Читать книгу A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day - H. G. Swift - Страница 4

INTRODUCTORY—THE CAUSES OF DISCONTENT AND THE RISE OF POSTAL AGITATION

The long continuance of agitation and disaffection in the postal service would seem almost to entitle the public to the belief that the Post-Office is a place where the Englishman’s privilege, which is to grumble, is systematically maintained and indulged in as a recreation. Possibly to many it might seem to justify some such cynicism as that the Post-Office is a public institution whose employés make mild conspiracy their serious business in their working hours, and deliver letters and send telegrams only as a pastime.

The spirit of unrest, at last finding expression in organised agitation, has for so long been associated with the Post-Office that that department has come to be regarded in the public mind as not merely a vehicle of general convenience, but principally as a hot-bed of discontent. In strange contrast to that serene contentment and peaceableness which so distinguishes the rest of the Civil Service, the Post-Office has continued to stand out, with its familiar declaration of grievances, a single discordant note in the harmony. The Temple of Mercury in St. Martin’s-le-Grand has been found from time to time the scene of angry discord, and the caduceus of the messenger of the gods, with its twining snakes, receives a new significance as a postal emblem. The ground about, that should be expected to yield nothing but the perennial golden harvest, is found to be given over to weeds, and the production of a crop of nettles.

Until recently almost, discontent in a Government department was thought a form of moral disease, and agitators were hunted as assiduously as was the Colorado beetle. There are doubtless many among the public who actually entertain some such view in regard to postal servants. There are many again to whom the Post-Office is represented by the principal living emblem in livery, the postman; and him perhaps a few tolerate as something of a nuisance, to whom they have to give a forced contribution annually to bring up his wages, or whom custom compels them to bribe into civility and a proper observance of his duties. For beyond the fact that discontent has prevailed more or less in the postal service for many years past, the public know but little of the inner workings or of the conditions which produce this symptom. It may be that the postman, being such a familiar, and to the majority a more or less welcome figure, filling the public eye, as he does, shares only with the Postmaster-General the distinction of representing the greatest public working institution in the world. What lies behind the outward and visible working of the vast and complicated piece of machinery, neither the man in the street nor his peers care much about, because it is hidden away from the light of day. The numerous army of postal workers, which comprise the indoor staff—those who sort letters and those who send telegrams—are as little thought of as the unseen crew of stokers below, engaged in their inglorious, but none the less useful, task of keeping the furnaces agoing.

The history of labour in the Post-Office has been a history of restraint and repression on one side, and of determined, persistent, and, in the end, more or less successful resistance on the other. The awakening of the trades-union spirit, and the manifestation of discontent, so long as it confined itself to a few London letter-carriers, was not formidable enough to excite either the anxiety or the animosity of the department. Discontent, disorganised, sporadic, and uncertain in its utterance, could either remain ignored or dealt with summarily.

It was only when agitation assumed much larger dimensions that it began to arouse that mingled feeling of apprehension and aversion which in itself became the means of aggravating still further those very evils which the authorities aimed at suppressing. Time and again the authorities, while complaining of the heat, yet added fuel to the fire.

Unionism in the Post-Office has ever been regarded as something verminous, something to be stamped out, something impertinently out of place in a Government office, and its leaders treated as breeders of sedition. And this has been so many years after the principle of trades unionism has at last been reconciled to Respectability and folded in her arms.

Slowly, step by step, labour in the Post-Office has gained something of a recognition of its value; but it has been forced to fight its way ofttimes with manacled hands and tape-tied feet. Happily, however, the story of postal agitation and the spread of combination throughout the postal service is not made up entirely of failures, contumacies, inflictions, and punishments. That combination in this branch of the public service has had to fight hard for its very existence from the beginning till now is perfectly true. It has been uphill work throughout, and its wounded have been left by the way. But in its struggle against the forces of bureaucracy it has snatched a victory here and there; it has received rebuffs, and even now and again courted defeat, but it has had its exultant moments of victory too. And, on the whole, there is little to regret that the fight so far has been fought; for where men have a principle at stake perhaps, to paraphrase a great dead poet, ’tis better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at all.

