letter-sorters were not readily recognised as a separate craft by the various unions of ordinary artisans; they could claim no trade kinship with them; they were neither this nor that, but a sort of ugly duckling in the legitimate brood of artisanship.

Fortunately a more intelligent understanding and a better feeling now exist, and has existed for some years past. But even to gain this simple recognition that a postal official with a grievance battling against wrong was a man and a brother entitled to admittance into their ranks, was not easily obtained even when they sought it. Even the men themselves were chary of accepting the position of professed trades unionists, and it was many years before the objections associated with declared trades union principles and methods were waived by the men of the Post-Office. The fact is they remained for long uncertain as to their exact relationship to the general industrial and labour movement. There was some amount of mutual distrust between outside trade organisations and combination in the Post-Office, and both parties failed to see distinctly what there was in common between them. It must be admitted that despite their awakening so far, the postal agitators still preserved something of that reserve which may have been easily mistaken for pride or perhaps priggishness; and, indeed, felt that an open connection with trades unionism might damage their chances of redress, and alienate the support and sympathy of the few public men on whom they relied. Besides, it has to be considered that the trades-union doctrine was not sufficiently accepted to be yet accounted respectable. But all that is now past; it has been rendered both respectable and respected by almost universal acceptance, and postal agitation owes not a little to it. And if postal agitation owes more to the spirit of trades unionism than the latter does to any postal effort, then, to claim no more for it, perhaps trades unionism has no reason to feel ashamed of its poor relation who fought a battle in its behalf years ago. They maintained its principle within that most unlikely and unpromising of places, a Government office, against hostile officials who were backed up with inexhaustible reserves and the best artillery.

That the solid advantages gained through agitation have not even up to the present day fully compensated for the sacrifices made, the time, the trouble, the energy, and the money expended on it, can perhaps be freely admitted. Yet the same holds good of every other movement of higher pretension, social and political. Men with a purpose count the moral advantage as well as the material gain. If only considerations of this nature had always weighed in the past, our Merrie England would to-day be divided into slaves and slave-owners.

To its credit be it said then, that postal agitation has not been altogether confined to capturing the enemies’ cattle, or to striving for yet a bigger share of the loaves and fishes. It has only had to discover its duties and responsibilities to immediately lay claim to them, and to strenuously assert its right to fulfil them. It has always maintained the principle of combination as a principle, while it has long and persistently protested against the exclusion of postal servants from the full enjoyment of civil rights and the untrammelled exercise of the franchise. It has lost few opportunities of championing the cause of the weak against departmental intolerance, and silently and unseen it has often stayed the hand of official persecution at the very moment it was raised to strike. It has triumphed ultimately where often it has seemed to have failed. It has fought for and won the one right accorded to every free-born British citizen who was not a postal official—the right of free speech and open public meeting.

When, as an unpretentious little organisation, numerically weak and modest in its programme, it was first started by a few London postmen and letter-sorters, it was doubtless prompted principally by the very human desire to improve their own workaday lives and to benefit their wives and children. It need not be claimed that they were animated by any higher or nobler motive.

But as time went on, “new occasions taught new duties,” and as the sphere of their operations almost insensibly widened, so they readily accepted the responsibilities attaching to their character as the wing of a forward movement.

CHAPTER II

BEGINNINGS OF COMBINED AGITATION—THE COMPULSORY SUNDAY LABOUR QUESTION—FIRST PUBLIC PROTEST AT EXETER HALL.

That the spirit of discontent in the Post-Office manifested itself so far back as over half a century ago, will probably somewhat surprise most people outside the postal service itself. Possibly even farther back than that, some traces of discontent and effort at agitation might be found; but in those obscure days, however the working conditions of the service may have justified it, all such effort must have begun and ended with a few individual insubordinates, whose names are buried in oblivion and the official records. But it has to be remembered that in the earlier days of the Post-Office the very conditions under which the members of the working staff were introduced into the service almost precluded the possibility of organisation for the redress of grievances. Indeed, it may be well understood that in the pastoral days of the good old times—when life went slower, and when there was an absence of that feverish rush and hurry so characteristic of the present everywhere, and of the Post-Office in particular—postal officials were the happy inhabitants of a sort of Sleepy Hollow. In a word, probably there was little discontent in the earlier days, owing to the system of appointment by patronage. At least, there could have been very little open and avowed discontent, and much less could it have been organised.

As a survival of the system in vogue in the old twopenny-post days, the greater part of the working staff—that is to say, those subordinates who afterwards came to be described as the manipulative part of the machinery, were for many years after the introduction of the penny post recruited from those in whose behalf some influence had been exercised or invoked. Many were the sons of old servants of the aristocracy, others the sons or relatives of the dependants of M.P.’s, of Justices of the Peace, of lawyers, and public men more or less eminent. Every notability who could exercise any influence with the postal authorities, or with those who were en rapport with the powers that were, had their nominees. It was then next to impossible for a mere outsider, whatever his merits, to obtain employment under the Postmaster-General without this golden talisman. This system, so general in the earlier days, has been adverted to only in order to show one reason for there being so little discontent openly manifested, and to explain why agitation did not assume an organised form till later in the century. For however slow may have been the times, doubtless the conditions of the postal service were not even then so Arcadian as to stifle entirely the feeling of discontent in some. But the system of nomination by influence and patronage, and what in these days might be called by the uglier name of nepotism, was better calculated to foster a feeling of dependence in the majority, and one of grateful loyalty in many. This, too, it has been already pointed out, was in the days when the principles of trades unionism were little studied and little understood, even so far as they had taken root in the minds of the working-classes. Combination in any shape or form was in fact little sympathised with by those whom it sought to benefit, and in Government offices particularly would have been anathema to the authorities, or, at any rate, received with fear and aversion.

While the good old principle of “looking after Doub” prevailed extensively in every other Government office, it was almost paramount in the Post-Office; and this being so, it would be surprising to find anything but a state of stagnant contentment existing among the working staff. If not exactly a state of stagnant contentment, the readiness to assert a principle, and to resent encroachment on existing rights and privileges, would certainly not be forcibly in evidence. Whatever official wrongs, if any, they may have been subjected to at the hands of their superiors, they showed no willingness to be awakened to a sense of them. The tide of Chartism beat in vain against the grim walls of the Post-Office; the fluctuations of trade disputes, strikes, and lock-outs interested them only in a casual way, if at all; while the bare idea of organised opposition to the wishes of the authorities, however arbitrary, would have spelt downright treason. They were recruited from a class of men who, if they had not always been brought up in the paths of virtue, had always gone along the line of least resistance, which was that of conventional respectability. Once in the Post-Office, they had a character to keep up, and they were not as other men who had to work for their living with dirty hands. They felt that their Queen and country had reposed a confidence in them by selecting them for the responsible position they held. They were something midway between lawyers’ clerks and menials of the royal household. They doubtless felt they were very superior persons, though their wages were meagre and their uniform scanty; but the authorities were like unto little gods to them, and so they took it for granted that Heaven had established a natural gulf between them. Still they were the children of patronage, and of fathers whose only ambition was to see their sons settled in a Government situation; for a Government situation was for their sons the Mecca and the goal of those people who always kept good and paid proper respects to the parson and their rent regularly to the squire. And when the sons got there they felt they were a chosen few, invested with a caste and a distinction which entitled them to hold their heads a little higher than the people living in the same street. The consciousness that his neighbours occasionally pointed him out as the “gentleman who works in the Post-Office” more than atoned for his inability to wear fashionable clothes and a top-hat like his superiors.

This system of patronage as a means of rewarding the deserving relatives of old servitors and sworn retainers by drafting them into the General Post-Office, though it would not be tolerated in these democratic times, yet is reminiscent somewhat of the good old days when such things were only right and proper in every department of the State, and when it was taken for granted that Government situations were only the just reward of faithful service rendered elsewhere to the heaven-born men of power and influence in the State, and created for them to prove their generosity. Such a system is perhaps therefore saved from utter condemnation by just a suggestion of poetry about it, recalling the earlier coaching days, when the bond between master and servant was often one of intimacy and mutual obligation; and perhaps it would not be difficult to say a good word for it. It showed at least that whatever the failings of those in power and those in high places, whatever their attitude towards the working-classes generally, however they may have sniffed contemptuously at any suggestion of Chartism, or at all attempts at combination among the masses, they were not always unmindful of their moral duties towards their own dependants. Willingly enough they paid their obligations, and rewarded services rendered by quickly pushing the applicants into the service of the State. They felt that they had discharged the whole duty of man when they had done this; they had provided the son of a deserving old family servant, of an influential constituent, or of a good paying tenant, with a berth for life in a Government office, and, what was more, had proved their importance in being able to do so.

Still, whatever may have been the abuses attaching to such a system, the State was to an extent the gainer in getting men of good character, with a good certificate of family respectability, and, moreover, men who were guaranteed to go for any length of time without winding up, who were warranted never to become discontented, but always to remain faithful and loyal, well satisfied with the position in which it had pleased God and their patron to place them.

With the rank and file of the postal service composed of such men, brought in under such conditions, it is not surprising that discontent never raised its head, and that many a grievance went unredressed because it was silently endured. Nor is it surprising that the Post-Office, garrisoned by such an army sworn in in this manner, was almost the last citadel that it attacked with any degree of success. It would have been too dangerous for any man to have attempted to bell the cat in those days, and however strong may have been the desire in some, without the support and confidence of their fellows it would have been sheer official suicide to have taken the first step. They were men calculated to endure much. Petty official tyranny to such men meant no more than mild discipline. A grievance with them was but an evanescent thing, felt to-day, forgotten to-morrow; for they had a stake in the Post-Office. To express discontent would be to court certain dismissal, and that would have meant much to them, while it would mean the betrayal of the good, kind patron, their father’s master or landlord, whose powerful influence had placed them there. Indeed, it is easy to understand that no man would have felt himself either a spy or a renegade to principle in secretly or openly denouncing the rash fool who would endeavour to organise a meeting of protest against his superiors. Such were the conditions and such the temper of the men of the postal staff that must have long obtained prior to the fifties and sixties. From the introduction of the penny post in 1840, which practically organised the Post-Office on a new basis, there is no evidence of combined discontent worth recording till the early fifties, though through that period of eighteen years or so the leaven of discontent was slowly but surely working, till a desire to make their wants known at last became manifest.

Yet only a few years after the institution of the penny post the indoor working staffs and the letter-carriers were both given grave cause for dissatisfaction by the extension of Sunday labour. Whatever protest they may have made of their own accord counted for little; but it is interesting to find that so early as 1848 an influential and public-spirited section of the community took up the matter of compulsory Sunday labour on behalf of the aggrieved postal servants, the sorting-clerks and others, and publicly expressed that dissatisfaction which Government servants dared not themselves utter too openly.

At that time it was contemplated by the authorities to compel two attendances on that day as on other days of the week, and to abolish entirely for postal servants in London the distinction between the day of rest and ordinary working days. This was the origin of that question of compulsory Sunday labour in the Post-Office, which was to continue for thirty years and more as one of the prevailing causes of dissatisfaction to thousands of men. On the 8th October 1849 a great mass meeting was called at Exeter Hall to protest as strongly as possible against this desecration of Sunday. The meeting was convened in the interests of postal servants themselves as much as in furtherance of the Sabbatarian principle, and there is little doubt that the men of the Post-Office who were the principal objectors to the new regulation, were behind the scenes aiding and abetting in the success of the movement. A writer in the Patriot newspaper of that year, and one evidently familiar with the Post-Office machinery, drew a vivid picture of the possibilities of Sunday labour in the Post-Office. This article in the Patriot, probably from the pen of the first avowed discontented postal servant, did not a little to further the memorial for the cessation of the practice, which was afterwards drawn up by the Sunday-School Union, and forwarded to the Lords of the Treasury. The action of the authorities was denounced as sacrilegious, arbitrary, and tyrannical, by a number of clergymen and others speaking for the aggrieved men, while Rowland Hill, the postal reformer, the “Father of the Penny Post,” came in for a large share of hostile criticism, his name being repeatedly hissed at the Exeter Hall meeting. If the audience hissed Rowland Hill, they as loudly cheered the postal servants on whom this new official imposition was to be put, directly it became known that, to their honour, they had respectfully but firmly declined to submit, and that when the sheets for their signature went round the large establishment only two men could be got to sign away their birthright for the little extra pay. The name of the Queen was invoked to prevent this iniquitous violation of the “Pearl of Days.”

The memorial was forwarded to the Treasury; and the request for an interview with Lord John Russell to support the prayer of his memorial, met with only a curt refusal through his secretary. There the matter ended, so far. The Post-Office had its way, and compulsory Sunday labour in the Post-Office became an established, and in the minds of many, a disgraceful fact; to prove, however, a source of further trouble later on, and to provide one of the most substantial excuses for agitation during the next thirty years. Yet the comparatively feeble agitation by proxy, set on foot then in 1848, did produce, nevertheless, some little result; and on March 18, 1850, a Parliamentary paper was issued to show the “results of the measures recently adopted for the reduction of Sunday labour in the Post-Office.”

CHAPTER III

ECONOMICAL REFORM AND A LOWERING OF STATUS—AN ESTIMATE OF ROWLAND HILL—EFFORTS OF THE CIVIL SERVICE GAZETTE—THE CONDITIONS OF THE SERVICE, 1854-60.

From about 1854 it seems a new class of men were gradually being introduced. By the operation of what was known as the Elcho Scheme, there was a large reduction of the clerical class who had hitherto usually discharged the duties of letter-sorting, as well as the despatch and receipt of mails. But the authorities, beginning to awaken to the fact that the Post-Office was becoming a splendid source of revenue, therefore decided to cut down expenditure by introducing a more poorly paid class to take up the duties of those who had been in receipt of a much higher salary than it was proposed to offer the new entrants.

The work of sorting letters, for example, which had hitherto been performed by clerks, was now to be entrusted to men of an inferior grade. And the “Report upon the Post-Office for the year 1854,” in which this innovation is first announced, expresses the hope that such persons on an inferior salary would be able, as necessity arose, or on “occasions of any extraordinary pressure,” to take a share also in the duties of the clerks. This is perhaps one of the earliest indications of that policy of cheese-paring and depreciation of the value of official work, which, if it has not always justified discontent and agitation, has proved a fruitful source of it. From the introduction of the penny post, and probably from a long time before, the public correspondence was treated tenderly and disposed of conscientiously. So high was the importance attached to it that none were deemed worthy of being entrusted with it who were not servants belonging to the “major establishment.” Both the sorters of letters and those who despatched the mails belonged to the clerical staff, while only the work of “facing,” stamping, tying, and the work of conveyance and porterage was entrusted to the class of minor officials, who afterwards came to constitute the main bulk of the force.

From this period the clerks, who had been the only ones entrusted with the high responsibility of sorting and despatching letters, gradually became a restricted and exclusive class, while the lesser officials, who formerly had been scarcely allowed to touch the correspondence, were now trained to those superior duties, but without a corresponding increase of remuneration. It is worthy, however, of bearing in mind that the despatching of mails was still deemed of such a responsibility and importance that mere letter-sorters were not yet allowed to perform such duties, clerks only on a salary rising to £400 a year being thought worthy of that honour, although a few years later, when such duties became several times heavier and correspondingly more responsible, the inferior class of letter-sorters were compelled to take them up. It was the continuance of this anomaly for some length of time, indeed, which constituted one of the main elements of discontent, and came to be regarded as a distinct grievance among the letter-sorting staff especially.

