APPENDIX TO CHAPTER XXIII.

MONEY ORDER DEPARTMENT.

The secretarial charge of this department had been committed, as I have already said, to my brother Frederic. I cannot better describe the state to which it had by this time been brought than by quoting the following passages from an interesting and amusing article in “Household Words”:—[120]

“In 1792, when the true British sailor was stoutly preparing to defy the French in various parts of the globe at thirty shillings a month, and when British military valour was fighting Tippoo Saib in India at a shilling a day, it was felt as a great hardship that the affluent warriors of both services could not transmit, safely and speedily, to their sweethearts and wives, even from one part of the United Kingdom to another, their surplus capital. The Government, seeing the danger of allowing the savings of its servants to burn holes in their pockets, was good enough to concoct a snug little ‘job,’ by means of which such pocket-conflagrations might be extinguished. The monopoly of transmitting money from one place to another was conceded to three gentlemen in connection with the Post Office. Their terms were—eightpence for every pound; but if the sum exceeded two pounds, a stamp duty of one shilling was levied by Government in addition. Five guineas was the highest amount which could be thus remitted; and the charge for that sum was four shillings and sixpence, or nearly five per cent., besides the price of the postage of the letter which contained the advice—perhaps a shilling more.

“Now, happily, the days of monopoly have passed, and Mr. Rowland Hill does the same thing for the odd sixpence, with an odd penny, at a profit to the Government of about seven thousand pounds a year, exclusive of the gain derived from the enormous number of letters of advice which Post Office orders have created. When the privilege was extended from soldiers and sailors to the general public, the three monopolists of the last century could divide between them, on an average, no more than six hundred and fifty pounds per annum. No longer ago than the year 1838, the Money Order Office was absorbed into the Post Office; and, although the charges were reduced to a commission of sixpence for sums not exceeding two pounds, and of one shilling and sixpence for sums up to five pounds (which was, and is still, the limit), a chief clerk and two assistants were appointed to do all the business the public brought to them; and even they could only do it at a loss to the department. People could not afford to increase even the reduced charges for commission, by the eightpenny and shilling postages for their letters of advice.

“Penny postage, therefore, is the parent of the gigantic money-order system, which now flourishes in full activity. In estimating the advantages of that great stroke of economical, administrative, and commercial sense, many of its less prominent agencies for good are overlooked. The facilities it has afforded for epistolary intercommunication are so wonderful and self-evident, that we who benefit by them are blinded to the hidden impulses it has given to social improvement and to commerce. Regarded only as the origin of the present money-order system, penny postage has occasioned the exercise of prudence, benevolence, and self-denial; it has, in many instances, stopped the sufferings of want by timely remittances; and it has quickened the undercurrents of trade by causing small transactions to be easily and promptly effected. These advantages can only be estimated by a consideration of the following facts.

“During the advent year of penny postage, the commission on Post Office orders was reduced to threepence and sixpence for sums not exceeding two pounds and not exceeding five pounds respectively. In that year the number of orders granted in the United Kingdom was (in round numbers, which we shall use throughout, for the reader’s greater convenience) 188,000, for an aggregate amount of £313,000. Even this was a great advance on the business previously done at the old prices; but what are the figures for the tenth year of penny postage? During the year 1850 the number of orders granted in the United Kingdom was 4,440,000, for amounts making up £8,495,000; only a million less than the yearly produce of the income and assessed taxes put together! This marvellous increase can perhaps be better appreciated by being seen through a diminished medium. In the first month of the penny postage (1840), the issue of orders was about 10,000 in number, for something over £16,000; but in the month of December, 1851, the number of orders issued was more than 367,000, for £690,000. That is to say, during that single month twice as many orders were taken out and paid for than were issued and paid in 1840 during the whole year.

