Post Office

The history of the Inland Letter Post is an important part of the history of modern communications. Since 1635, the General Post Office and its successors has been the progenitor of a number of techniques, organisational innovations and methods of communications distribution that have, in the course of time, been adopted the world over. The development of a modern Inland Letter Post system capable of delivering approximately 30 billion items per annum in Britain has clearly experienced an enormous amount of change over this extremely long period of time. It has been strengthened by centuries of growth, a sustained increase in organisational sophistication and a number of sweeping transformations, such as the introduction of the national Penny Post in the nineteenth century or of postcodes in the twentieth century. In the following passage of writing some of the key developments of the Letter Post service, that form the historical context for the records found within POST 23, will be sketched.

In July 1635, by a Royal Proclamation of Charles I, a new revenue-producing plan to offset the cost of maintaining the Royal Posts was implemented (the Royal Posts date back to the reign of King Henry VIII and were made up of the King's personal messengers, conveying letters on behalf of the court and nobility). For the first time, this allowed the public to use the Royal Posts in return for fixed rates of postage. These rates were based upon the number of sheets of paper making up any given letter, and on the distance it was carried. Posts were carried along the five principal roads of the kingdom, those to Dover, Edinburgh, Holyhead, Plymouth and Bristol, travelling as far as Edinburgh and Dublin, with a number of Post Houses en route to allow collection of letters from intervening towns (see POST 23/1). This service survived the Civil War and was reconfirmed with the 'Charter of The Post Office' in 1660, which established the first London Letter Office. The 'Charter' reinforced the edicts of a 1657 Act of Parliament, which effectively fixed rates for the conveyance of postage across the British Isles. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Crown had secured a state monopoly on the carriage of inland mails and had taken control of the London Penny Post, a public postal service operating within the capital only, for which both those sending and receiving a letter would pay a penny. The establishment of a modest national service was by this time secure and settled and continued to expand at a steady pace.

By the mid eighteenth century, there was a controller of the Inland Office and two clerks for each of the six principal roads that spread from London to the rest of the British Isles. At the Head Office in Lombard Street, there were two Postmaster Generals, a number of other senior figures and approximately 16 sorters, amongst other staff responsible for the daily running of affairs. The outdoor service of the Inland Office was undertaken by nearly 70 letter carriers. In total, the department served over 180 offices nationwide, in addition to the work of the Bye and Cross Road Letter Office, which cared for the local carriage of posts between cross-road towns (See Howard Robinson, 'Britain's Post Office' (OUP, 1953), pp. 68-71). Towards the end of the century, there occurred a wholesale reform of the way letters were carried across Britain, when John Palmer oversaw the introduction of armed mail coaches to replace the boy messengers, from 1785 on. This development meant that the mails could now be carried across Britain faster, more regularly, with more safety and to a far stricter timetable, which in turn led to an expansion of services, revenue and national importance of a burgeoning modern Post Office.

Naturally, the industrial revolution and its attendant technological developments meant that mail coaches would not carry inland mails indefinitely. Travelling Post Offices (TPO), trains that journeyed the length and breadth of Britain carrying staff to sort the mail whilst on the move, began operation in the 1840s and there were over 100 in operation by the end of the nineteenth century. However, the great changes, developments and reforms that unravelled in many spheres of life during the nineteenth century, an ever-growing and increasingly literate populace and the growth of industry and commerce, all contributed to a demand for an inland letter service of ongoing expansion and sophistication. A crucial step in this regard were the reforms to this service that occurred in the 1840s, which are commonly associated with the leading light of British postal history, Sir Rowland Hill (1795-1879).

Hill made a number of proposals for reforming the Post Office, but his major contribution was to change the way people paid for the national letter service, which in turn led to a more affordable service, a substantial growth in postal traffic and therefore to a series of organisational changes. In 1837, he published a pamphlet, 'Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability' (see POST 23/214). Instead of the recipient paying a rate dictated by the mileage involved and the number of sheets of paper in the letter, a system that had become highly criticised, Hill argued for the following. A national rate of one penny, to be pre-paid by the sender by means of an adhesive label (the postage stamp), with charges being made according to weight. This pamphlet was well received. In 1837, a government-appointed select committee looked into the matter and published its final report in March 1839 (see POST 23/202) and it was agreed by Parliament on 12 July of that year. The concept of pre-payment was agreed and new uniform rates were introduced on 10 January 1840, only five weeks after an interim 4d rate had demonstrated its practicality and also due to public pressure. However, it was not until 1897, as part of concessions made for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, that delivery by postmen was extended to every house in the Kingdom. There were changes to the maximum weight that could be posted for one penny in 1871 and 1879 and the national Penny Post kept its eponymous rate right up until 1918 when this charge was finally raised by a half pence (See POST 23/201 for a review of the achievements of the penny post by 1890, written by Rowland Hill's son, Mr. Pearson Hill).

When the national penny post was introduced, the Post Office handled just over 75 million letters per annum. By 1870, this figure had risen to in excess of 860 million and letters remained the dominant means of inland long-distance communication until the telecommunications revolution of the twentieth century (for postal traffic figures see Martin Daunton, 'Royal Mail: The Post Office Since 1840' (London: Athlone Press, 1985), p. 80). The mid-nineteenth century reforms to the way the Post Office went about its business laid the foundations for the way the organisation would administrate the nation's inland letter service well into the twentieth century. However, before concluding with a consideration of the equivalent reforms of this later period, there is one department of the nineteenth century Inland Letter Office that is particularly well represented in POST 23 and therefore worthy of brief comment.