As the growth of the Post-Office business necessitated a larger staff to cope with it, so a new class of men were being slowly introduced. The penny post was a reform so much appreciated by the public by this time that it had become even now, in 1854, the most flourishing business in the world. And Rowland Hill was not slow to take every advantage of his discovery that the Post-Office contained greater possibilities than to remain a cheap public convenience. The founder of the penny post was now Permanent Secretary, and a greater power in the land than the Postmaster-General, not a little of a bureaucrat, and one who had trained himself to regard his postal domain as a sort of family preserve. He saw no harm in introducing cheap labour; he discovered a new way of cutting down expenses by relegating the work which had been paid for at a salary of from £200 to £400 a year to this new class of minor officials, mostly salaried at less than a fourth that amount. There was one new element introduced with the new-comers, however, which probably was never taken into account at the time; and that was, that they were drawn from a better educated, and a more enlightened body of men than those hitherto engaged on inferior duties. The educational tests for admission into the Post-Office had previously been very meagre, and almost nil where special influence had been used. The old system of patronage and nomination was maintained as long as it was convenient, and as long as it worked satisfactorily, and for some considerable time longer. But at length, owing to the expansion of postal business, even patronage could not of itself keep up an adequate supply of qualified recruits. And it was impossible to go begging to lords or distinguished commoners for poor relations, or cast-off dependants, as that might be putting a premium on dishonesty, and cheapening still further good recommendations which were already in some cases too cheap to be genuine. Besides, the growth of democratic ideas among people outside was making them inquisitive. There was the beginning of a feeling that nomination by aristocratic influence was not of itself recommendation enough for a government post, however humble; though, perhaps, this was shared most largely among those ever ready to make a mark of public departments, and by those who had failed themselves to invoke such influence, or who envied those who had succeeded. Again, the claims of education had never been sufficiently recognised in filling these subordinate positions, and now was the opportunity to get a better value for money. Accordingly by slow degrees the old system of nomination by influence alone became more honoured in the breach than in the observance. At least it came to be not insisted on as the highest qualification—which was certainly a step in the right direction. Instead, a suitable educational test, coupled with ordinary certificates as to character, was the principal introduction required.

Patronage was still allowed to exercise its influence where it desired, and continued to do so for many years afterwards, but it was no longer held to be the only “open, sesame” to a berth in the Post-Office. And so there were drawn from almost every rank in life, men of a better educational standard; men who knew the world better, and men who in many instances fostered a feeling of independence, more or less, by having some knowledge of a trade, or the experiences gained in a former occupation. In any case they were not drawn from any particular class. They were not all the sons or relatives of sworn retainers—of humble and obedient family servants grown grey in bowing and scraping to superiors—nor from a stock always warranted by such circumstance to remain quiet in harness. Doubtless some still were; but the majority were not. If, on entering the Post-Office, they had to share the lot of all postal officials in those days of being deprived of the franchise, they were as free as, or freer than, their predecessors, to influence members of Parliament secretly and indirectly through their relatives or friends who had votes to give, or may-be to sell. Though there is no reason to think that any number of them at that time attached any very serious importance to the loss of civil liberty in this respect which entry into the public service entailed; still, members of Parliament, and intending Parliamentary candidates having influence in high quarters, could not altogether refuse their good offices on behalf of a letter-carrier, or a sorter, whose case, or whose individual claims, might be represented by a friend who was a constituent suffering no such electoral disability. One postal employé might influence half-a-dozen votes in a constituency.

At first this new departure in economy had been attempted very gingerly, only about twenty selected men of the minor establishment being introduced into the sorting department for this purpose. The class from which they were drawn comprised the letter-carriers, messengers, doorkeepers, &c., who were originally intended to remain in those inferior positions as long as their service lasted. These twenty men were accordingly brought into the Inland Letter Branch, where for a time they were exclusively employed in the first stages of those duties for which their superiors, the clerks, had been drawing three times the highest salary they could ever hope to obtain. This work of primary sortation, dividing and subdividing the correspondence at the general sorting and divisional tables, necessitated no great intellectual strain, and required no educational ability beyond that of reading the addresses on the envelopes. But, as will be seen, the “experiment” was bad in principle, inasmuch as whatever the inducements, whatever the promises, the new sorting staff got no improvement in pay or prospects. It was a too flagrant and sudden depreciation of the standard of work hitherto regarded as of such exclusive importance that none but clerks rising to substantial salaries had been thought capable enough or trustworthy enough to deal with it. The experiment, for the best of reasons, was pronounced satisfactory, and then after a while new responsibilities were heaped upon these twenty expectant scapegoats, whose expectation proved to be their only comfort. They were eventually put to “despatching” and other highly responsible duties as these were vacated by the clerks; others, letter-carriers, &c., being brought in to perform the primary sortation. And so this system of replacement continued year after year until eventually the whole of the Inland Letter-sorting Office was manned by minor establishment men. This was a piece of official cozening that was complete in its success. That from £200 to £400 may have been too big a salary to pay for such work in those days especially may be readily granted; but it certainly might have been expected that some improvement in position corresponding to their new duties and heavier responsibilities would have been granted the new class of sorters. As it was, they were left to remain on their old status as letter-carriers and messengers. In the face of this—that Rowland Hill and the authorities had found out a new way to get the public’s correspondence dealt with at somewhere about one-third the original in salaries—it seems difficult of belief that absolutely nothing was done for this badly-treated class of men until fully twenty-five years later. Yet such is the fact. It was not that the men felt they had no cause for complaint; it was not because they did not realise that they were a cheated and disgracefully-sweated body of men. Many indeed left the Post-Office in disgust after remaining only a few months. But whatever discontent may have shown itself, and however justified, there were none in Parliament yet who could be induced to take up their cause as a body. Doubtless individual representations were made by the score, but while they may have been pretty well agreed by this time that they were being duped more or less, there was still a lack of unity among them. Besides, they were a small and obscure body about which the general public knew next to nothing and cared less; they were as yet without any means of making known their plaint even if they so desired. They were without influence as without votes. They were not only without influence and without votes, but those who by circumstances were compelled to tolerate the conditions of their service felt that the rigorous rule against communicating with the press or approaching M.P.’s directly was looked upon as having all the sanctity of law by those outside. Even the organs of the public press were not to be trusted, it was felt; while to communicate directly and privately with any M.P. would have been not only useless but dangerous. They could have taken a ready revenge for being pestered by men with grievances but no votes. Consequently there was never, till a few years later, discontent open enough or of such a nature to draw public attention.

At this period the London letter-carriers were principally confined to the chief office, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and as the grades of stampers and sorters were mainly drawn from this body, and as both were located in the same huge building, the relationship between them was of a close connection. Whatever grievances were felt by one class were felt or sympathised with by the other. If there was no movement among them answering to combination as it came to be understood a little later; if they did not set their faces in one particular direction by common impulse; if they as yet had no thought of gathering in public meeting and attempting to break the silence imposed on them by official restraints, it was not because they were not agreed that they were an ill-used body of men. The awakening was beginning; the signs of discontent were scarcely concealed, but the authorities saw no reason to inquire further.

Already the most daring among them directed their eyes to Exeter Hall, and some talked of the possibility of a public demonstration. As was very natural, the majority hesitated about taking a step which had scarcely before been attempted. It was like exploring an unknown country, and they could only guess at the difficulties and dangers ahead. No one was certain, either, how the public would receive any demonstration of aggrieved postal servants. It might be regarded as an exhibition of downright disloyalty by those without, and as rank mutiny by the authorities within. It might even be looked on by the public at large as the beginnings of a postal strike; while it was feared that the press would prove anything but friendly. If it did not hold their puny efforts up to scorn and ridicule, it might hamper them in no small degree, and alienate any little sympathy they might be able to command among a few influential public men who had quietly promised to assist them to get the matter looked into. It was such considerations as these that caused the proposal to hang fire for a period.

About 1855, however, the discontent among the London letter-carriers began to express itself in something like organised effort. A committee was formed, and small subscriptions were collected to defray the expenses of hiring a hall in which to hold public meetings. The principal ground of complaint was, as usual, the smallness of salary as compared with the high price of provisions and increasing house-rent, and the withdrawal of payment for extra duty. It appears that while the men had been allowed the opportunity of adding to their slender wage by making sixpence an hour for overtime, they bore with the conditions of the service uncomplainingly. But they very justly regarded the withdrawal of this payment for extra duty as incompatible with the increased pressure of work imposed upon them. The meanness which few private employers would care to be found guilty of was unblushingly practised by a State monopoly upon its poorest and most defenceless menials even at this early period. But the letter-carriers were not without spirit, and not without spokesmen to protest on their behalf. On the 13th January 1856, a meeting of letter-carriers was for the first time convened to ventilate their grievances and prepare the terms of a memorial to the Postmaster-General. The memorial was accordingly drawn up, but the memorialists—which principally consisted of the fourth or lowest class of letter-carriers, and therefore the poorest paid—committed the fatal mistake of allowing its publication in the press before presentation to the head of the department. This fact was seized upon by the then Postmaster-General, the Duke of Argyll, as in itself sufficient ground for refusing their claims, and it was intimated to them that the step was so improper in the circumstances that even had the memorial been found reasonable in itself his Grace would have found it difficult to take it into favourable consideration. In the second annual report of the Postmaster-General the “misconduct” of the agitators was severely animadverted on, but his Grace in conclusion expressed his willingness to make allowance for “misconduct arising out of excited feeling,” and desired to take as lenient a course as was consistent with due regard to the discipline of the office. He therefore satisfied himself with reminding those who had shared in these “objectionable proceedings” that henceforth no annual increment would be granted without a certificate of continued good character from their superiors.

Having regard to the circumstances and the times, perhaps they had some cause for congratulation that their offence had been passed over so lightly. Certainly it must be said that the Postmaster-General of 1856 showed an example in lenity which a successor of twenty years after would have done well to copy, and which would have shown him in more consistent accord with the growing and expanding spirit of reform.

Undoubtedly there was ample justification for the discontent which centred in the recent memorial from the letter-carriers. The conditions of the service for them and the lower ranks of postal operatives especially were perhaps not what they should have been, a recent slight improvement notwithstanding. But they were better off than they were to be a year or two later. Things were bad in the Post-Office; but if the plain truth be told, probably the position of the letter-carriers rather favourably compared with the lot of those outside, whose occupation and calling bore the nearest analogy to theirs. For, though the department had committed itself to a policy of rigid economy and profit-making, and had definitely assumed a position of subserviency to the Treasury, it had not yet fully entered on that of cheese-paring parsimony at the expense of its humblest workers which was later on to so characterise it the more as it became wealthier and mightier in its operations and its ambitions. Certainly, it had assumed to think its servants well paid on a starvation pittance, but presumably it still felt some little compunction for their bodily comfort. And this was something in those days when labour had few rights and no privileges. With a curious inconsistency, while it kept the letter-carriers on a wage too low to enable them to live decently, and deprived them of a means to add a shilling or two to their incomes, it actually expressed a philanthropic concern about the manner their poor pay and prospects compelled them to house themselves. The dwellings of the letter-carriers for some time became the object of the authorities’ benevolent attention; apparently on the assumption that a slave-owner may consistently pose as a good, kind master, it at least pretended to take a paternal interest in the domestic welfare of these humble public servants still complaining of too little pay. It was suggested that some sort of postal barracks for letter-carriers and their families should be erected near to the General Post-Office. It was thought that they would enjoy a greater immunity from sickness, but more especially would it be convenient to the department to have them within easy reach, so that they might summon them by bugle-call, and shepherd them in one big drove whenever big mails arrived from abroad. Doubtless, also, it entered into the calculations of the authors of this proposed pretty little postal commonwealth, that they would be better able to keep an eye on the morals of their employés, and preserve their good characters. The authorities, however, shrunk from the responsibility of erecting and maintaining such barracks at the cost of the Government. They did not trust their pet scheme so far as that. The Duke of Argyll, whose original idea it was, thought the prospect one more suitable for a public company, but it was stated in his report that the department might afford aid by “securing to the company its rents, deducting the same from the wages” of the letter-carriers. The Postmaster-General of the period may have been animated by the best of motives; but it is observable that no part of the cost was to be borne by the department, nor were the men, already poorly paid, to be assisted in paying for the extra convenience to the department. The report of the medical officer on the matter discloses the conditions which the low wage of the letter-carriers compelled them to live under. A perusal of this report alone, it seems, provides sufficient excuse for the letter-carriers’ claim to better pay as servants of the State. And the Duke of Argyll, by the publication of the disgraceful facts, provided an unanswerable indictment against his own judgment. It has to be remembered that these were the days before workmen’s trains, when the neighbourhoods around the city were almost as congested as at present, and several times more squalid. The medical officer’s report showed that the great demand for house-room, and the convenience of living near their work obliged these men to live in single apartments, for the most part low, imperfectly ventilated, and “in many cases totally unfit for habitation.” “In some of them the officers who have lodged there have taken smallpox, scarlet fever, and similar contagious complaints.… All the cases of smallpox and fever that have come before me during the last six months have occurred to officers living in such tenements.”

And yet the public servants compelled to live amidst such surroundings were reprimanded for their “misconduct” and “objectionable proceedings” in daring to ask for that slight increase of pay which would enable them to improve the very conditions which his Grace of Argyll so deplored. The Postmaster-General’s dream of a contented little postal Utopia nestling under the shadow of St. Martin’s-le-Grand was, as a matter of course, never attempted to be realised; nor was the slightest compensating advantage given to the neglected men. Yet it must however be stated, to the credit of the authorities of those days, that though they refused any improvement in pay or prospects, they offered the men good investment for their money in the way of an insurance scheme for their benefit. If they could not better provide for their employés while living, they made amends to them when dead. The Post-Office was willing to provide a decent funeral cheaply for any of its servants whom death from ill-nutrition and overwork had saved from becoming State pensioners. It was a happy stroke and a bold one in the direction of economy, and a clever experiment in State Socialism, for which the Duke of Argyll was to be eminently commended.

Still, when all is said, and when all allowance is made for the times, the Post-Office as an employer was no worse than many a factory and many another huge workshop. It was certainly no worse than it was itself destined to become on the departure of the dukely pseudo-philanthropist from St. Martin’s-le-Grand. If there was one thing in postal administration during this time which called for praise it was the earnest solicitude after the health of the staff. The earlier reports from the medical officers of the Post-Office are examples of completeness, and display a patience, a research, and a suggestiveness, as well as a desire to improve the sanitary conditions and working environments of the staff, which is all the more creditable, seeing that the Post-Office then employed only a tithe of the vast army which to-day crowd and toil within its walls.