* * * * * *

“The Central Money Order Office in which these remarkable results have been produced and ascertained is in Aldersgate Street, London, hard by the Post Office. It is a large establishment—large enough to be a very considerable post office in itself—with extensive cellarage branching off into interminable groves of letters of advice and receipts, all methodically arranged for reference. The room in which the orders are issued and paid has a flavour of Lombard Street and money. It has its long banker’s counter, where clerks sit behind iron gratings, with their wooden bowls of cash, and their little scales for weighing gold; and vistas of pigeon-holes stretch out behind them—which are not without their pigeons, as we shall presently see. Here, from ten o’clock to four, keeping the swing doors on the swing all day, all sorts and conditions of people come and go. Greasy butchers and salesmen from Newgate Market, with bits of suet in their hair, who loll, and lounge, and cool their foreheads against the grating, like a good-humoured sort of bears; sharp little clerks not long from school, who have everything requisite and necessary in readiness; older clerks in shooting coats, a little sobered down as to official zeal, though possibly not yet as to cigar divans and betting offices; matrons who will go distractedly wrong, and whom no consideration, human or divine, will induce to declare in plain words what they have come for; people with small children, which they perch on edges of remote desks, where the children, supposing themselves to be for ever abandoned and lost, present a piteous spectacle; labouring men, merchants, half-pay officers, retired old gentlemen from trim gardens by the New River, excessively impatient of being trodden on, and very persistent as to the poking in of their written demands with tops of canes and handles of umbrellas. The clerks in this office ought to rival the lamented Sir Charles Bell in their knowledge of the expression of the hand. The varieties of hands that hover about the grating, and are thrust through the little doorways in it, are a continual study for them—or would be, if they had any time to spare, which assuredly they have not. The coarse-grained hand which seems all thumb and knuckle, and no nail, and which takes up money or puts it down with such an odd, clumsy, lumbering touch; the retail trader’s hand, which chinks it up and tosses it over with a bounce; the housewife’s hand, which has a lingering propensity to keep some of it back, and to drive a bargain by not paying in the last shilling or so of the sum for which her order is obtained; the quick, the slow, the coarse, the fine, the sensitive and dull, the ready and unready—they are always at the grating all day long. Hovering behind the owners of these hands, observant of the various transactions in which they engage, is a tall constable (rather potential with the matrons and widows on account of his portly aspect), who assists the bewildered female public, explains the nature of the printed forms put ready to be filled up for the quicker issuing of orders and the greater exactness as to names, and has an eye on the unready one, as he knots his money up in a pocket-handkerchief or crams it into a greasy pocket-book. If you have any bad money by you, be careful not to bring it here. The portly constable will whisk you into a back office before you can say Jack Robinson, will snip your bad half-crown or five-shilling piece in half directly, and (at the best), after searching inquiry, will fold the pieces in a note of your name and address, and consign them to a bundle of similar trophies for evermore.

* * * * * *

“This sort of mystification is even more surprising than that under which certain uneducated individuals (Irish) have been known to labour. The belief has more than once been manifested at a money order office window that the mere payment of the commission would be sufficient to procure an order for five pounds; the form of paying in the five pounds being deemed purely optional. An Irish gentleman (who had left his hod at the door) recently applied in Aldersgate Street for an order for five pounds on a Tipperary post office; for which he tendered (probably congratulating himself on having hit upon so good an investment) sixpence. It required a lengthened argument to prove to him that he would have to pay the five pounds into the office before his friend could receive that small amount in Tipperary; and he went away, after all, evidently convinced that his not having this order was one of the personal wrongs of Ireland, and one of the particular injustices done to hereditary bondsmen only.

* * * * * *

“Despite the prodigious increase in the business of the department which we have pointed out, its efficiency has been doubled, and its cost almost halved. By superseding seventy-eight superfluous ledgers, the labour of sixty clerks has been saved; by simply reducing the size of the money orders and advices, the expense of paper and print alone has been diminished by £1,100 per annum; while the abolition of separate advices of each transaction has economised the number of letters by 46,000 weekly. The upshot is, that these economical reforms have effected a saving in the Money Order Office alone equal to £17,000 per annum.”

