The Last Post

In the newspaper that, with its stablemate, gives a platform to paleoconservative opinion in the British (and, on its website, the American) sense, Dominic Sandbrook issues a call to arms to those who believe in national sovereignty, in the monarchy’s direct link to every address, and in rural communities, to unite with those, very largely the same people, who believe in publicly owned public services, in strong unions, and in rural communities, so that, together, we can save our Post Office:

With less than two weeks to go before the last posting date for Christmas parcels, millions of us will spend the next few days waiting bleakly in a Post Office queue. Public discontent with the postal service has probably never been higher.

To the pioneers who first built Royal Mail three centuries ago — and to the postmen who, once upon a time, brought deliveries a staggering six times a day — the state of the service today would appear nothing less than a tragedy. And for many of us, too, our disappointment is all the more acute because we remember the Post Office as one of our nation’s great institutions, one of the sinews that held British life together. As I have discovered while making a new Radio 4 series on the history of Royal Mail, almost no brand name in the country has a richer or prouder history. Indeed, as recently as the 1990s, the Post Office was still making a handsome profit. But its appalling betrayal by New Labour’s meddling politicians is one of the most disgraceful episodes in our recent history.

At the heart of the Post Office there has always been a tension between two key impulses: public service and profit. A rudimentary postal service was set up under Henry VIII, but the monarch and his courtiers were the only ones allowed to use it. But then, in 1635, a Staffordshire merchant called Thomas Witherings asked Charles I for permission to run a proper state postal monopoly, open to ordinary people as well as the rich and powerful. In a way, Witherings was the equivalent of today’s internet entrepreneurs, out simply to make a profit. But for the monarchy, the Post Office seemed a potent weapon.

At a time of mounting discontent with Charles I’s absolutist regime, the king saw the Royal Mail as a gigantic machine to control and censor information. And when he was executed in 1649, his successor, Oliver Cromwell, took this surveillance culture a stage further. At the first Post Office in central London, Cromwell’s men set up a secret room where letters were opened, copied and resealed. Every night, from eleven till four in the morning, Roundhead agents pored over the nation’s letters, looking out for any signs of dissent. A sign of how well the system worked came when Charles II returned from exile. He pardoned Cromwell’s spymasters and set them to work opening letters for him.‘They have tricks to open letters more skilfully than anywhere in the world,’ wrote the French ambassador in 1665, ‘some even fancying that it is not possible to be a great statesman without tampering with packets.’

Yet as the great passions of the Civil War began to fade, the Post Office gradually evolved into a genuinely public service. With literacy booming, even ordinary people were now getting used to writing and reading letters. In 1680, another enterprising businessman, William Dockwra, set up Britain’s first private courier service, the London Penny Post, which delivered letters across the capital for just a penny. It was a lot cheaper and more efficient than its modern equivalents, with their garish vans and endlessly postponed deliveries. But since it represented a threat to the state monopoly, Dockwra was promptly dragged into court, and the Penny Post was forcibly nationalised.

Here was a sign, though, that public demand was booming. Indeed, by the late 18th century, popular enthusiasm for sending letters had outstripped the Post Office’s ability to cope. Then as now, the organisation was beset with complaints. ‘The London Mail did not arrive here till near five Hours after the usual Time last Monday morning, owing to the Postman’s getting a little intoxicated, and falling from his Horse into a Hedge,’ fumed the Bath Journal in November 1770.

One local businessman decided to take matters into his own hands. As a theatre owner in the West Country, John Palmer used stagecoaches to transport his props. Why not, he suggested to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Pitt, use stagecoaches to move the mail, too? Pitt gave the go-ahead for a trial, and the age of the mail coach was born. Soon people across the land were accustomed to seeing coaches whizzing down the nation’s roads, their scarlet-coated guards relieving their boredom by taking pot shots at passing cattle.

For some people, the coaches were a disturbing innovation. Their 10mph speed ‘was thought to be highly dangerous to the head,’ wrote the future Lord Chancellor John Campbell, ‘and stories were told of men and women who, having reached London with such [swiftness], died suddenly of an affection of the brain.’ What they captured, however, was the spirit of an institution that was moving with the times. Indeed, by the time Queen Victoria acceded to the throne in 1837, the Post Office had become a crucial part of Britain’s booming industrial landscape.

For the nation that led the world in commerce and communications, a decent postal service was absolutely critical. And in an age before telephones or email, letters were the lifeblood of an expanding society. What distinguished Britain in the Victorian age, however, was that it was never content to rest on its laurels. In 1840, the great postal reformer Rowland Hill successfully argued for a radical new scheme under which people would pay a simple, flat fee before sending a letter, rather than the receiver paying on delivery, as had been the case until then. Even today we still use a variant of Hill’s system. We even use the same method of pre-payment — a postage stamp bearing the image of the monarch.