Yet, painstaking and conscientious as these annual reports on the health of the staff continued to be for the first few years of their appearance, they were by virtue of their very quality calculated to mislead the public as to the inner conditions of Post-Office life. For one thing they referred principally, if not wholly, to the staffs of London; occasionally Edinburgh and Dublin and other large centres came in for observation, but generally speaking too little attention was paid to the conditions of the provincial offices and other places. Extensively quoted and commented on as all such reports were likely to be, they helped, despite the good intentions of their authors, to convey a lasting impression that the Post-Office was the best-managed and best-regulated department of the State, second only to the army in point of immunity from liability to disease in sanitation and general healthful surroundings. They conveyed the idea that the authorities were on the whole so solicitous about the health and comfort of their lesser subordinates that they would temper the wind to the shorn lamb, and were only too eager to stand between a postman and a draught even while they resolutely refused him proper boots and a winter overcoat. They conveyed the notion that while it was good for his moral welfare to underpay him and put temptation in his way, they none the less themselves endured sympathy pains each time an epidemic of diarrhœa swept through the office. They might be found guilty of many things, but it could never be urged against them that they neglected to regulate the number of microbes in the drinking-water. Altogether such regard apparently was paid to the health of the postal staff in these earlier reports that they gave a suggestion of an abiding humanitarianism in postal administration which should cause postal officials generally to regard themselves as fortunate indeed. Only the timidly-uttered discontent among the letter-carriers gave indication of that newly-imported spirit of profit-mongering commercialism which in a few years was to debauch that leavening principle almost beyond recognition. Not that there was any conscious hypocrisy as yet in officialdom. Through all the changes that ensued, the authorities acted according to their conception of their moral duty. For, up to the present, no responsible minister had risen to accuse the Government of being the model employer.

Rowland Hill, the Permanent Secretary, who by this time had become petted and praised and honoured as the greatest reformer of his or any other age, was nevertheless beginning to be found out by his humbler subordinates. Among them at least the “Monarch of the Penny Post” was anything but a living embodiment of all human virtues. These, the little army of obscure minions about the footstool of his gilded throne, had found out that the idol had feet of clay. While the crowd worshipped without, the menial servants within the temple dedicated to his fame could not seal their eyes to his imperfections. They were the menials on whose humble shoulders was borne the weight of that throne and footstool on which he rested; and they most of all knew that their worshipful master’s clay foot was one that could crush most mercilessly. Such was the feeling under the surface, while the great postal reformer himself never dreamed that those so low down would dare to question either his wisdom or his benevolence in finding employment for such a class of men as they. If he ever dreamed that menials could prove so ungrateful for his inventing the penny post, which gave them their livelihood whatever the conditions, it is probable he did not care. Had he been curious to find out, like another Al Raschid, how his servants regarded him, he would have found it somewhat difficult. But suddenly one day, in the summer of 1858, there was circulated broadcast among the members of the London postal service a stinging piece of satire in verse, which purported to represent the esteem in which he was held by the rank and file of the working staff. There is not the slightest doubt that means were taken to ensure his getting a copy, even if his own cherished penny post were used as the medium. If Rowland Hill ever saw it, history is silent as to how he took it. Possibly he only smiled contemptuously; certainly he was not the man to wince, because the sting of an insect had found a loose joint in his armour. Needless to say the author never came forward to claim his laurels, nor was his anonymity discovered. The verse, which was printed on a small handbill, convenient for secret distribution, is almost a literary curiosity now after nearly fifty years. It read as follows:—

THE WHITE SLAVES

To the Magnate of St. Martin’s-le-Grand

The author presents his compliments to Mr. Rowland Hill, and begs his acceptance of the accompanying lines as a mark of the respect in which he is held by a numerous and hard-working class of which the writer is one, as

A Post-Office Fag, Versus White Nigger.

O Rowland Hill! O Rowland Hill!

Thou man of proud imperious will!

Forbear to crush, with iron hand,

The drudges under thy command;

And strive to purify thy fame

From stains that now defile thy name.

Hast thou all sense of justice lost,

Great Monarch of the Penny Post?

Thou takest care, O Rowland Hill!

Thy own big-bellied purse to fill;

But woe betide the hapless wight,

If thou canst nibble at his mite.

Is not thy service rather dear,

At fifteen hundred pounds a year?

Thy brother, with a thousand too,

Methinks is pretty well to do:

And then thy Son, that hopeful sprig,

Five hundred hath to laugh and jig.

So thou hast feathered well thy nest,

And now canst giggle with the best.

But sometimes, Rowland! cast a thought,

On those by labour overwrought;

Nor crimp them of their scanty pay,

That thou mayst revel with the gay;

Invoke their blessing, not their curse,

And thou wouldst never fare the worse.

There is reason to believe that the lines were produced by the printers of the Civil Service Gazette. The lines gave an immense amount of secret satisfaction among the class of men to whom the poet was supposed to belong. But better was in store. Following almost immediately on the publication of the verse, the Civil Service Gazette announced its early intention to ventilate the grievances of the “Fags” and “White Niggers” of the postal service. Great was the jubilation among the aggrieved men, for each confidently expected to borrow a copy from his neighbour when it came out. The Civil Service Gazette was a luxury few could afford ordinarily in those days, costing as it did fivepence, principally owing to the paper duty not being yet repealed.

It was the very first time that any public organ had shown the courage and independence to take up in this manner the little-known case of the sorters and letter-carriers. They were naturally delighted, and devoured the articles with avidity. Now that their grievances had at last found ventilation in all the glory of print, surely the day of their deliverance was close at hand.

But the articles fell short of the mark. They were forcible and telling enough—as all such articles of the Civil Service Gazette in those days were—and they showed no small justification for the discontent prevailing. Yet they convinced nobody but the aggrieved men themselves; the authorities were scarcely impressed, except with the impudence of it, while they were read with only a qualified sympathy by the other members of the Civil Service who chanced to take them up. The only effect the publication of the articles had on the heads of the department against whom they were more or less directed was to provoke an inquiry into the authorship of what they chose to regard as a gross literary impertinence. The usual voluntary spies and amateur detectives were set to work secretly to discover by their own methods who could have been guilty of communicating the facts, or, better still, who was the actual author, and if he had any connection with the service. If the men knew anything at all, they kept the secret loyally. The authorities never got beyond suspicions which they failed to justify, and so the matter blew over. If ever there was a postal Junius in connection with the case, none but a few and the Civil Service Gazette knew his identity.

Before leaving the matter of these articles, of which such high hopes and expectations were raised, it may be worthy of mention as a curious item that the interest and enthusiasm of the men was for some time before kept alive by the surreptitious distribution inside the office and elsewhere of handbills issued from the publishers. Let the handbill speak for itself, and break the silence of nearly half a century:—

Read the “Civil Service Gazette”
Unstamped 5d.—Stamped 6d.

July 24th, 1858,
ROWLAND HILL’S LAST UKASE!
BREAK DOWN OF THE GAGGING SYSTEM!
WHITE SLAVES OF THE POST-OFFICE.

31st,
ROWLAND HILL’S JOB FRUSTRATED:
HIS GREAT REVENGE:
The Screw and Gagging System of the General Post-Office.

POST-OFFICE REFORMS
AND THE WAY TO GET THEM:
HOPE FOR THE LETTER-CARRIERS.
Coming Emancipation of the White Niggers.

August 7th.

POST-OFFICE MANAGEMENT:
OUR MISSING LETTERS AND OUR LATE DELIVERIES

THE LETTER-CARRIER’S “BILL OF FARE.”

14th.
POST-OFFICE REFORM BY MERIT:
REVELATIONS FROM ST. MARTIN’S-LE-GRAND.
HOPE FOR THE OPPRESSED.
THE POSTMASTER-GENERAL AND THE LONDON LETTER-CARRIERS.

These handbills with the articles were all that remained as sad mementos of a new experience and a great disappointment.

The day of postal deliverance was not yet. There were many hills of difficulty to climb ere they could hope even to catch a distant glimpse of the Promised Land.

CHAPTER IV

GROWING DISCONTENT AMONG LETTER-CARRIERS—PROHIBITION OF PUBLIC MEETING—THE FRANCHISE AMONG POSTAL SERVANTS AND ITS HISTORY

For another ten years practically the authorities allowed the malcontents to stew in their own juice.

There was, however, some slight attempt on the part of the letter-carriers to again bring their grievances under notice in 1858 by holding another public meeting in the south-western district of London. This meeting, in the newspaper reports of which the names of the speakers were concealed, for that reason principally, incurred the serious disapprobation of the authorities, and it was honoured with special reference in the Fifth Annual Report of the Postmaster-General. Therein the letter-carriers were severely rebuked for not adopting the same regular course which had hitherto failed to bring them satisfaction. One or two passages are instructive. Instead of the proceedings being “conducted in an open, manly, and respectful manner, the meeting referred to was held away from the ordinary place of employment, and speeches were made containing statements which the men who uttered them must have known to be false, but from the consequences of which they endeavoured to screen themselves by concealing their names.” Lord Colchester, the then Postmaster-General, took the opportunity to warn the letter-carriers “against the machinations of discarded officers who, reckless of the ruin they may bring upon others, strive to spread disaffection in the department from which they themselves have been removed.” Coupled with this warning there was a half promise that, though their position was, as was maintained, a very enviable one, their grievances would be further looked into—providing they complained no further and held no more meetings.

A year or so later, in 1860, owing to the persistent representations made by the various bodies comprising the circulating department, in which they complained of insufficient remuneration and other grievances, an Inter-departmental Committee of Inquiry was held, composed of the principal authorities, assisted by the Assistant-Secretary of the Treasury. This committee occupied itself with the subject matter of the memorials which had been presented. The result was a report in which they recommended a slight increase of force, and a small increase in wages. Whatever the increase of force that was recommended, it was not before it was needed. As for the increase of wages it was not only insignificant, but the manner of its application betrayed it at once as only a temporary stop-gap hesitatingly offered by a parsimonious department anxious to obtain the most credit out of the transaction. Before the public the letter-carriers were represented as coming in for another departmental legacy, but the microscopic benefit was still further diminished by being confined to the “men now in the service,” so that “men newly appointed to the minor establishment would come in on the old and lesser rates of pay.” Even this slight improvement in the conditions of the service was to be confined to the men who had agitated and put the department and its Inter-departmental Committee to some little trouble and expense.

In the year 1866 Lord Stanley of Alderley, then Postmaster-General, felt constrained to prohibit all outside public meetings which were called for purposes of promoting agitation among discontented postal officials. Lord Stanley issued an order prohibiting such open meetings on pain of dismissal. However it may have been justified at the period of its introduction, it is interesting to note that successive Postmasters-General allowed it to remain practically in abeyance for the next twenty-five years. Either Lord Stanley’s order was forgotten, even in the most stormy periods between 1871 and 1874, or the different public heads of the department felt a reluctance to reintroduce it. It was not till 1890 that a definite prohibition of the right of public meeting based on this order was issued by Mr. Raikes.

The London letter-carriers at this period of 1866 were in a highly-dissatisfied state, notwithstanding that on March 22, 1865, there had been a slight revision in the scales of pay for sorters, stampers, letter-carriers, and supplementary letter-carriers. The latter were in receipt of eighteen shillings, while two classes of letter-carriers went from twenty shillings to twenty-five, and from twenty-six to thirty shillings a week. In introducing this improved scale of pay in a circular memorandum, the Postmaster-General did not forget to impress on the lucky recipients that “the benefit of their places is by no means confined to their bare wages, and that this is especially so in the case of the letter-carriers.” They were also once more reminded of the amounts they received from the public “in gratuities at Christmas—a sum which, if divided equally and spread over the whole year, would produce on an average 5s. a week to each man.”

Yet though a beneficent and paternal department gave sanction to the indirect taxation of the public to bring up the wages of the letter-carriers, the letter-carriers themselves still found cause for complaint. On March 1, 1866, a small meeting was held in a public hall to decide on the best means of letting the public and the authorities know of the chronic discontent prevailing, and the adoption of the most effectual means of agitating for the purpose of obtaining a higher wage. The prime mover of this was a letter-carrier named Padfield, in receipt of twenty-five shillings a week, and his principal coadjutors were Sinfield and Booth. Some strong comments were made regarding the decisions of the Postmaster-General and upon the replies of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons, which utterances, as reported, were objected to by the authorities as exceeding the bounds of official license. Padfield, who called the meeting and filled the chair on this occasion, had been an active agitator for some years, and the fact was remembered to his detriment when this particular meeting was taken into account. The Postmaster-General thought it would be against the interests of discipline to retain such a man in the service, and directed that he be dismissed, in the hope that this single example would serve as a sufficient warning to the others. Padfield was accordingly dismissed in the thirteenth year of his service, his defence that he merely took the chair to enable the meeting to express an opinion, which he in no way directed, being of no avail. The two minor sinners, Booth and Sinfield, were dealt with more leniently, and escaped with a severe admonition and a warning as to their future conduct. Booth, however, was to reappear as a more important character later on.

It was this meeting called by Padfield which induced the Postmaster-General, Lord Stanley, to put down with a strong hand these public expressions of discontent among postal servants. He had already expressed disapprobation of such meetings, and could no longer think that there remained any grievances unredressed.

On March 13, 1866, Lord Stanley issued a minute dealing with the practice of holding meetings in public, and the privilege was withdrawn. The decision come to by Lord Stanley was that he was “determined no longer to tolerate a system of agitation which is got up by a few turbulent men, and which tends to create a spirit of discontent and restlessness among the whole of the lower body of the Post-Office servants. With this view he forbids, on pain of dismissal, the holding by officers of the department of any meeting beyond the walls of the Post-Office building for the discussion of official questions.”

The department by this time had whetted its appetite for economy; it had at last wholly committed itself to a policy of save-at-any-price. Had not the great oracle of reform, Rowland Hill himself, shown the way? It was easy to effect this by reducing postal servants’ pay in proportion as their work became harder, and their responsibilities increased. It was also easy of accomplishment by compelling those employed and paid for performing inferior duties to take up those of their immediate superiors who had been in receipt of nearly double their wages. Not that this was altogether a new shuffle in the game of economy, but it had never been so effectively applied. The stampers, therefore, who were regarded as an inferior grade of letter-sorters, were forthwith made to take up despatching duties, those same duties practically for which only a few years before clerks at £200, £300, and even £400 a year had been almost exclusively employed. Thus was the dignity and responsibility of postal duties depreciated still further; thus were the men given fresh causes for complaint; and thus were the seeds of future agitation further sown. The stampers resented it in the only way possible, by petition, verbal and written, and by every means of respectful protest that remained to them. The department had not yet even learnt how to be diplomatic—it practically left them without an answer; not even one of those characteristic replies which have so often protracted the struggle, by referring it to their successors for interpretation. They thought that appealing to the men’s vanity would remove their discontent; that by giving them a new designation they would feel they were not so hardly worked after all. They thought that by calling a man something else he would consent to regard himself as less of a white slave than he was in reality. They very magnanimously altered his official description from that of a stamper to sub-sorter, but without the smallest difference in point of pay or prospects in return for the newly-fixed responsibilities. The malcontents were still ungrateful enough to remain unconverted to the department’s point of view. They did not mind being called anything that would befit them; a rose by any name would smell as sweet; but if they had to do more work of a higher responsibility, they wanted correspondingly better pay. If anything, the discontented ones were even more sordid in those days than those who followed later.