As a supplement to the foregoing extracts I quote from my Journal the following statistical record:—

“June 7th, 1853.—The accounts of the Money Order Office for 1852 show an increase of profit of £4,227, making a total for the year of £11,664. In 1847, when I took to the department, there was a loss of £10,600 a year; so that the effective saving is upwards of £22,000 a year.”

GENERAL ECONOMIC MEASURES.

Various improvements noticeable under this head (some of them of considerable importance) are omitted here as being more conveniently mentioned under other categories, as Money Orders, Conveyance of Mails, Packet Service, &c.

The following, though of economic tendency, was, as will be perceived, more beneficial in another respect:—

“October 29th, 1851.—A clerkship at Hong Kong having become vacant by death, the Postmaster-General has, on my recommendation . . . determined not to fill it up, and to employ part of the saving thus effected in giving to the postmaster and each of the remaining clerks in turn leave of absence for a year and a half, with full salary and an allowance of £100 towards the expense of the voyage. By these means, while ample force will still be left, the poor fellows will have the opportunity of recruiting their health, and a saving will be effected of £183 a year.”

By merely entering into negotiations for substituting coach for railway train we obtained from the Belfast and Ballymena Railway Company a voluntary reduction in charge of more than £2000 a year, and this with some gain in time; again, by substituting car for coach between Limerick and Galway, we obtained another reduction of £1,200 a year.

Another measure provided for some immediate and a large prospective saving in the cost of guards, the duties of many amongst whom I found, on examination, to be so light as not to occupy, on the average, more than three or four hours per day. It is a curious fact that I was led to the examination resulting in this discovery by an application for increased force.

In the year 1851 prepayment in money of postage on inland letters was abolished at all those provincial offices where it had been thus far allowed. Early in the following year the abolition was extended to Dublin, next to Edinburgh, and last of all to London—thus completing the establishment of prepayment by stamps alone throughout the United Kingdom, and greatly simplifying our proceedings. To save trouble, however, to the senders of large numbers of circulars, a limited exception was still allowed at the chief office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the rule eventually taking this form, viz., to receive prepayment in money from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in sums of not less than £2 at a time. And thus, with this trifling exception, was carried into full effect, and I believe without a dissentient voice, a mode of payment which it was at one time maintained that the public would regard with such disfavour that its unpopularity would be found a serious obstacle, if not an insuperable bar, to the whole scheme of penny postage.

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS.

Early Delivery.

“December 31st, 1851.—Frederic has succeeded in satisfying Smith (President of the London District Office) of the practicability of a considerable improvement in the delivery of the general post letters in those parts of the suburbs of London which are about four or five miles from the Post Office. For the last three or four weeks the delivery at Brixton and in the neighbourhood has been about two hours earlier than theretofore, and the improvement will shortly be extended to Hampstead, Highgate, Stoke Newington, and many other places about equally distant from the Post Office, if the Treasury sanction the small increase of expense necessary. The measure will be a step towards the more perfect plan which I attempted to carry out more than four years ago, but which I was obliged to abandon for the time in consequence of Smith’s objections.

“January 31st, 1852.—The further improvement in the suburban deliveries commenced this morning. At my house [Hampstead] the general post letters were delivered just before nine o’clock, instead of, as heretofore, about half-past eleven.”

The hour of morning delivery has now, for many years, been as early as eight. This acceleration by three hours and a-half in the principal delivery of the day, especially to the large class resident in the suburbs of London, whose occupations require that they shall leave home by nine or ten o’clock in the morning, is obviously very important. In many cases it makes the difference of a day in their ability to reply.

Facilities for Posting.

Up to this time pillar-boxes were unknown in England,[121] though already in use not only in France, where they were an old institution, but also in some of the principal towns of Germany, and even in the villages of the Channel Islands.

“January 8th, 1852.—We had a conversation on the subject of street letter-boxes, when I found that the Postmaster-General was not disinclined to a trial of them in the great thoroughfares of London.”

Postal convenience at railway stations was also still unknown.

“February 13th.—The Postmaster-General has sanctioned a measure of mine which, I expect, will have the effect of converting the railway stations in all the larger towns into gratuitous receiving offices.”

