Читать книгу A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day - H. G. Swift - Страница 12

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.