The department had yet a deal to learn, but it played the game with a sublime indifference to the rules of fairness, and wondered when it was detected cheating. It had not yet learned how to cheat with grace, and by means of forced cards, without the subterfuge being exposed on the instant. That was to come later. They had been so used to submissiveness on the part of the force that they could not think the men would have the courage to persist in their objections now. So they thought to compromise the difference by giving the men yet another title, that of “assistant-sorter,” and putting them on the sorters’ scale, but with a reduced maximum when they should reach the top. Now the only advantage they could afford the men as a solatium in their disappointment was to offer them a maximum more easily attained to by being reduced by five shillings. This was the result of a “revision” made in September 1867. The highest wage a man could now receive was 45s. a week instead of 50s., and the only compensation offered for his deprivation of prospect was an increase of 6d. in the yearly rise, and a very slight increase on the lower scale. So that instead of taking nearly half a lifetime to reach 50s. by twenty-seven yearly instalments, it now took sixteen years to reach 45s.

Then after a while they were given the option of remaining on the 50s. maximum at 1s. increments, or the 45s. at 1s. 6d. annual increments. In either case it was like the promise of a copyhold in the moon; at least so the men regarded it, especially as the immediate outlay to the department meant only a dozen shillings or so. But they were compelled to accept the conditions and to take up the duties none the less.

Even with an unblemished character, it took perhaps half a lifetime to reach a respectable salary. Consequently many—the stampers, sub-sorters, postmen, and others—had to eke out their meagre income by working at an alternative trade, such as bootmaking, watchmaking, or other odd jobs in the intervals which should ordinarily have been given to sleep and leisure. One man who used to engage in “moving jobs,” he having a little greengrocers business, was constantly late for the afternoon duty. When called on to explain, he gave as his reason that the Post-Office gave him his bread, and he had to employ his spare time elsewhere looking for his cheese. It is a trifling incident, but the reply would have equally well fitted hundreds of others in similar positions.

As has already been pointed out, the bond of relationship between the letter-carrier and the stampers and sorters was becoming a most intimate one, and one body scarcely moved without the other. The letter-carriers complained of poor pay in proportion to the value of their work, and bad treatment generally. The stampers and the sorters had their own distinct grievances, but there was to an extent a common ground of action between them. They had as yet no right of public meeting; indeed that right, conceded as such, did not come till twenty-five years after, when it was granted expressly by Mr. Gladstone. There appeared to be a total absence of instruction on the matter, but it was generally taken for granted that postal servants who were debarred the simple privilege of recording their votes at election times, except under most dreadful pains and penalties, most certainly would not be allowed to convene meetings or to hire halls for purposes of agitation. It had always been thought that postal officials courted official outlawry by attempting to do so. The withholding of the franchise from them encouraged the belief, even among themselves, that they were not fit and proper persons to engage in anything but their own business, which was that of serving the State and the public as faithfully as they knew how on their scanty pay. Yet it was not till 1866 that there was any direct official pronouncement on the matter, and it is probable that nothing but the events happening previously provided the warranty for it.

The greater portion of the Civil Service at this period were up in arms to claim their right to the franchise, and the Post-Office, as represented by the clerical staff, particularly played its part. The Post-Office clerks took the lead, and joined with the rest of civil servants in the general demand to be treated as loyal and intelligent citizens. Many meetings were held, at which M.P.’s and influential speakers attended. Postal servants of the lower grades gave sympathetic support, but it must be confessed that they were as a body less impressed with the importance of the principle than were their superiors in the service. With them it was more a question of more bread and butter than votes; and only a proportion of the more discerning saw how the exercise of the franchise would directly affect them and their position.

On the whole, the credit for agitating for the franchise for postal servants must be given to the clerical staff of that period. It is not, however, to be supposed that they were animated by any democratic desire to extend political privileges to such people as letter-carriers and letter-sorters. They, as was only natural in the circumstances, played principally for their own hand; but they helped to win the game, and the thanks of those who afterwards shared in the spoils were due to them.

And here it is perhaps allowable to point out as a noteworthy fact that it was the clerks of the Civil Service themselves who originally were responsible for the withholding of the franchise from all Government servants. They it was who relinquished their birthright, and were the indirect means of depriving future generations of it. This happened so far back as 1782, and it was actually done at their own request and petition. Nor was there anything particularly reprehensible or blameworthy in their taking up such a position, as it was done entirely for their own protection. The possession of a vote in those days had proved more of a curse than a blessing; and an election period meant a time of coercion and anxiety about the security of their position under Government. In an election they could not please both parties, and their votes being solicited by rival factions, woe to them if they did not vote on the lucky side. At this time the existing Government, through the votes of public servants, controlled no less than seventy seats in the House of Commons. Just before a General Election, Lord North, who had been in power for twelve years, took a high hand by sending notices to those constituencies where the votes of Government servants were likely to turn the scale, that unless they voted for his party, it would go very hard with them in the event of his being returned to power. This was a threat and a warning serious enough in itself, but it was rendered more so by the opposite party retaliating in a like fashion by also sending out notices to the effect that there was a likelihood of their coming into office, and that if they did not give their vote, such Government servants would find themselves in a very awkward predicament.

A strong petition was sent up pleading for disfranchisement, and a bill was introduced shortly after the formation of Lord Rockingham’s administration, which was to deliver ministers from temptation to tamper with civil servants, and the better to secure the freedom of election. It is a somewhat surprising fact, looked at in these days, that this bill was warmly contested in all its stages through the House of Commons. But it was eventually passed by considerable majorities, though in no division were more than 110 members present. At that time it was regarded as a very necessary precaution to have passed this Act (22 Geo. III. c. 41), as it was computed that the Revenue officers formed nearly twenty per cent. of the whole electorate. While the Government of the day wielded such power over the destinies of civil servants because of the possession of these votes, and that in point of fact they could by this means influence no less than 140 votes in the House of Commons, it was perhaps far better that civil servants should be disfranchised. But the natural consequence was that all Post-Office servants, whatever their rank, high or low, were excluded from the use of their votes; and this in course of time gave rise to a very grave injustice.

While citizen liberty was everywhere expanding, and the greater majority of the artisan and labouring classes were being gathered into the widening folds of the British electorate, those who happened to serve the Crown in any capacity had to pay for the privilege by the sacrifice of their vote. From allowing too much liberty to Revenue officers and those serving under the Crown, the Government rushed to the other extreme, and an Act was passed in the pre-Reform days (7 & 8 Geo. III. c. 53, s. 9) by which the provisions of former Acts were amended and extended still further by increasing the penalty to be inflicted on any Revenue officer (including postal officials) for voting at election times while still in his Majesty’s service, and for two months subsequent to leaving it. The penalty was increased from £100 to £500. An officer in the Post-Office was not merely liable to this heavy penalty for recording his vote, which in the ordinary course was allowed him as a citizen by the law, but on conviction was declared to be for ever disabled and incapable of holding or executing any office of trust under the Crown, if he committed the heinous crime of voting at Parliamentary elections. The great Reform Act of 1831, which came to be hailed with such joyous satisfaction by the whole community, afforded no relief to the Post-Office official, and it was not till a quarter of a century later that they were thought worthy of being entrusted with a vote. However this deprival of the franchise may have been justified in Lord Rockingham’s time in 1782, times and circumstances had materially changed when the middle of the nineteenth century arrived.

Such was the paradoxical position taken up with regard to postal servants and all those who served the Revenue, that while they were invariably men of selected character and selected intelligence and education, generally introduced into the public service through the highest influence to vouch for their integrity, they were not thought trustworthy enough to use a vote with common honesty and discretion. The absurdity and injustice of the position could not fail to arouse in course of time the opposition of those affected. In those days the future brilliant critic and fighting editor of the World, Edmund Yates, and Anthony Trollope, the future novelist, were in the Post-Office; and these, in co-operation with Messrs. Frank Ives Scudamore, Chetwynd, and Ashurst, threw themselves into a movement for the removal of such electoral disabilities. The Inland Revenue was represented by Messrs. Dalbiac, Jacobs, and Alaric A. Watts, and the Customs by Messrs. Dobell and Hamel. These, the representatives of the Post-Office, the Inland Revenue, and the Customs, resolved themselves into a committee. A circular was issued to the members of the service, and the support of members of Parliament was obtained, and among these were included Mr. Charles Buxton, Sir Harry Verney, and Mr. Charles J. Monk. The discontent with the existing political restraint placed upon them in a short time pervaded all ranks and sections of the Civil Service; and, feeling that the retention of the present disabilities was a slur on their intelligence, and a stigma on their character for loyalty, the agitation for their removal was entered into with earnestness. This was the first organised attempt to obtain the removal of the disabilities in respect of voting and taking part in Parliamentary elections, which invidiously differentiated all Revenue officers from all other civil servants of the Crown. But it was to prove nearly a nine years’ hard fight before they were to take back what had been so hastily thrown away by a previous generation of civil servants. Beyond a few private members no minister could be induced to give countenance to what had almost come to be regarded as an impossible demand.

When the Reform Bill of 1867 was passing through the House of Commons, Sir Harry Verney, who had warmly espoused the cause of the disenfranchised civil servants, proposed a clause enabling Revenue officials (who were otherwise qualified) to vote at elections, but, on the recommendations of both Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, this clause was negatived without a division. Yet this part of the proposal, at any rate, vehemently opposed though it was by the Government of the day and the leaders of the Opposition, was to be within two years embodied in a statute of the realm. Each forward step taken by the friends of enfranchisement was contested by the occupants of both sides of the House; and every argument that could be devised for and against was imported into the discussion.

It was due to Mr. Charles J. Monk, the member for Gloucester, that the first breach in the Opposition was made. From the very first he had been struck with the unfairness of excluding educated and selected men in the Post-Office, Customs, and Inland Revenue from the exercise of the franchise, while their brethren in all the other departments of the State could freely vote and take part in elections. The principal high official argument, used in its many variations, was that it would be an unsafe weapon to place in the hands of men who might use it for furthering excessive demands, and for general purposes of agitation. Mr. Monk’s reply was in most cases to the effect that “if these officers have just cause of complaint it is far better that the grievance should be brought before the House by their Parliamentary representatives than that it should be left to seethe below the surface, or be brought to light through irregular channels.” It was early in the session of 1868 that Mr. Monk introduced his Revenue Officers’ Disabilities Removal Bill. Slowly and inch by inch it was carried through all its stages in the House of Commons, defeating the Tory Government of Mr. Disraeli, on the motion for going into committee on the bill, by a majority of thirty-two. This was certainly a triumph for the friends of Reform, considering that the Government had the support of the Leader of the Opposition in opposing the measure. Lord Abinger took charge of the bill in the House of Lords, when the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cairns, much to the astonishment of the peers themselves and many others in the Lower House, supported the measure most strongly. This was sufficient to ensure its success, and it speedily passed into law (31 & 32 Vict. c. 73).

During the subsequent Parliament, 1868-1874, Mr. Monk made several attempts to complete the measure of enfranchisement by enabling officers engaged in the collection and management of her Majesty’s revenues to take part unreservedly in the election of members to serve in Parliament. But he was invariably opposed most strenuously by the then Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone, and it was not till another Parliament had been elected, in 1874, that he was enabled to accomplish that object by passing one other measure (37 & 38 Vict c. 22) through Parliament, with the concurrence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the new Government, Sir Stafford Northcote.

The services of Mr. Monk in getting passed the measure of 1868 were still appreciated by the newly-emancipated postal servants and others; and Mr. Frank Ives Scudamore, Assistant-Secretary to the Post-Office, on behalf of the Revenue Offices generally, presented him with an illuminated address, expressive of their gratitude to him for his skill and ability in carrying their “Bill of Rights” successfully through Parliament, “in despite of formidable opposition.”

If it was the higher grade of civil servants who for their own protection threw away their right to the franchise, it was the same class who recovered it, and who were instrumental in procuring it even for their humbler subordinates in the postal service and elsewhere.

During the progress of the agitation among nearly all Civil Service bodies to obtain the franchise, discontent was becoming all the more acute in the Post-Office. Doubtless the contemplation of practically the whole Civil Service engaged in furthering a united demand, in no small degree gave an impetus to the growing postal movement, and helped to develop the forces of discontent within.

CHAPTER V

FORMATION OF AN ORGANISATION—BOOTH, THE LETTER-CARRIER—CONDITION OF THE LETTER-CARRIERS—PROPOSED PETITION TO PARLIAMENT.

It was scarcely to be expected that, with the spirit of discontent so widespread among every class and section, that discontent would remain altogether dumb and inarticulate. If the authorities imagined that by putting their veto on the right of public meeting discontent would in consequence die a natural death, they were mistaken. It may have slumbered for a while, only that there were already a few active spirits at work among the letter-carriers. Secretly and quietly, and almost unrecognised even among those whom he was slowly organising, one man particularly at this period was actively at work. His name was William Booth, a City letter-carrier. He began by convening little hole-and-corner meetings in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. And what was a source of no little annoyance to the authorities, those smuggled meetings of postal employés were more often than not reported in the public press, though the names of the speakers were not always given. Nor did it stop at smuggled meetings outside the official domain; for Booth called several meetings, with the official permission as well as without, in the letter-carriers’ kitchens. Some were impromptu meetings, carefully planned by the indefatigable Booth, and, as usual, reported next morning. Such meetings were generally for the purpose of shaping a policy, and for discussing the best means of drawing the attention of Parliament to their grievances. They were always well attended, not only by the letter-carriers themselves, but by every other class and section of postal employé in the Post-Office buildings. But spies and overseers were frequently present to see that no one used a pencil to scribble a surreptitious note. Yet, even with this precaution, to the chagrin of the authorities, the morning papers had accurate accounts of the proceedings. The invisible reporters were never looked for in the proper place, for they stationed themselves by one of the open windows of the underground kitchens which looked into the Post-Office yard; and through these windows every word of the speakers floated upward to be deftly caught by the eager reporter in waiting.

Then, as if to test the existing official prohibition, Booth advertised that he would lecture on postal grievances at Cowper Street Schoolrooms, and the fact was announced by the distribution of some thousands of handbills. The lecture was delivered to a crowded and enthusiastic audience, and many of the public were present. The result of this was that the lecturer was next day called up before the Controller to explain why he held a meeting outside the Post-Office building, the forbidding rule notwithstanding. Booth very adroitly won his case on a quibble, and was afterwards none the less proud of having done so. He maintained it was a lecture merely, there being no resolution of any kind discussed; and there being no prohibitive rule against lectures, of whatever nature, he submitted that he had broken no regulation. The official Solon discharged him with a caution.

The agitators were by this time made aware in many unpleasant little ways that they were constantly under the surveillance of the departmental informers. Both on duty and away from it they could scarcely move with freedom. Booth especially was regarded as such a dangerous firebrand that the department felt it advisable to keep itself acquainted with his every movement while off duty, and for that purpose he was constantly shadowed to find out where he went and with whom he mixed. His house at Brixton was watched almost night and day, and several times the official touts got reprimanded by their superiors for reporting that Booth had not left the house after being seen going in, when as a matter of fact he was found to have addressed a postal meeting the same evening. For the sake of causing their discomfiture, and for the fun of the thing, he generally circumvented the watchers by getting over the back-garden wall and dodging through a neighbour’s house into a side street.