It was still, however, some time before the plan was carried into effect.

NUMBER OF LETTERS.

The following entries show the progressive increase of letters during this period:—

“January 19th, 1852.—The number of letters which passed through the London Office last week is the greatest on record, being 2,597,000 general post, and 850,000 district post letters; in all, 3,447,000, or considerably more than twice the number under the old system for the whole kingdom. It is remarkable that the London general post letters, which increased to the extent of about 200,000 a week soon after the opening of the Exhibition [the Great Exhibition of 1851] continue now that it is closed to be as numerous as ever.

“January 20th, 1853.—The usual annual account of letters gives 379½ millions for the year 1852, or an increase of 19½ millions on the previous year. The number is exactly five times as great as before reduction. . . . The letters have for the last three or four months increased very rapidly (one of the many signs of prosperity); the last return (for the week ending 21st December) showed an increase of more than 400,000 in the letters passing weekly through London; and on Monday morning last Bokenham tells me that the number of letters which passed through his office was greater than in any previous Monday by 40,000.

“January 9th, 1855.—The number of letters delivered in the United Kingdom last year was 443½ millions, showing an increase on 1853 of 32½ millions; the largest increase since 1840, the first year of the reduced rates. This great increase is, I think, mainly owing to the extension of rural distribution. In the course of the year, I believe, we have opened more than five hundred offices.”

This large increase of correspondence by the admission of the rural districts to the postal system reminded me of a remark which I had heard from my father many years before, viz., that the result of the first census, while it disappointed expectation as to the population of the towns, exceeded it as to that of the whole country; the rural districts proving to be better inhabited than had been supposed.

Occasional Pressure.

The following entry gives a specimen of the remarkable contingencies to which the Post Office was then liable, and for which therefore it had always to stand prepared. By improved arrangements the difficulty has in great measure been obviated.

“July 4th, 1853.—On Saturday the despatch of the night mails was three-quarters of an hour late; this was caused by the arrival in the course of the day of heavy mails from the following places, viz., the United States, the West Indies, the East Indies, Australia viâ Singapore, and Australia viâ the Cape. The total number of letters, including inland, which reached the General Post Office that day, was 458,000, of which 212,000 (chiefly Foreign and Colonial) were unpaid. It was with the greatest difficulty that the work was got through at all.”

Increased Honesty.

I need not say that I made the following record with great satisfaction:—

“July 8th, 1853.—A recent return to Parliament of the number and cost of prosecutions [for Post Office offences] from 1848 to 1852 inclusive shows an enormous decrease, nearly, I think, in the ratio of three to one; this very satisfactory result is, I believe, mainly owing to the improved arrangements in the Money Order Office.”

Titus Oates.

One of my letters of this period refers to a curious document, discovered some time before amongst the records of the Post Office, by which it appears that the infamous Titus Oates received, after the Revolution, by way of recompense, it may be supposed, for the tremendous flagellation he had undergone a few years before, and certainly on recommendation from the House of Commons, a pension of £300 per annum, charged on the revenues of the Post Office. Of this document, when first discovered, I had sent a copy to Lord Macaulay, by whom it is noticed, though slightly, in his account of the period.[122] The document, curious in itself, is too long for insertion, but the following are extracts:—

“We [William the Third] for divers good causes and consideracons Us hereunto moveing. . . . Have given and granted by these presents . . . unto Titus Oates Doctor in Divinity his Executors Administrators and Assignes one Annuity or yearly pencon of Three hundred pounds of lawfull English money . . . payable out of Our Revenues . . . of the General Letter Office or Post office . . . for the term of ninety-nine years . . . if he the said Titus Oates and Rebecah his wife or either of them shall soe long live.”

Funeral of the Duke of Wellington.

“November 22nd, 1852.—The returns for the last week show that the funeral of the Duke of Wellington on the 18th reduced the letters despatched from London by the evening mails of that day by about 100,000. The next day’s mails were probably increased by about 10,000.”