Yet we often forget how odd stamps seemed to our Victorian ancestors. One schoolboy remarked that he did not ‘fancy making my mouth a glue pot’, although licking a stamp did provide ‘the satisfaction of kissing or rather slobbering over Her Majesty’s back.’ Soon enough, though, the presses were working round the clock to produce 600,000 stamps a day. And strange as it may sound, the postage stamp changed the look of Britain’s front doors for ever. Since postmen no longer needed to knock for payment, most people cut holes in their doors so that the postman could just shove the letters through. Only a few diehards held out, such as the Marquis of Londonderry, who sent Rowland Hill an angry letter demanding to know whether ‘the Postmaster-General actually expects that I should cut a slit in my mahogany door?’

But the Post Office was now at the cutting edge of technology and communications. Indeed, some observers thought that it had become the guarantor of world peace. ‘Distance no longer creates difference, no longer excuses indifference,’ said one paper in 1868. ‘The railway, the telegraph, the Post Office, have taught populations sundered by hundreds or thousands of miles that they are part, after all, of the same human family.’ Carrying letters was only part of the Royal Mail’s mission. Not content with taking over the telegraph network, its Victorian bosses also introduced Parcel Post, sparking a boom in mail order catalogues that sold everything from insect repellent powder to wax for gentlemen’s moustaches.

Crucially, though, this was the peak of the Post Office’s public service ethos. In 1861, William Gladstone introduced the Post Office Savings Bank — the first bank explicitly aimed at ordinary people, allowing even the poorest in the land to put away money of their own. And in towns and villages across the country, little sub-post offices became the centre of the Victorian community. ‘The villagers now come to the Postmaster in their troubles,’ reported one Welsh postmaster. ‘Even the Vicar and the Minister play second fiddle to him nowadays in public usefulness.’

At the heart of all this was a spirit of public service that now seems like something from another world. The public might sometimes be annoying, wrote one senior official, but every counter clerk must remember that ‘he is the servitor and they the masters’. The idea of the public as the masters might sound outlandish to today’s Post Office bosses. But it endured for much of the 20th century, despite the advent of new technology like the telephone. During World War I, for example, the Post Office eagerly played its part. Although the Army technically had its own independent postal service, run by the Royal Engineers, it was staffed largely by former postmen and mail sorters. This was an extraordinary logistical exercise: every week some 12½ million letters left Britain for Flanders, which meant dispatching 16,000 mail bags every day.

And after the war, the Post Office led the way in taking on disabled veterans, even installing special seats for paraplegic sorting officers who had survived the horrors of the Western Front. By World War II, Royal Mail was the biggest employer in the land, with a staff numbering almost half a million. Most people had at least two daily deliveries — down from an astonishing six in the 18th century, but still a much better service than we get today. The postman was a much-loved figure. In rural villages, he might even bring milk and bread for elderly neighbours, or stop for a cup of tea. And although the service began to creak in the Seventies, it is notable that Margaret Thatcher never seriously considered privatising it. Like most people of her generation, she saw Royal Mail as one of the bulwarks of the British state — an institution of which the nation could be proud.

All this was to change, however, when Tony Blair arrived on the scene in 1997. Contrary to myth, the Post Office was not losing money. In fact, it had made a profit for 23 years in a row, and in 1999 it handed the Treasury a cheque for £310 million. But Whitehall wanted more. Ignorant of history and greedy to squeeze every penny from what they saw as a mere cash cow, New Labour began an endless round of half-baked reforms, leaving Royal Mail in a kind of limbo, neither public nor private. Deliveries were slashed, staff numbers plummeted, and many villages saw their beloved post offices sacrificed in the name of efficiency.

Of course change always had to come. After all, the Post Office’s history has been a story of constant evolution. The rise of email has meant a seismic shift in the way we communicate: between 2005 and 2009 alone, the volume of letters we send every day fell from 84 million to just 75 million. But Blair’s hapless reforms could hardly have been more disruptive. And nothing better symbolised the disgraceful insensitivity of the service’s bosses than the abortive attempt to rebrand the service ‘Consignia’ in 2001. Thankfully, this contemptible episode has now been banished to the dustbin of history. Sadly, though, there is a good chance that the Post Office itself will soon be joining it.

With the market now open to competitors for the first time since 1635, privatisation seems inevitable. Future generations, who will take competition for granted, may laugh with disbelief that we were so attached to our state monopoly. But the Royal Mail’s proud history is a reminder that there is more to life than fat profits for the few. For more than three centuries, it has been a vital part of our national story, pioneering new technology and building links between town and countryside, north and south, rich and poor. My head tells me that change is coming. But when you think back over more than three centuries of postal history — mail coaches and Penny Blacks, Valentine’s cards and letters from the Front — it is hard not to feel outraged at the shameful neglect of a much-loved national institution. For when the name Royal Mail vanishes into history, we will have lost a little bit of our nation’s soul.

Dominic Sandbrook presents The People’s Post on Radio 4, every weekday at 1.45pm from next Monday to December 23.