In this manner principally he got together meetings of men whose co-operation he sought, and though such gatherings were often secret and unrecorded, they were largely the means of setting the agitation on the move along definite lines. The agitation from this period may be said to have been started in a little coffee-room off Gunpowder Alley, in Fleet Street, and from Gunpowder Alley, very appropriately, most of the squibs to be directed against the postal authorities were prepared and fired. It was here that the first conference of postal servants was held, when Booth, having called together a body of representatives from the various district offices, besought them to assist him to form an organisation of postal employés for mutual benefit and maintenance of rights. It was the ambitious aim to unite the whole of the Post-Office and Telegraph employés, to assist in obtaining by legitimate means the abolition of Sunday work, increase of wages, and an honest and clearly-defined system of promotion without loss of pay, and generally to relieve cases of distress. The planks of the platform having thus been rough hewed, it remained to nail them together. For this purpose a small preliminary public meeting was called in a schoolroom attached to the Borough Road Congregational Church, which was lent by the Rev. G. M. Murphy, a notable preacher of the day, who became an active sympathiser with Booth and his efforts. This inaugural meeting in the little schoolroom took place on the 17th of May 1872, when the society was formally constituted and members enrolled.

At the time the bare idea of a protective society of this kind within the ranks of the postal service was so novel and audacious, and the difficulties in the way of its complete success so numerous, that for some months it hung fire, and even many of those who had joined predicted an early demise. At any rate, the progress made was not very reassuring to Booth and his coadjutors, who were staking almost everything on the cast of the die. Nevertheless, the leaders worked with a will to pull the movement together and make it presentable before the public, and an enormous amount of work was quietly accomplished. An extensive correspondence was carried on with public men and others who were to be counted on as friendly, and who were likely to help and encourage them in the future. By this means they awakened an interest in their work among a numerous class of members of Parliament belonging to both political parties, and gave them that knowledge of postal wants which was expected to bear fruit when the time came.

It was not very long before the authorities were surprised to receive an application from the men to be allowed to hold a mass meeting inside the Post-Office, and the loan of the Newspaper Branch was requisitioned. Whatever may have been the hesitation in giving official sanction to so large an order, the required permission was, nevertheless, granted after some delay. The object of this meeting was to discuss the terms of a postal petition to Parliament, and possibly it was the nature of the project which caused the authorities to deem it wiser to confine its discussion within their own walls than to drive it into the public arena.

And just here it is necessary to point out that at this time the fraternal feeling between the London letter-carriers and the letter-sorters was stronger than ever. The several public meetings and the encouragement they had received, with the numerous injunctions from outside friends and sympathisers to keep together, begot a spirit of comradeship which sunk all petty distinction of class, and Booth’s activity did much to cement them. The sorters were slightly better off than the letter-carriers in point of pay and status, but they had grievances much in common, and they had learnt more than ever to recognise that they were useful and necessary to each other in the fight for freedom, a decent wage, and better conditions of work. The army of discontented letter-carriers had been very much increased since 1860. In that year the levelling-down principle, first introduced in 1854 by Rowland Hill and a Commission which then sat, was carried one step further by the formation of an inferior grade to be known as auxiliary or assistant letter-carriers, originally a hybrid class, something between postal labourers and the ordinary letter-carriers. They were badly paid and worse treated; they shared all the misfortunes and hardships of the letter-carriers without their advantages as to pay and prospects. They were a cheap class of labourers in the rich postal vineyard, for whom it seemed the authorities thought any treatment good enough, if only because they were cheap. Their working hours were spread over even a greater period of the day than were those of the full-blown letter-carriers. Their position in the service was most precarious.

Their wretched conditions of service soon impelled them to organise among themselves, but their organisation was as feeble as their funds were shallow, and though nominally they were a separate body, yet virtually they were to be counted in with the general army of malcontents. They gave and received whatever moral support was possible. They joined in where they could; they attended the postal meetings, and assisted in some degree towards the general betterment of the service.

The condition of the auxiliary letter-carriers was so pitiable as to cause wonder that the heads of the department could be so short-sighted as to set up in the persons of these men, many of them almost bootless scarecrows, such a damning and convincing proof of postal ineptitude and parsimony. With a class of men in the Government service working under such conditions, it is easy to see that they were not to remain unaffected by the prevailing epidemic of discontent. Almost from the first they sent forth ready recruits to swell the ranks of the disaffected. They were in themselves a reservoir of discontent, and provided the agitation with a fresh justification, enabling the agitators to make a stronger complaint than ever against the authorities. If anything were wanting to prove that the letter-carriers especially were a body of ill-used men, these auxiliaries supplied the last piece of material evidence. They presented a pathetic spectacle to the public eye. The idea of a man struggling to keep himself and a big family on fifteen shillings a week, the while to remain honest and irreproachable, was likely to awaken the public to it as a matter for its own concern. The auxiliaries had to attend, whenever their services were required, at a remuneration lower than that of a dock-labourer, being threepence or fourpence per hour, and but for the fact that they were compelled to engage in other callings many of them might have starved.

The condition of the indoor staffs could not be so prominently brought under the public eye, but both letter-sorters and letter-carriers alike suffered from disabilities, and had grievances which fully entitled them to an inquiry and a hearing. It was not only that they were expressly forbidden by rule to hold public meetings to discuss their grievances and endeavour to enlist outside sympathy, or to take any public action whatever for the purpose of removing the wrongs of which they complained. To obtain redress of any grievance, the only course officially open to them was to apply through their immediate superiors; but this, with the so-called right of appeal to the Postmaster-General, more often than not begot annoyance and petty persecution from those of whom redress was sought. The right of appeal especially was rendered nugatory by the exercise of the power of damaging endorsement on the part of officials through whose hands such an appeal would have to pass on its way upward to the chief of the department. Indeed, their experience in the matter of petitions to the Postmaster-General had up to the present amply proved that the authorities were intended to serve as a breakwater or a barrier to resist all such appeals, and provide the public head with ample excuses for refusal or an ignoring of the claims of all humble subordinates. As has already been noted, it took many dreary years of waiting or slow climbing to reach what is to-day regarded as a decent living wage. The rules of the department did not insist that a man should work more than eight hours in the twenty-four, but owing to the increase of work they were more commonly extended to ten and sometimes eleven hours in the working day, while these duties were usually divided into two, three, and four separate attendances, the intervals barely leaving time for meals and going to and from the office. All that the sorters had ventured to ask for was that these abuses should be removed; that their pay should better correspond to their heavier responsibilities and the increased cost of living; that their hours should be confined to eight in the twenty-four, and adjusted more humanely.

The letter-carriers joined with the sorters in complaining that their pay, thirty shillings a week after fifteen or twenty years’ drudgery, was not a fair wage; that promotion was not only unequal, but too slow. A peculiar grievance with them then, as it has always remained, was that the fact that letter-carriers were given Christmas-boxes by the public had invariably been made a pretext for paying the men badly. Letter-carriers who were formerly eligible for sorterships had all such promotion closed against them; and practically they were left without any hope of ever getting beyond their thirty shillings a week, even if ever they got so far. A great and widespread source of dissatisfaction too was the way in which men who had been induced to enter the service with a fair promise of promotion had been bilked by subsequent alterations in the establishment.

There were other causes of discontent not so broadly defined, but poor pay and lack of promotion were the main features. Man cannot live by bread alone, but the Post-Office made it its business to see that its servants never became lazy through over-feeding. It sealed their lips and prevented a public voicing of their grievances, and it almost dared them to open their mouths too widely either for talking or eating.

CHAPTER VI

BOOTH THE LEADER OF THE AGITATION—A MASS MEETING IN THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE—A PETITION TO PARLIAMENT

So the wave of discontent gathered force. By 1871 the agitation for better pay, better-adjusted hours of duty, and better prospects had assumed some appearance of an organisation, though without a recognised leadership. But the man was to come when the hour demanded him. The forces were ready; an army of volunteers, enthusiastic and confident in their cause, but as yet undrilled. They were not undisciplined though, for the rules and restrictions by which they were bound kept them in order, and strengthened their self-control. An army of discontented Government servants thus almost of their own free-will, and spontaneously brought together without an acknowledged leader, without even as yet an accepted plan of procedure, is, from this distance of time, not a little curious to contemplate. It at once affords an evidence of the existence of very real grievances as the impelling cause of the men’s sincerity and of their self-command. So far, there is not one single case of enthusiasm carried to excess; the movement had been orderly in its growth, and in no case had their grievances caused them to forget the respect due from them to those who ruled over them; nor to diminish their loyalty to the public service. It is as gratifying as it is remarkable.

Here, then, at this period were the forces, two contingents of them, ready and eager to test their strength in any manner that was legitimate and lawful.

They would not shrink from the displeasure of the officials; they knew that the frown of the Postmaster-General was already upon them. Who then was to be leader of these irregulars? The man came forward when the moment arrived, and henceforth for a few years Booth was to assume the leadership. He was not particularly eloquent, and had no gifted fancy, nor a tongue to form choice periods; but he had a full-throated voice with a ring in it, a head well poised on thick-set shoulders, and every comrade knew him for one who was not afraid. Every comrade knew him for a man who meant what he said, and could say it pointedly, if not elegantly. Experience of him had taught them that what he put his hand to he carried through; they knew that he could formulate a petition as easily as he could knock a man down.

Up to this time petition after petition had been laboriously drawn up by committees and meekly presented by the men, only to be ignored by the authorities, or returned as informal. Months had been wasted in this manner, till the aggrieved men, letter-carriers and sorters alike, got weary of waiting. They wanted to be on the march, but none knew whither. It was now that William Booth came to the front. The forces of discontent were not to dwindle away for want of a man. There was work to be done; there was a road to be made, and here were the willing hands and the implements ready. Booth sprang out of the ranks, and put himself at the head of them, and facing them addressed them.

His first word of command was short and decisive. “To the House of Commons!” said he. The very audacity of the proposal for a moment almost unnerved them, but the fact itself went a long way to convince them that their leader had come at last. Too long had they wasted their energies and their time on fruitless effort, and too long had they contented themselves with standing still, or progressing slowly over the same beaten track provided by officialdom. “To the House of Commons!” There was something original in the idea, and its very daring after a while recommended it. From the armoury of the franchise they had been provided with a new and efficient weapon; and St. Stephen’s should provide them with a shooting-range.

Forthwith, under the recognised leadership of Booth, they set themselves in this direction. The first difficulty that presented itself was the discovery that Parliament was guarded by the skirts of the department, and that therefore it was necessary to first obtain permission of the magnates of St. Martin’s-le-Grand to draw up a petition to Parliament at all. The liberty of the individual was more restricted than they imagined. The franchise had been extended to them; a weapon had been put into their hands by the Constitution; but the authorities reserved to themselves the right to overlook their powder and shot, and fix the firing distance for them. There was no help for it; not even the originality of their leader could circumvent the department in this respect. The House of Commons, free of approach to every working-man in the kingdom, was as yet barred to postal officials by an inquisitive and mistrustful bureaucracy to prevent their being too rash in their importunities. They might think themselves very fortunate in having obtained the liberty to use their vote; but to dare approach openly the sacred persons of those who represented them, without first submitting their intention, was not to be thought of.

Accordingly the necessary petition to the Controller of the London postal service, asking the liberty and the indulgence of being allowed to draw up and present a humble petition to the people’s representatives in Parliament assembled, was prepared and sent in. The humble petitioners waited with bated breath, and wondered what would become of Booth when it was realised that he was the moving spirit of the daring enterprise. With more than usual discretion, too, they obtained this official permission to hold a meeting to consider and discuss the terms of the proposed petition to the House of Commons. After some little delay, and a few further inquiries, thought more or less appropriate and necessary, the permission sought for was granted. But there was to be no outside public meeting this time. Whatever they had to say must be said within hearing of the officials and under the official roof. And there were to be no strangers present; and journalists and newspaper reporters were so strictly prohibited that any one might have shot them on sight as interlopers without incurring departmental displeasure.

The meeting was interesting, if only from the fact that it was the first meeting of this nature ever known to have been held in the Post-Office. It was quite a new departure, and the men halted between satisfaction and suspicion. They felt that whatever the advantage in other respects, they were muzzled to an extent. They felt that the department was treating them like children who could not be trusted beyond the playground for fear of throwing stones in the street. Still, they determined to accept the situation, and to make the best of it.

The meeting was called for the 28th June 1873, to be held after the duty, at eight o’clock in the evening, and the Newspaper Branch at the top of the building was placed at their disposal. For in those days, in this particular branch at least, there was a cessation of duty after this hour. The conditions were bad; but the Post-Office was not always at work during the whole round of the clock; it was not exactly the ever-panting, ever-working, never-ceasing, never-sleeping monster it is at the present day. The floor of the branch would be capable of accommodating over two thousand men; but it was necessary to make some preparation. A platform was extemporised from two or three of the facing or stamping tables, each almost of the dimensions of a respectable platform in itself, and round this a number of chairs and seats were ranged. The seating accommodation was, however, principally made up of bundles of disused mail-bags and baskets, while a considerable number, perhaps the majority, stood. The success of the meeting from the first moment was beyond all expectation. If any had fears that the men would be too suspicious of attending a gathering of this kind within the precincts of the building, and under the shadow of the department, they were mistaken. Almost directly the despatches were finished, and the duty done with for the night, they swarmed in from every part. From every other branch in the building—for the General Post-Office is a nest of branches, like a Chinese puzzle-box—and from outside offices they swarmed up the stairs and through every means of entry. The men from the districts showed up in full strength, and provided a few spectators for the platform. The branch in its structure was admirably suited to such a meeting; it was lofty, and there was a plentiful supply of gas-jets, depending in a long regiment from the ceiling. By half-past eight, the time for opening the meeting, the vast room was crowded. Every one was expectant and curious; this was an auspicious occasion, and there was something of novelty in the circumstance and the local surroundings. It was pretty well conjectured that spies would be present, as they were generally to be looked for at all their open deliberations. They were pretty well known, but it would have been impolitic, if not impossible, to exclude them. Those who were among the crowd could not very well on the spot take notes of what they heard and saw without betraying the real reason of their presence there. But if it was suspected there were official spies there, it was more than suspected, it was known almost for a certainty they had on their side a newspaper reporter, who had been quietly smuggled in with the crowd of district men. Thus was the prohibition of the officials evaded; and it was said that the Standard reporter avoided the scrutiny at the entrance by borrowing a portion of a letter-carrier’s uniform. It was afterwards said that the enterprising reporter found concealment in a recess beneath the great gallery clock, which overlooked the whole of the branch. However this may be, that there was an officially proscribed “chiel amang them takin’ notes” was sufficiently evidenced a few hours later, when the morning Standard came out with a report of the night’s proceedings.