This is the Missing Letter Branch (Sub-Series 3 'Missing Letter Branch Case Papers'). This department conducted investigations into many suspicious cases where inland letters went missing, and was often successful in finding a culprit, usually a sorting clerk or postman. Missing duties were the responsibility of the Solicitor from the first recorded instance in 1793 (see the minute entry Eng321P/1827 in POST 30/21) and in 1816 they were assumed by the Secretary's office (See POST 72). However, in 1839 (when this series begins) the duty became known as the Missing Letter Branch. A number of organisational changes occurred such as the introduction of a Post Office Inspector General in 1848, the replacement of this post ten years later with the detachment to it of four Travelling Officers (investigation officers) and two police constables (assistants) and a number of other travelling officers becoming permanent staff in 1861. In 1883 the Missing Letter Branch was renamed the Confidential Enquiry Branch (CEB), and its head was given the title of Director. These files relate to the period 1839-1859 and contain a wealth of information such as the 500 indexed cases for 1854-1856 that can be found in POST 23/62.

Efforts to revitalise Britain's letter post were redoubled after the Second World War and there were a series of organisational changes to the way the London Postal Region (LPR) was run, with collection and delivery times, circulation objectives and staff working hours coming under the spotlight (See Sub-Series 6 'Post War revision to letter services, London Postal Region'). The major changes that occurred in the post-war period until the 1980s and beyond owed much to technological advancements that, like many sectors of British business and industry, the Post Office Board sought to take full advantage of. The mechanisation of postal sorting gathered pace from 1945 onwards and the automation of many parts of the by now elaborate and very large inland letter system heralded other changes of national importance, such as the introduction of post codes in the early 1960s (See POST 17 in general for issues related to mechanisation and see POST 17 Sub-Series 10 for the introduction of post codes in particular).

One of the landmark developments facilitated by these improvements to the system was the arrival of a two-tier letter service, which was officially introduced on 16 September 1968. The new first class service was charged at 5d and second class letters were charged at 4d. These were liable to deferment in the post and, in general, were delivered about 24 hours later than the equivalent first class service. Long before this service was introduced, letter traffic had been divided into two broad streams with fully paid letters in one stream and printed papers at a lower rate of postage in the other stream in order to ensure prompt delivery of fully paid letters. Late postings had gradually increased over the years, for example, in the Western District Office in London, it increased from 75% in 1956 to 82% in 1967, and so although the new system was sometimes criticised, it was considered to be a necessary adjustment to the way the letter service was run. Reports, memoranda, the proceedings of parliamentary speeches and debates and much else related to the introduction of the two-tier letter service can be found in Sub Series 8 'Two-Tier Inland Letter Service, Correspondence and Reports'.

In 1969, an Act of Parliament made the Post Office a nationalised corporation and the organisation ceased to be a government department for the first time in the modern era. Under the terms of the Act, the organisation was split into two distinct sections: posts and telecommunications. One of the consequences of this legislation was that that the organisation came under increased pressure to remain profitable. With this in mind, marketing plans and long term planning papers were drawn up during the 1970s and 1980s in which the state of the letter system and plans for its future development were discussed, some of which can be found in Sub-Series' 9 and 10. By the early 1980s, the telecommunications side of the business had been separated and was later privatised in 1984, whereas the inland letter service remained under the control of the Post Office. This part of the organisation became separated from counters and parcels under the name 'Royal Mail Letters' in 1986 and reports relating to the establishment of the letters business in this year can be seen in Sub-Series 13, including graphs that show the volumes of inland mail and the relative success/failure at meeting service targets from the 1960s on (POST 23/155 and 199). From 2002, a similar set up remained in place, but with one important difference: Royal Mail (which continued to be a PLC) lost its monopoly for the conveyance of inland letters.

The history of the Post Office monopoly of letter services is very complex and its validity has been a source of political debate throughout the twentieth century. The 1635 proclamation made it unlawful to establish a private post where an official one existed and in 1637 a further proclamation declared a monopoly on carriage of letters between persons within the kingdom. In 1657 an Act established a 'General Post Office' and appointed a 'Postmaster General,' giving him a monopoly on the carriage of letters. Throughout the latter part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, measures were taken to clarify the application of, and exclusions to, the monopoly, and extend it to other Post Office services. There have been other interesting episodes related to this Post Office monopoly, including an occasion in 1885 when the Postmaster General made an ill-tempered visit to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge to investigate an independent postal system that had been developed at the universities, producing its own postage stamps, between 1870-1886 (see POST 23/77) and the contentious monopoly continued to be the subject of political debate well into the late twentieth century (see POST 23/142 'The Letter Monopoly: Review, 1979' and Sub-Series 4 'The Post Office Monopoly of Letter Post' for related material). From 1 January 2006, the market was opened up to competition by the postal regulator Postcomm in anticipation of EU rulings concerning postal monopolies. This ended a 350-year period in which the Post Office had maintained this sole right to offer an inland letter service.