For 400 years the delivery of letters has been integral to British life. As Royal Mail confronts an uncertain future, Susan Whyman charts the Post Office’s development and discovers, through the correspondence of ordinary people, just how much letter writing meant to them.
The Post Office has aroused passions in every century and it still does today. This was demonstrated by the response to the government’s recent plans to sell off part of the Royal Mail. Email may have transformed the way we send messages, yet efforts to save local post offices reveal deep-seated attachments. They suggest that the Post Office is a cherished social institution whose service means more than just the delivery of a letter.
This was as true in the 18th century,when developments in literacy, trade, transport and growth of empire heightened the need for mail. The experiences of a young Scot, Joseph Morton, illustrate this point. In 1765 he left his family in Kelso to settle in a Cumbrian village where he hoped to find work as a gardener. Throughout his 124-mile journey to Kendal he carried letters to friends and received sorely needed meals in return.Morton’s first two letters to his family gave detailed instructions on how to address his mail so as not to incur the double postage that was charged if more than one sheet of paper were included: ‘Write at the Bottom (Single Sheet),’ he instructed his family,‘as you see I have done.’ One letter was sent part way by the local carrier,who delivered goods privately; the other wholly by post: ‘Let me know,’ he wrote with a concern for cost,‘whither this or the other was Dearest.’
Morton’s knowledge of postal practices was not unusual for his time and class. Over the next 21 years, though he was often out of work, he wrote constantly to his parents, spelling his words out phonetically. Letter writing was a normal and indispensable part of the way he coped with life. In fact Morton adjusted his own routines to mesh with the rhythms of the post. Even in times of severe poverty, he and others like him, found makeshift ways to send letters, assisted by friends, servants, porters, newsmen, hawkers or carriers. When Morton fell into debt and his prospects seemed poor, his letters brought emotional comfort and family assistance. In better times they helped him to find stable employment as a clerk for a coalmine owner.
Similar enthusiasm for the post is reflected in contemporary novels. It was only natural for Jane Fairfax to remark in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815):
The post-office is a wonderful establishment … So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the Kingdom, is ever carried wrong – and not one in a million, I suppose actually lost! And when one considers the variety of hands, and of bad hands too, that are to be deciphered, it increases the wonder.
In the eyes of middling sort of people, like Jane Fairfax and workers like Joseph Morton, the Post Office was, indeed, a wonder of the world.
Yet the postal service was not originally designed for public use. It emerged haphazardly in the 16th century to provide horses and messengers in times of war for Henry VIII. A major aim was to establish a government monopoly over the gathering and censoring of information and mail.As well as controlling the flow of intelligence, it would oversee the delivery of diplomatic correspondence, support foreign and domestic policy and help to raise revenue. The king’s first Master of the Posts, Sir Brian Tuke (d.1545), selected local postmasters and divided the six major roads from London into stages.
Increased literacy, trade and an interest in news soon led merchants and the public to demand access to the post. But it wasn’t until 1635 that a London merchant Thomas Witherings (d.1651) offered a proposal to organise the first postal system for public use.A Royal Proclamation for the ‘settling of the Letter-Office of England and Scotland’ gave Witherings the authority to establish fixed, regular posts. Each post town had its own mail bag to and from London,while foot posts carried letters further on. The central London office at Bishopsgate co-ordinated mail on six main roads, charging 2d a letter for up to 80 miles.
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