The floor of the branch, which when empty was like the interior of an enormous barn, by half-past eight was black with men. Not only did they completely cover the floor in a dense, solidly-packed mass, but they perched themselves on the tops of the sorting-tables; they swarmed up the tall slim iron columns which support the roof, and clung there, thirty feet above those below. Others more venturesome, by the same means, found a resting-place on the higher ledges of the over-stretching girders, smothered in dust, their heads in contact with the shelving ceiling. Hundreds more had to content themselves with catching an occasional glimpse of the platform and its occupants through the tiers of empty pigeon-holes, rising from the middles of the sorting-tables into which the newspapers were sorted. For every one came to see as much as to hear. A very large number from distant districts had only heard of him, and wanted to see Booth. They wanted to see what kind of man it was whose audacity and whose organising resource had so far overcome official objections as to make this meeting possible, who had thus enabled them to beard the official lion in his very den. The rostrum on the platform was contrived of big square mail-baskets and some wooden boxes covered over with mail-bags, touched up with a piece of green baize in the middle; and by this there were sitting a few postmen and others. Some one rose to speak, but the tumultuous outbreak of applause kept him silent on his feet for fully a minute. This, then, was Booth; and eyes and ears were strained to better take his measurement, and to catch his words—a rather short, sturdy man, with a full head and somewhat Gladstonian features. He spoke for half-an-hour or more, and if at first there were any waverers in the crowd, there were none when he finished. They would have stormed the Treasury benches that very night. Other speakers followed, and emphasised the necessity of laying their plaint before Parliament; and in the end a provisional committee was elected to draw up the petition. The lines on which the petition to Parliament was to run were to ask for the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into their grievances, and their claims for better pay and improved prospects of promotion, and the abolition of Sunday labour.

The petition was accordingly prepared, only however to be returned as not complying with the standing orders of the House. It was soon framed on more constitutional lines, and again being forwarded through the approved channel, the petitioners awaited the result with renewed confidence. There was a weekly subscription among the men; there were letters to Parliamentary candidates; there were bushels of circulars openly posted to sitting members, the folding and addressing being done by volunteers in their spare time in the official retiring-rooms. Further than this, Booth now sought the co-operation of the provincial men, and worked night and day, often depriving himself of sleep to prepare and send the necessary correspondence. No less a number than three million tiny circulars were dropped in pillar-boxes all over London, and Booth and his assistants spent hours of their spare time in disseminating by this means the seed-corn of discontent. Then one morning the Petition Committee were sent for by the Controller of the London postal service, and informed that they had incurred the serious displeasure of the department, as they were exceeding the bounds of a legitimate movement. They were informed that they had not confined themselves to formulating a petition to Parliament, but they had become active in fomenting an agitation throughout the entire service. They were forbidden to act as a committee, and they were to receive no recognition from their followers, and they were forthwith to disband themselves without calling any meeting. Whatever protest or appeal may have been thought necessary to save the situation was made, but without avail. There was no alternative but dismissal. The committee was therefore disbanded, and the affairs wound up, and balance-sheets issued to the men, the reasons being given for this strategic movement to the rear.

CHAPTER VII

ASSERTING THE RIGHT OF PUBLIC MEETING—PUBLIC AND PARLIAMENTARY FRIENDS—CONFERENCE OF M.P.’S—THE ORGANS OF THE MOVEMENT—MEETING AT EXETER HALL—A MONSTER PETITION TO PARLIAMENT—ELUDING THE LAW OF CONSPIRACY.

But it was not Booth’s way to take a defeat so tamely. Almost immediately the organisation was re-formed on a more definite basis than ever, with a new high-sounding title of the “United General Post-Office and Telegraph Service Benefit Society.” Rules were made and collections were started; Booth was appointed chairman, and a dismissed agitator, named Hawkins, was engaged as secretary. After the official rebuff the men felt it unsafe to join openly, but they none the less joined secretly, and cheerfully responded to the calls upon their purse. Booth animated the whole movement; and it is probable that but for him the department would have seen it crumble to pieces, yet they probably saw that his dismissal just then would only have strengthened his arm against them. The authorities, however, went so far as to suspend him from duty on some trivial pretext; and Booth was not slow to turn the fact to his advantage. He immediately set about organising a public meeting to be held at the Cannon Street Hotel, 16th July 1873. The objects of this meeting were twofold: it was to strengthen the hands of the members of Parliament who were supporting the postal petition, and it provided a means of protesting against the leader’s unjust suspension. But mainly it was intended as a hint to the Government, and as a parade of strength to show that their Parliamentary friends were well supported by a following in the postal service. A few days previous to the date of the meeting a conference had taken place in the tea-room of the House of Commons, attended by nearly every member pledged to their support, from whom the statement of grievances, made by Booth and several others, received a very attentive hearing. Among the members of Parliament who had interested themselves in the postal case were Mr. W. H. Smith, Mr. A. J. Mundella, Mr. Roger Eykyn, Mr. J. Locke, and several other influential members. And it was to give support to their friends in the House that this first Cannon Street Hotel meeting was called.

On the Post-Office vote being taken on Monday, 28th July, the claims of the aggrieved postal employés were strongly urged upon the attention of the Government by each of those members who had attended the tea-room conference, and the advocacy of Mr. W. H. Smith, Mr. Mundella, and others was particularly able. The reply of the Government was, however, unfavourable, or at least unsatisfactory.

The antagonism towards their claims, as voiced in the House by the Postmaster-General and other members of the Government on that occasion, caused Booth to decide on another public meeting. This meeting of protest against the decision of the Government was called also in Cannon Street Hotel, on Tuesday, 5th August, and was to be presided over by Sir John Bennett. The forthcoming meeting was officially “proclaimed,” and the men were warned against attending such public demonstrations; but it was looked forward to with enthusiasm. Elaborate preparations were made for the forthcoming meeting, and almost all the funds in hand were used to ensure its success. Five brass bands were engaged, and the procession of district men then off duty, marshalled by Booth, was to start from Finsbury Square so as to reach St. Martin’s-le-Grand a minute or so before eight o’clock, the hour when the staff at the General Post-Office would cease work. The district contingents turned out strong at the place of meeting, and by a quarter to eight the procession of postmen in uniform, followed by an enormous crowd of sightseers, moved in the direction of Cannon Street by way of St. Martin’s-le-Grand. The five brass bands blared out some stirring marching tunes, and the procession was animated with all the enthusiasm of men anxious of defying authority. On reaching the General Post-Office they were quickly joined by the letter-sorters, letter-carriers, and others, and their numbers now swollen to a big battalion, they marched to Cannon Street Hotel as if to capture a fortress, the bands meanwhile keeping them in step with “The Postman’s Knock” and “Rule, Britannia.”

The huge hall of the Cannon Street Hotel was filled to overflowing within five minutes of the arrival of the procession; and the utmost enthusiasm took possession of them. Sir John Bennett, who had already distinguished himself as a friend of the postal workers, was punctually in the chair. Sir John, with his snowy ringlets, his gold spectacles, his velveteen jacket and Hessian boots, and his fresh, clean-shaven, almost boyish features, which so belied his years, was a familiar public character, and the postal employés felt that in securing him for chairman they were favoured. Among those supporting the platform were Henry Broadhurst—not yet M.P., but only a working stonemason; George Potter, who then owned and edited the Beehive newspaper; and Charles Bradlaugh, not yet either so notorious or so distinguished as he afterwards became.

The speeches were stirring, and the keynote of almost every speaker was that as postal employés enjoyed the right of every citizen to petition Parliament, they had no need to fear the petty restrictions of red-tape; and this inalienable right should be their sheet anchor and their hope. At the same time the authorities were violently denounced for so meanly visiting their resentment on the leader Booth by suspending him without any assigned cause; and, as may be surmised, the most capital was made out of the incident, the action of the authorities being ascribed to his having dared to exercise his right as a free-born Englishman; in which, on the whole, the speakers were probably not far wrong. Mr. M. C. Torrens, M.P., and other well-known friends of the movement graced the platform, and formed the necessary firing party. All the speaking from the platform was done by the public friends and sympathisers; the postal employés themselves significantly remaining dumb. They had not yet the right of free speech, though they had asserted the liberty of holding a public meeting in this fashion; that was to be tested later on. The public press noticed the meeting at some length; and it acted as a splendid advertisement for the postal claims. The next day Booth was ordered back to the Chief Office, not, however, to receive his sentence of dismissal as was surmised, but to be restored to duty without suffering the loss of pay usual in such circumstances.

For the purpose of discussing ways and means of raising funds to keep the fire going and sustaining the enthusiasm of the men, there were also one or two meetings held at a little hall known as the Albion Hall, conveniently situated in London Wall, near to the General Post-Office. Mr. George Potter took the chair, and Sir John Bennett, of Cheapside fame, ably supported.

Sir John Bennett had proved himself one of the staunchest and most industrious of their numerous public friends at this period. He had an especial liking for the postmen, and any one of them in uniform could purchase a three-guinea watch at his shop at something like thirty-five per cent. discount. But they were doomed to lose him in a somewhat peculiar manner. The postal volunteer corps, the then 49th Middlesex, had been formed on the occasion of the Fenian scare of 1868; and during a recurrence of a similar alarm from the same causes, a number of the postmen and others joined the corps in a body. Sir John Bennett was peculiar in his views of postal patriotism, and dropped the postmen and their agitation from that moment.

“If,” said he in his blunt fashion, “you who are agitating for better hours and a better wage can find time to go ‘gallavanting’ about with weapons of destruction in your hands, you have no reason to ask my assistance.”

It was scarcely a fair statement of the position; but he was not to be moved further, and kept his word.

That, however, was a loss not to be sustained till later.

Not long after the great public meeting, and probably resulting from it to some extent, there was a slight revision in the scales of pay of the London town letter-carriers. But it was a very niggardly affair, and the entire benefit secured amounted to about £52 in a period of fifteen years, or a rise of one shilling and fourpence per week, no regular addition being made to the maximum or minimum, while even this small benefit was confined to a small class of about four hundred men only. This, in the circumstances, could not be accepted as a complete settlement of all their various claims. It was not only quite inadequate to meet the needs of the class it was intended to satisfy, but entirely ignored the claims of the suburban, auxiliary, and country letter-carriers, and also those of the sorters, assistants, and porters, many of whom stood in even greater need of an increase of salary than the limited number who received this slight benefit. This small unsatisfactory scheme was rendered all the more unsatisfactory by its giving to the inspectors a really substantial increase amounting to 8 per cent. on their minimum, 25 per cent. on the annual increment, and 20 per cent. on the maximum. The inspectors who thus mostly benefited were already regarded as comparatively a well-paid class, besides which they as a body had contributed neither funds nor sympathy to the agitation which had secured these benefits for them. What was intended as a sop was only another fresh cause for dissatisfaction; and in any case it was deemed necessary to prosecute the agitation with renewed vigour.

Thereupon Booth and his associates, with a view of strengthening the Society and definitely proclaiming their character as trades unionists pure and simple, got the Postal Union affiliated to the London Trades Council. They hoped thereby to secure the co-operation of the various trade societies, should at any time it be deemed necessary or expedient to call for that assistance which they themselves were prepared to render to others.

Again, some little time after this great public demonstration, the leader of the agitation, Booth, found himself suspended from duty by order of the Controller. It was not that impending dismissal had any terrors for him, but he was determined to avoid if possible the humiliation of it. With his usual readiness he decided to take the bull by the horns in his own fashion. He conceived the idea that unless some such step as he contemplated were taken at once, his dismissal, which he knew had been recommended, would this time be certain. He hurried off to the printers who usually did such work for the movement in those days, but was told the men could not be prevailed on to work after the usual time. Booth said he had a job which would engage them all night, and being told that it was quite impossible, asked to see the men in a body. He came, he saw, he conquered, and the men agreed to stop the night through for the production of a cartoon which had been roughly sketched out. It took three hours to prepare the lithograph-stone, three draughtsmen being simultaneously engaged on parts of the sketch. During the night and early morning four or five thousand copies were printed off, and by ten o’clock they were being sold like hot cakes in St. Martin’s-le-Grand and all over the City. To ensure their sale and circulation they were virtually given away to the street-hawkers, who retailed them at a penny apiece. The first batch was soon exhausted, and before the day was over as many thousands more were sold. The pictorial lampoon had little of artistic merit to recommend it; it was fearfully and wonderfully made; the drawing was vile even for caricature; but the letterpress, the scriptural quotations wittily applied, and the illustrations together, told. The broadsheet contained four or five separate illustrations having reference to the recent great procession of postal employés to Cannon Street Hotel, “in defiance of official threats”; the question of Sunday labour, hit off by the figure of a portly bishop offering a tract on Sunday observance to an overladen postman; the recent postal petition to Parliament, and cognate matters. Booth, suspended from duty, was represented by a figure on a gibbet, intended as the mental vision in the mind of the official who had ordered it; while disposed about in odd corners of the cartoon was a “spy-glass,” “the bullet,” “ye sack,” labelled “Post-Office persuaders.” It did not bear criticism, but as the work of a single night it was interesting; and, what was more, it had some of the effect intended. The suspended leader was restored to duty the day following.

What had now come to be known as the Postal Petition to Parliament was from that moment never lost sight of by its promoters and their followers. Booth and his little staff of lieutenants worked night and day and every hour that their official duties spared to them to keep the petition before the members of the House of Commons. One result of their persistent efforts in this direction was that they had soon quite a respectable number of Parliamentary friends who promised to support the motion for inquiry when it came to be raised on the estimates. And petitioners were not content merely with verbal promises of support, for where possible they obtained an autograph letter embodying the promise, which letters were put on record in the Postman, the organ of the movement. Booth during this time was untiringly ubiquitous. He was everywhere, and his hand was in everything, from getting out circulars to lobbying M.P.’s. He undertook the duties of the orderly as well as those of the captain.

Among the petty annoyances to which Booth had been subjected by his zealous superiors was his being made to finish up his evening duty at the furthest possible point from his home, his last delivery of letters being by the Angel, Islington, he living at Brixton. But he now succeeded in getting on a walk by which he had to deliver the Temple, where eminent counsel and the élite of the legal profession most do congregate. He did this with a motive, knowing that he might make friends among those who could command influence. He soon found an opportunity of making himself known to every legal M.P. who had chambers in this vicinity, while those who were prospective candidates for Parliamentary honours no less escaped his attention. In addition to making friends for the movement by this means, Booth and his lieutenants—Hawkins, the secretary; Haley, a fellow-sorter, and virtually second in command; and others, interviewed eminent divines of every denomination on the sore question of compulsory Sunday labour in the Post-Office.

Such were the number of promises of support they received from M.P.’s, and such were their importunities, that at last it was resolved to hold another conference in the tea-room of the House of Commons to discuss the petition and decide on some action if possible.

Earl Percy took the chair, and among those present who had pronounced favourably on the postal claims were Mr. Mundella, Mr. W. H. Smith, and Mr. Roger Eykyn. A deputation of the aggrieved postal employés had been invited to urge the points of the petition for a Select Committee of the House, and these points provided arguments for better pay and improved prospects of promotion, and the abolition of the hated compulsory Sunday labour.

The conference listened attentively and sympathetically, as conferences always do when they are composed of politicians out of office. In the present instance the tea-room conference was composed chiefly of Tories who coveted the seats on the Treasury bench then occupied by the Liberals. There could be little doubt about the honesty of the intentions of Mr. W. H. Smith, of Mr. Mundella, or of Mr. Roger Eykyn; they each proved it in every manner possible. They each by this time were well informed on the postal grievances, having been interviewed privately on previous occasions. But at this stage of the proceedings the agitators were not quite sure how far the good intentions of these gentlemen would be carried into practical effect. For it has ever been a common practice with the party in opposition, Liberals and Tories alike, just before the eve of a General Election to gather up all the elements of discontent throughout the country and promise support to each in turn. But at length the men, having pleaded their various points, came away fully assured that in the Tory party lay their principal hope of salvation, though they were aware that some time must elapse before their petition could come to be considered by Parliament. Their one aim now being a Select Committee of Inquiry, their Parliamentary policy became more active than ever, every by-election being assiduously watched and every candidate approached by personal interview or by letter.