That the department has given as little heed as possible to the claims of postal servants, and far less sympathy, goes without saying. It has to be remembered that it is a public department, and, generally speaking, in a public department its niggardliness is in inverse ratio to its power of profit producing. It requires no argument to prove that a public institution such as this, run on the old conventional lines of red-tape and routine, and for the most part in the leading-strings of a watchful Treasury, would never spontaneously better the condition of its servants. If the same holds good generally as regards the relations between capital and labour, between the private employer and his man, it is more particularly so in a public department. Experience has proved that a betterment of the conditions of labour among the working staffs of public bodies as a rule have had to be forced from the authorities by every legitimate method which agitation can devise, by persistent petitioning, by deputation, by public meeting, often by taking the war into the enemy’s country, and getting M.P.’s to beard the Postmaster-General and the Treasury heads in their official lair, or by tracking them down in the House of Commons. And even then, after all this expenditure of force, there is often nothing but disappointment in return.

That it is not always the administrators of a public department who are to blame so much as the rule and the method which usage and convention have fossilised, must in all fairmindedness be allowed. It is easy to believe and understand that the various heads of departments, though never guilty of the unpardonable indiscretion of showing the smallest sympathy for agitation as such, none the less do often deplore the necessity of enforcing certain rules and regulations which act to the detriment of the men or which are productive of individual cases of hardship.

This point has only been touched on to show that the grievances which have given rise to agitation in various times have not been so much due to the action of officials as to the rules which they have had to administer. Hemmed in by such conditions, and bound to follow the customs prescribed by tradition and laid down by departmental etiquette, the natural inclination is to hold the reins tightly, to sit close, never to give way for fear of appearing weak, and never to willingly grant a concession merely because their private conscience may tell them there is some reason and justice in the demand. In such a situation the responsible public official has to face a higher tribunal than his own conscience. It is always fairly safe to refuse concession, but it is dangerous to grant it until you are compelled to. When the public, the press, and Parliament unite in saying such and such a demand must and shall be conceded, then it is time to act, not before. You bow with a good grace, and salaam and say, “Am I not my master’s servant?” And the public and the press and Parliament think none the less of you for your firmness, interpreting your stubbornness as zeal for the public service, though they would have turned to rend you for your incompetence had you given way sooner. Such to some extent is the trying position of those in authority in public departments, they needs must only when the devil drives, and not a moment before. They are more or less in the position of a constable whose duty it is to keep back a clamorous crowd testing a right of way; zeal and duty and anxiety for his position keep him firmly at his post till his superior and the law give him the nod and he has to fall back.

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Government officials have steadfastly pursued a policy of resistance to all claims for reform emanating from the subordinate staff. And this policy has been rendered the easier by such resistance being shown through that abstract entity known as the “Department,” which may mean one man or twenty, removing as it does the necessity for any particular individual, from the Secretary downward, to show his hand or reveal his identity. This is the system which made possible Dickens’s famous piece of satire anent the “Circumlocution Office.” It also provides a justification for Sydney Smith’s equally famous dictum regarding corporations, and, of course, Government departments—that they “have neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned.”

Certainly, it holds generally true as an important and significant fact of postal history, at any rate, that the authorities have never allowed a claim except grudgingly. And a due appreciation of this fact will conduce to a better understanding of the events which follow.

That this species of official obstinacy is not altogether peculiar to the postal service may be abundantly proved by reference to the records of other public departments. The postal authorities have sinned in very good company; and, to be fair to both sides of the question, let it be said that on the whole the sins of omission and commission have doubtless been dictated as much by a virtuous desire to save the public funds as to enhance their own credit. That at least is a saving virtue which is always conveniently placed to the credit of every permanent and public official, even when he has carried his zeal to excess. Allowing such a defence to stand without cavilling or questioning, still the fact remains that in their zeal for the public service the rights, the privileges, the convenience, the creature comforts, the health, and, it might be said, the very lives of many of the staff under their control have often been sacrificed in the past. Yet there have been exceptions, and it will be seen that the tens of thousands comprising the rank and file of the lower grades of the service have some reason to hold in grateful esteem the memory of one Postmaster-General at least—Professor Henry Fawcett. The high-souled qualities of Henry Fawcett, the blind Postmaster-General, are even now as familiar as is the recollection of that lamentable infirmity which only roused him to “wrest victory from misfortune.”