At this time, between 1872 and 1874, agitation was rife among all classes of labour throughout the country, and the feeling of discontent was principally due to the cost of the necessaries of life being out of proportion to wages. This was followed by a general rise in wages to meet the increased cost of living among the working population, many employers, to their credit, voluntarily raising the wages of their employés. This circumstance very materially strengthened the postal claim for an increase on their wretched pay; but the Post-Office as the greatest employer of labour would not concede one farthing until compelled by the public and Parliament. The officials with characteristic obstinacy defended the state of stagnation as to wages and promotion prevailing in the Post-Office. On one occasion, about this period, when the leaders of the agitation had reason to interview the Controller on the matter, that official, who considered his wisdom was none too well paid at £1200 a year, pointed to himself and reminded them even he had to cut down his luxuries. This provoked the retort from one of the poorly-paid men, that in his, the Controller’s, case it simply meant a denial of luxuries, but in their case it meant a denial of the very necessaries of life for themselves and wives and families. This might have been dismissed with an official frown as only a mild impertinence; but the Controller, a thick-set, burly, overfed man, unwittingly growled out the brutal truth in his rejoinder, “We don’t engage your wives and families; WE only want the men!”

But the universal rise in wages everywhere outside the Post-Office could not but provide them with a further justification for continuing the agitation for an inquiry. They obtained further funds to carry on the campaign, and more public friends rallied round them. Daily the postmen were becoming more than ever objects of sympathy. Subscriptions flowed in steadily from postal bodies all over the country, and a list of these subscriptions was published in the Beehive newspaper, which for some time past had opened its columns to the budding literati of the movement. The postal organisation had had for some time now an official organ of its own, the Postman; but as it had not the weight and authority of a public organ, circulating, as it did, among postal servants only, the assistance rendered by the Beehive was not inconsiderable. Edited by George Potter, who of course was in full sympathy with the agitation, its columns placed at the disposal of the postal cause were several times contributed to by Lloyd-Jones.

One postal contributor to the Beehive, who was the literary champion of the movement, was one of Booth’s lieutenants, a postman, who wrote under the nom de plume of “Silverstick.” The contributions of “Silverstick” betrayed no small amount of literary merit, and were eagerly looked for every issue by the men.

The hospitality of the Beehive was fully taken advantage of at this time (the official organ of the movement, the Postman, having now fizzled out), and the agitation received no small support from its powerful advocacy. George Potter, whose name will always be associated with public reform, gave the postal advocates carte-blanche in the use of his organ; and the secretary of the postal movement, Hawkins, who was employed on it, was assisted in every possible manner to bring postal grievances to the front. Besides the Beehive there had been the Postman, which exclusively devoted itself to the advocacy of their claims, and which, to an extent, rendered valuable service by being circulated among their outside public and Parliamentary friends. It may here be mentioned that the Postman had been started some few years before, being originally brought out as a small printer’s venture. It was started at the instigation of a postman named March, who was associated with the small printer’s business in question, situated in Clerkenwell Close, and he was principally instrumental in making the Postman the success it afterwards became. March, the postman agitator, was the same March who, when he left the postal service built up a flourishing business as a ballad printer, supplying hawkers and street singers with topical rhymes, coupled with the publication of more innocent toy-books and fairy stories for juveniles.

The Postman was almost wholly contributed by the leaders of the agitation, assisted by notes and scraps of interest from various correspondents of the different branches of the service. The circulation was kept going at this time principally by Booth and the others. It was never allowed to be openly sold in the Post-Office, though means were found to evade the vexatious prohibition, and the condemned publication was all the more anxiously looked for when the day of issue arrived. Booth generally directed special attention to it among the postmen. He always managed to obtain advance copies, and, knowing the most important item of news, gave the word to be passed round directly he came on duty, “Look on page so-and-so of the Postman.” Before the duty was over it had circulated all over the General Post-Office.

In connection with this organ of the movement it may be of interest to mention that for a time it was machined at the same firm as was the Court Circular or Journal; and there was a story to the effect that these pages of the two very dissimilar publications being of equal size, on one occasion two “formes” of type got mysteriously mixed, and to the amazement of the Postman readers the next issue informed them, after reporting some of the private doings of the Queen and Court, that her Majesty had graciously seen fit to order an inquiry into the postmen’s grievances.

The leaders now decided on a third big public demonstration. The same preparations as before were made, bands engaged and public men written to and interviewed to get their presence on the platform. Exeter Hall was chosen this time as the place of meeting, and when the date, November 18, 1873, arrived the principal anxiety of Booth and his lieutenants was as to where they should find room on the platform for all the brilliant notabilities who had promised to attend. The chair was this time to be taken by Mr. Roger Eykyn, M.P. for Windsor, while their old champion, Sir John Bennett, was once more to appear with his well-known and ever-welcome “So here we are once again, my postman friends!” The district contingents as before met at Finsbury Square, and with brass bands playing and colours flying they marched to St. Martin’s-le-Grand, where at eight o’clock they were promptly joined by the men of the Chief Office. Then defiantly striking up “Rule, Britannia,” they moved on towards Fleet Street, the authorities meanwhile crowding at the windows of the General Post-Office to watch the procession as it swept round into Newgate Street. On reaching Fleet Street the greatest excitement prevailed, the traffic had to be suspended, and crowds from all parts joined in the congestion. The postal procession was this time preceded by two red mail-vans, which, with the postmen in uniform, gave it a tone of local colour. The band, during its slow progress towards the place of meeting, improved the shining hour with “The Postman’s Knock” and “Work, Boys, Work, and be Contented,” a musical sarcasm in the circumstances much appreciated. Exeter Hall was not large enough to hold the immense throng who sought admission, and an overflow meeting had to be held in a side street. Exeter Hall platform presented a distinguished gathering of public men supporting the chair, which was filled by Mr. Roger Eykyn, the member for Windsor. Among those who crowded the platform was the midget-like figure of the redoubtable George Odger, president of the London Trades Council, who had brought with him a deputation of trades unionists. There were a large number of members of Parliament, and the principal labour leaders of the day, notably Mr. George Howell, who had already endeared himself to the postal servants by doing an enormous amount of work for them one way and another. The meeting was addressed by Sir Antonio Brady and several distinguished M.P.’s, among the number being W. Williams, M.P., W. Fowler, M.P., and A. Stavely Hill, M.P.

It was at this meeting that Booth determined to test once and for all the right of postal servants to speak in public. He and one or two others spoke, and Booth took means to get their utterances reported among the speakers.

The result was as he had anticipated. He and the others were carpeted before the Controller. That official said that his attention having been drawn to the reported meeting, it was his duty to call on them to explain. There was nothing very objectionable in the language they were reported to have used, but the fact of speaking at all sufficiently compromised them as Government servants. Booth and his associates were called on for written statements, and they each defended their conduct on the ground that they were exercising a common citizen right in asking Parliament and the public for a redress of those grievances which the department had refused to consider.

Within a few days they were again called up to listen to a severe reprimand from the Postmaster-General. There was some protest to a few public men, and Mr. Roger Eykyn interviewed the Permanent Secretary on behalf of the men; but there the matter ended.

The men themselves, however, feeling that their speeches had been so studiously modest and moderate, could not but regard such notice being taken by the authorities as both arbitrary and unconstitutional, and opposed to the spirit of English liberty.

Based on the resolutions passed at this public meeting, a monster petition to the House of Commons was prepared on behalf of the letter-carriers, sorters, porters’ assistants, rural messengers, and others employed in the minor establishment of the Post-Office throughout London, suburban, provincial, and rural districts. Having regard to the increased cost of living and the rise in the value of most classes of labour, they submitted that the time had arrived when such an addition should be made to their pay as would constitute a more adequate remuneration for their arduous and responsible duties. A Commission of Inquiry was also strongly asked for to receive evidence on the questions of promotion, Sunday labour, and general grievances not specified but known to exist.

One of the principal planks in the platform of the postal movement at this time was the abolition of compulsory Sunday labour for letter-carriers; and in furtherance of this end Booth and the other agitators interviewed the most eminent divines and religious leaders of the day. Among those whose assistance was sought to procure a free Sunday for postal workers was Cardinal Manning. A deputation of Booth and two other postmen waited on his Eminence at his residence. He was politic in discussing the question; he sympathised with them in their laudable efforts to relieve Sunday labour; but he hesitated to pledge himself to assist them; he must have time to consider the matter. The deputation withdrew inspired with very little hope from their diplomatic reception. The truth was Cardinal Manning hesitated to in any way assist in hampering the Government while Mr. Gladstone was tackling the Catholic University question. They interviewed Dr. Parker at the City Temple, with a vague sort of hope that he might denounce postal Sunday labour from his own pulpit. But Dr. Parker did not prove the rigid Calvinistic Sabbatarian they imagined; he thought that certain forms of labour were very necessary even on the Lord’s Day, and it was desirable to receive letters from distant friends and relations at least once on Sunday. Even Professor Fawcett and Mr. Charles Bradlaugh both concurred in thinking this a weak plank in their platform, and tried to induce Booth to abandon it for a time at least. But Booth would not be dictated to even by two such men as these, and expressed his determination to try to carry it through in spite of all opposition.

This question of compulsory Sunday labour, as it affected the rural letter-carriers especially, was a very sore one. Some lines of verse written by one of their number were about this time freely circulated. The few lines selected will show that they possessed tolerable poetic merit.

THE POSTMAN’S DAY OF REST

We are toiling, we are toiling on each sunny Sabbath morn,

We are toiling when the dewdrops sparkle on the white-robed thorn,

We are toiling when the sons of toil have found a Sabbath blest;

But for us no Sabbath dawning, no holy day of rest.

We are toiling thro’ the dewy fields ere peeps the eye of morn,

When the mist on pastures hanging makes the aspect so forlorn;

Thro’ mud and mist, and mire, and rain we pick our toilsome way,

While fellow-men are warmly housed upon the Sabbath day.

If in the annals of the world your names unrivalled stand,

Then cleanse so foul a blot from the escutcheon of our land,

And a thousand hands shall cease from toil, and find a day of rest,

And the God of heaven shall bless you, as He has our country blest.

F. K. (Letter-carrier).

[An appeal from the rural letter-carriers of England, who are employed delivering letters, circulars, and newspapers on the Sabbath day.]

While this question of Sunday labour was being pushed to the front, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P., desiring to become Mayor of Birmingham, was approached by Booth, who promised him the whole postal support of the town if Mr. Chamberlain would in return direct his influence against Sunday duty imposed on postal officials. The promise was given; Mr. Chamberlain became mayor, but he now found it would be inexpedient in the commercial interests of Birmingham especially to abolish Sunday labour in the Post-Office.

Although the right to exercise the one privilege accorded to every British citizen, that of presenting a petition to Parliament, had up to now been their mainstay and the bulwark of their personal protection, the agitators constantly found that they were the objects of departmental attention. They had been particularly careful, for the success of their movement, to proceed along thoroughly constitutional lines, and nothing could have tempted Booth and his associates to depart from this. As has already been shown, the disappointment induced by the protracted methods of the Government, and the antagonism of the officials to the agitation, was such that it might easily have risen to the point of rebellion had the leaders been so inclined; but they were not; and as it was they had frequently to exercise to the utmost their restraining influence on the men. It was scarcely to be supposed that the authorities would give them any credit for this, and as was only natural, perhaps the leaders were held wholly responsible for the strained relations between the department and its subordinates. Booth and his lieutenants therefore had no mercy to expect from their superiors should they commit themselves. The very surveillance, the constant spying, and every manner of testing and trap-laying to which Booth especially was subjected, would have caused any other man with less fortitude and with a more sensitive temperament to have given up long before he did. But to all the insidious influences to which he was exposed, Booth especially never showed the least concern, but went about his work as though there were never an official to dog his footsteps even to his own door, nor a band of the permanent officials anxiously waiting and watching for the moment when they might reasonably dismiss him with humiliation and degradation. In the official mind in those days, whoever lent themselves to agitation within the walls of a Government office could be little better than desperadoes and conspirators, disloyal alike to the service and the public. It was not to be wondered at, then, that they were regarded as playing a desperate game, which, to go no further, even as yet almost brought them within the clutches of the law. The agitators were not blind to the position in which they stood, nor ignorant altogether of the desire of the authorities to encompass their destruction. Already Booth had been most unpleasantly made aware that his private correspondence had been tampered with in its passage through the post; that, before reaching his hands, the letters addressed to him had been watched for and “Grahamed”—to use an expression which signified the secret methods of opening and overhauling suspected people’s correspondence then, as a survival of the “Espionage Room,” more or less in vogue in the Confidential Inquiry Branch of the General Post-Office. While the department had such a piece of machinery as this at its disposal, it was not going to confine its use to such men as Mazzini and political personages disagreeable to the Government, and allow the postman Booth, and others of its own household, to escape. He had had cause to more than suspect that his letters, addressed to those who were assisting the agitation, had been intercepted, and their purport conveyed to the authorities who had ordered it. To evade the prying curiosity of official detectives and the “Grahaming” process, the letters exchanged through the post between the leaders, and touching on questions of policy, were thereafter directed to a fictitious “Mrs. Harvey” at various convenient addresses.

Nor did departmental antagonism, both open and concealed, to the principle of combination rest here. That the ringleaders of the agitation had all along pursued purely legitimate and constitutional methods to obtain redress for their grievances, affording so few technical loopholes through which they might be made answerable, was almost sufficient in itself to cause the department to look on them as mischievous breeders of wholesale contumacy and discontent, and agitators of the most dangerous description. They might have got rid of them one by one “on suspicion”—a process of dismissal which carried with it an implication of common dishonesty—only that the men had now too many powerful advocates, and, moreover, there might have been an outcry in the press against such an obviously hollow pretext. They were so far saved from such a fate as had befallen others of a lesser calibre. But they had, almost unknown to themselves, narrowly escaped losing their personal liberty for the part they had taken. It was only owing to an accidental hint dropped by an eminent member of the legal profession and a member of Parliament, who at the time was friendly disposed towards Booth and his movement, that the whole of them were not made the subjects of a Government prosecution under the odious law of conspiracy. Booth ferreted the matter out, and learnt that the brief was already prepared. The postal leader was given the comforting assurance that he stood to get two years’ imprisonment, and the others nine or six months apiece, and that the writs would probably be issued within a few days. Such, at least, was the information gathered, and circumstances made it extremely probable that the Government contemplated delivering one blow which would not only rid the postal service of a number of powerful agitators, but completely demoralise and disorganise their followers for years to come. If such was the motive, then the Government was checkmated in one simple move. Booth at the time was on the Temple “delivery,” and it was due to this fact principally that he obtained the interest and assistance of several eminent counsel who had either already obtained or had an eye on a seat in the House. After piecing his information together, so as to be morally certain that some such coup was intended, Booth the same day hastily summoned a meeting of the executive of the postal organisation, and before night handbills were in circulation advertising the fact that Booth was now the sole official representative of the movement. Next day he learnt the contemplated prosecution was to be abandoned, for the sufficient reason that the Law of Conspiracy could not very well be made to apply to one man only, it taking three at least to become conspirators. After Booth’s adroit manœuvre they could not with decency proceed against the agitators by legal action, and so nothing more was heard of the matter.

CHAPTER VIII

A TEST OF “THE LABOUR MARKET”—THE UGLY DUCKLING OF TRADES UNIONISM—MR. GEO. HOWELL’S ASSISTANCE—FURTHER DEMONSTRATIONS—THE DEPARTURE OF BOOTH.

Notwithstanding the numerous strong expressions of public opinion evoked by the recent meeting of the 18th November 1873, the Government showed no disposition to meet the moderate demands put forward in the petition to the House of Commons. The authorities particularly seemed bent on resisting the claims of the men. Acting on instructions issued in a Treasury Minute issued under the previous Government, they extensively advertised for persons to fill the places of the letter-carriers. Yet, as a matter of fact, there were no such vacancies as alleged in the public advertisements, unless the department contemplated dismissing the existing staff wholesale. The ostensible reason given was an experiment to “test the labour market.” There was a rush of applications, but there was a cruel insincerity in the whole business. A large proportion failed to pass the medical examination, while others who had passed were so disgusted at the neglect they received, and the time they were kept waiting in suspense, that they refused to attend for final approval. There had been something like twelve hundred applicants originally, and of these only nineteen were finally passed as suitable for the situations. The fact spoke for itself, and confirmed the opinion, generally entertained, that it was nothing more than an attempt to damage and discredit the case of the men, and intimidate and discourage the “agitators.”

If this experiment to “test the labour market” did nothing more, it tended to promote still further the feeling of misunderstanding in the minds of the general public, and assisted to obscure the issue.

However, the aggrieved postal employés, as represented on the London Trades Council, were accredited trades unionists. The trades unionists of the Metropolis, little as they understood their case, were compelled to take them into partnership.

By this time the efforts made by the postal employés had attracted considerable attention from every quarter; but trades unionists generally were almost as much at a loss to understand the precise nature of their claims as were most people, and there was much need for information. From the press reports and allusions to the matter in Parliament from time to time, a vague notion existed that postal employés were badly paid, and wanted better treatment, but little was known as to the real objects sought, or of the means by which they were to be obtained. The peculiarity of their position, the fact of their not being handicraftsmen in the generally-accepted sense of the term, caused their movement still to be looked on as the ugly duckling of trades unionism, and many were against allowing its claim for kinship. It was principally due to Mr. George Howell that this feeling of misunderstanding was removed. The condition of the postal employés and their battle for liberty was for the first time brought prominently before the trades unionists of the country at the Sheffield Trades Union Congress, January 1874. Mr. George Howell was secretary of the “Trades Parliamentary Committee,” and as a special delegate of the Postal Society, he read a paper which most clearly and convincingly showed that postal servants were in need of sympathy and moral assistance from the organised labour of the country. To the majority present it came as a revelation that those in Government employ were so restricted in the matter of civil rights. In thanking Mr. Howell for his valuable paper, they desired to express their sympathy with the movement of the postal employés for increased pay, better regulation of the hours of labour, the abolition of Sunday work, and a just system of promotion. The Congress recommended their cause to the trades societies of the United Kingdom, as well worthy of support.

The first General Election of 1873-4 had come and gone, and Mr. Gladstone found himself again returned to power, but with a majority of only forty. He immediately dissolved the House, and forthwith appealed to the country a second time.

The country was again in the throes of a General Election, and towards the fag-end, and before the result was certain for either party, another meeting of postal employés was called again at Exeter Hall. Meantime a written letter was sent by the Society’s secretary, Hawkins, to every Parliamentary candidate, asking for support in their demands. Nearly one hundred of those who gave their pledge were eventually returned to the new Parliament.

When it became known that preparations were in progress for holding another meeting, the authorities issued an official edict threatening with the penalties of insubordination any one found attending. They liked the Cannon Street Hotel meeting but little for the unenviable publicity it gave the department, but the prospect of the Exeter Hall meeting they liked still less. The meeting was again “proclaimed,” but a full two thousand attended, notwithstanding. Again there was music and banners, and a procession through the streets, and two thousand or more filled the vast space confronting the historic platform. Mr. Mundella took the chair on this occasion, and was supported by several Tory M.P.’s just returned triumphant from the poll. There was among them Mr. Ritchie, Mr. William Forsyth, Captain Bedford Pim, and Sir Charles Dilke. There were a number of eminent clergymen, among them the Rev. John Kennedy, D.D., and the Rev. Hugh Allen. The latter reverend gentleman generally prefaced his remarks at postal meetings with the words, “Those who distribute the correspondence of the country, distribute the wealth of the country, and their pay should be in proportion to their responsibility.” This agreeable sentiment was at once appropriated as the motto of the movement, and it figured on the stationery, and more than once on their banner. There was also the Rev. John Murphy, well known at the time as the “Bishop of Lambeth,” who had assisted right through the struggle till now. Altogether the platform presented a gathering of eminent men of almost every degree.

Mr. Mundella, as chairman, was just about finishing his address when the herculean form of Charles Bradlaugh was seen hurriedly pressing his way on to the platform. As the heretic agitator took his seat not far from that region of the platform sanctified by the presence of so many clerics of different denominations, there were some signs of dissent among some of the postmen in front. It almost immediately subsided with a wave of the chairman’s hand; and at Booth’s request Mr. Bradlaugh was given fourth place among the speakers, as he had to leave early. The several other speakers spoke, and it came to Bradlaugh’s turn. But immediately his huge form rose from the chair there was a hostile demonstration which gradually swelled in volume. Mr. Mundella requested the postal leader, who was sitting beside him, not to insist on Mr. Bradlaugh being heard. Charles Bradlaugh himself, always considerate in the interests of his friends and those whom he wanted to assist, thought his speaking might mar the success of the meeting, and made as if to leave the platform; the “booing” and groaning continuing meanwhile. They had not till now been ashamed to listen to and take counsel from the freethought lecturer “Iconoclast,” and many who now groaned at him had cheered him to the echo when it suited them. The hostile demonstration was probably only their way of paying a compliment to their reverend friends on the platform, though there were one or two, at least, among them who had come to assist in this good cause who would not have hesitated there and then to burn the heretic amidst a bonfire of his own godless pamphlets kindled with the light of sacred truth.

“You see, Mr. Booth, they will not hear him,” said Mr. Mundella, rather testily. But “Bulldog” Booth, as he was now known among his intimates, was not to be beaten. “Then dissolve the meeting, sir,” said he stoutly. “But they will hear him.”

The chairman rose and succeeded in calming the storm; and Mr. Bradlaugh essayed to speak. He had always been an active sympathiser with the postmen and the postal movement. It was not the first time he had stood before them. Once on his feet with a determination to make himself heard, he would not be denied. A towering figure, a leonine head, and huge, pale, clean-shaven face, with its mastiff’s mouth, he looked as ugly as Mirabeau, and as tremendous. Yet there was the charm of simplicity and a conviction of earnestness in his utterance, which made them feel ashamed at his reception. He spoke for four minutes, and adjured them to maintain the principle of combination; to stick together, to exercise their rights as citizens and to use their votes, and to support those who supported them. When he had finished, Bradlaugh received probably as loud an ovation as any who followed. A number of the clerical friends of the postmen naturally took the line of denunciation against forced Sunday labour, and their utterances for the most part were curiously reminiscent of those speeches on the self-same topic on that same platform twenty-five years before.

Among other eminent labour leaders and Radical politicians of the day there figured George Howell, who never failed the postmen in their need, and who had interviewed perhaps more members of Parliament and the heads of the Government than any other public man; for at this period it had particularly fallen to Mr. Howell’s lot to represent their case in this manner.

Shortly after this great Exeter Hall meeting the society published a balance-sheet, which clearly showed the enormous amount of work involved in the previous two years’ crusade. During the two years of agitation, numerous meetings, both reported and unreported, had been held; they had carried the war into almost every part of the kingdom, they had interviewed public men innumerable, prepared and got signed three monster petitions to Parliament, and attained to the dignity and importance of occupying the time and attention of the House of Commons more than once. The general correspondence of the society during the two years of its existence had involved the writing of no less than 2546 letters; while to the public press communications to the tune of nearly 2000 had been sent out. But, altogether, during the two years nearly 14,000 communications were addressed to Parliamentary candidates, M.P.’s, public men, and others. Truly, the Post-Office had been made to direct its hand against itself. Among the list of subscribers were the names of several public men, including Canon Liddon and Sir Charles Dilke.

The organisation of combined postal servants was now being perfected in various ways. Interviewing members of Parliament, both privately and at the House, was now almost of daily occurrence; and Booth and the various others were on terms of intimacy with most of the prominent men of the day.

It was this time a Conservative Government in power, and those members who wished to show a desire to redeem their promises convened a conference of the known Parliamentary friends to the postal cause. For the Exeter Hall meetings had had a marked effect on the press and the public. The conference was therefore called at the Westminster Palace Hotel, a stone’s-throw from the House itself. It was to be quite public, and reporters admitted. A deputation of the aggrieved men attended to urge their case once more. Mr. Roebuck was this time in the chair; and Mr. Stavely Hill and numerous other influential and well-known M.P.’s formed the self-appointed jury. Booth once more went over the old ground of their grievances; and Haley, another postal agitator, also gave an able exposition of their simple claims, which appeared to impress them favourably. The immediate result of the conference was that Mr. Roebuck, on behalf of his colleagues, promised to do an indefinite something as soon as found convenient.

They so far redeemed their pledge and showed their confidence in the justice of the postal claims as to privately urge the Government to take up the matter. For a month or so there was a superficial quietude among the discontented men. There were no meetings, but the postmen and the letter-sorters were subscribing to the general fund. There was no further interference on the part of the officials, probably from the fact that they were now beginning to recognise that the movement was too strong, and rendered stronger by press sympathy and public support. Eventually Mr. Roebuck—“Tear ’em,” as he was called in reference to his pugnacity in the House—brought up the matter of the postal case for inquiry on the Estimates. Booth, Haley, and the rest of the leaders of the agitation were found a place under the gallery, by the side of Sir John Tilly, the secretary, and Mr. Scudamore; for in some things the House is no respecter of persons. The debate was eminently interesting, and brought out all the points of the postal case in a marked degree.

The reply of the Government was unfavourable; and the argument, which has done duty so many times since, that there was really no just cause for complaint, was then used for the first time, and set an easy precedent, which nearly all succeeding Postmasters-General faithfully followed.

After the debate the leaders of the agitation crowded round the members in the lobby, Roebuck particularly was besieged by the disappointed men; but he shook himself free of them with the air of a man who had done his duty, and was determined to court failure no further. “Tear ’em” Roebuck was evidently chagrined and as annoyed as his clients, and he turned on them almost with a snarl. “You see I can do no more; the Government won’t interfere,” said he, and strutted away. The Government had left them to their fate; but pressure was privately brought to bear on Lord John Manners, who was now Postmaster-General. The refusal of the Government to interfere on behalf of the oppressed and aggrieved postal employés after all the promises of the Tory party, and after all the patronage extended to them publicly, resulted in such a feeling of resentment and disappointment among all classes of the service, that Booth the leader had the utmost difficulty in holding his followers in check. There was, indeed, one abortive attempt at a strike among the Hull postmen, and the spark might have ignited the whole had Booth and his associates given encouragement to it. It wanted but a breath from the agitators at this moment to fan the whole into a blaze.

Booth during this time never lost heart; he was as indefatigable as ever; scarcely a day passed but what he interviewed somebody or was himself interviewed. He had carried the art of interviewing to such an extent that he several times personated the secretary of the postal movement, Hawkins, for the purpose of getting editors and pressmen to say a word or two in behalf of the baffled, but as yet not defeated, agitation. By personating his own secretary in getting himself interviewed he thus evaded the official rule which forbade any postal servant communicating with the press, and which there is little doubt would have been mercilessly enforced against any one in the service caught doing it too openly. But however little they had to expect from the permanent officials, they felt that with a Postmaster-General as representative of the party from which only recently they had received so much sympathy and patronage, active hostility would not be allowed to be carried too far. Moreover, they felt pretty safe in conjecturing that, come what may, what the law officers of the late administration had hesitated to carry to a completion would not in a hurry be resorted to under the new Government of the party which included so many tried and pledged friends of postal reform. True, the Conservative Government, which the postal vote had in some measure helped to bring back to power, had so far disappointed them in not at once taking up their case as they were led to believe it would. But they were aware that their grievances were still occupying the attention of a large number of the members on both sides of the House, and that a large amount of influence was being brought to bear on the Postmaster-General. From Lord John Manners there was still something to be hoped for. And this hope was sustained by the plausible rumour that the Government’s refusal to inquire into their grievances was only a diplomatic way of empowering the Postmaster-General to do all that might be found to be necessary towards ameliorating the conditions of the service over which he had been put to rule. Yet the cloven hoof peeped out in an unexpected manner, and sooner than was to be looked for.

Lord John Manners, so long as he was in opposition, had not declined to be counted among the Tory supporters of Booth and the postal agitation, he having replied in favourable terms to letters and circulars soliciting his support towards obtaining the asked-for inquiry. There is perhaps always some allowance to be made for one newly taking office, and inconsistency is to an extent allowable, if not to be looked for. But it came as a surprise and something of a shock to Booth especially to learn that the new Postmaster-General, resisting all overtures from those of his own party, was about to set his face uncompromisingly against their claims and against the representatives who might urge them. Certainly, on the face of it, it seemed a wonderfully gracious act in a Postmaster-General to consent to receive a deputation of the men for the purpose of hearing once more from their own lips the story of their grievances he was already so well acquainted with. An application for an interview had been sent forward, in itself perhaps a piece of audacity almost unheard of, and to the surprise of the men themselves it was intimated that the interview would be granted. It was granted, but only with the condition that Booth should not be present. By the time that this was announced Booth had got over his first surprise, and was quite prepared for the intended snub, but scarcely for the unjustifiable insult which followed. It had been previously arranged that he should lead the deputation, but it was now officially conveyed to him that the Postmaster-General, while willing to see a deputation of the letter-carriers and sorters, must refuse to receive Booth “on account of his official bad character.” There was a feeling among the force that if the Postmaster-General would not see the leader the deputation ought not to go forward, but Booth put himself out of the question, and advised them to meet the head of the department and to obtain what advantage was possible. It was therefore decided to do so; but the undeserved insult, though inflicted on the man, was none the less felt to be aimed at the principle of combination, and their hopes were overshadowed with the suspicion that the interview was granted mainly for the purpose of better marking the agitators for future reference. The Postmaster-General’s treatment of Booth was scarcely likely to reassure them or to maintain their confidence in his fairmindedness. Throughout the agitation Booth had been careful not to run foul of his superiors on official matters, and his official character had been good enough to please Lord John Manners and his party before the last General Election.

The deputation to the Postmaster-General was memorable if only from the fact that this was the very first occasion the public head of the department had ever consented to receive representatives of the working staff. It looked like a concession, and as such would read well in the Tory press especially. But the men in their hearts were prepared for the disappointment which was to follow, and anticipated that it was the Postmaster-General himself who intended to get the most out of the interview.