Generally, however, there have been two opposing principles at work throughout. And with two such positive and negative principles—the desire of the postal workers to assert those rights already accorded to almost every other class of labour, and the determination of the officials that such aspirations must be suppressed as dangerous—it was only to be looked for that open discontent would manifest itself sooner or later, and presently assume a more or less definite shape.

The faults and shortcomings almost necessarily incident to such a system of administration as has been indicated, its failure to move with the requirements of the times, its too conservative hesitation to compromise with the growing spirit of reform, its refusal to make allowance for the universal tendency to combine manifested among all classes of labour outside, its cheese-paring economy carried into the question of pay and prospects, were enough in themselves to beget a feeling of unrest and uncertainty culminating in one of open discontent and agitation. But these were only the first elements contributing to combination and defence of principle. Then it was that stubborn refusal to give way on the part of the authorities developed into scarcely-disguised hostility to the men and their claims. They held the citadel of privilege, and the waves of reform might beat against the granite walls of St. Martin’s-le-Grand but they would make no impression. Certainly they were not to be moved from their position by the mutterings of a few hundred malcontents inside who had become infected with the absurd ambition to better their working conditions, and who actually aspired to the wages of a skilled mechanic. Not while they had the power and the license to construe respectful petitions into impertinent demands and respectful remonstrances into insubordination and constructive treason. It would have been too much to have met such demands in a spirit of conciliation and compromise, and, so early in the day, would have been going against every workable tradition of departmentalism. The fact that a Government situation was a guarantee of permanent employment so long as they did not complain should, it was thought, in itself be sufficient to induce the men to accept every humiliation the department chose to put on them. In its desire to govern according to its conception of a benevolent despotism it too commonly provided its employés with a grievance, or a succession of grievances, arising from its attempt to shape their workaday lives by rules of military discipline and restrictive regulations better fitted for a penal settlement than for free men and citizens of selected character and intelligence.

Such was the attitude of the department and the general conditions of the postal service when the earlier would-be reformers essayed to urge their plaint, and, in the most legitimate manner, to strike a blow for freedom. The men who have been alluded to as those who were first to engage in agitation and the first to incur the as yet unknown danger of arousing the resentment of officialdom against such daring innovations, it must be acknowledged, made up in moral fibre what they lacked in experience and methods of organisation. At any rate, they deserve to be remembered kindly by those who afterwards benefited by their efforts. They were the first to cut away the undergrowth, and to make the straight and solid path possible. If fault be found with their methods, it has only to be said that their mistakes were such as generally come in the experimental stage of almost every enterprise.

If it be thought that the happenings and incidents with which they were connected or of which they were the authors are here invested with undue importance, it will be recollected that the men who were identified with those happenings were among the first actors in an interesting little industrial drama. It will perhaps not be lost sight of that the incidents themselves, though insignificant if taken singly, none the less are important links in the chain, and necessary parts of a whole. Some acknowledgment is due to these men if only that they were the humble pioneers of an industrial movement of a special character. Not only this, but because they kept abreast of the tide of progress when it was nothing less than dangerous to do so.

If it be objected that every grievance complained of—the conditions of service, insufficiency of pay prospects and promotion, deprivation of civil liberty and the right of combination reduced to a meaningless farce—have had and still have their counterparts in every other department of the State, that objection in itself scarcely lessens the justification for the action taken by the agitators. The reasonableness or otherwise of their methods is another matter which it is proposed to deal with later on as this narrative unfolds itself. If it be urged that the policy of attempting to force concessions from a Government department has been a more or less selfish and sordid one, it must be conceded also that principle has always entered largely into it. That their sole consideration was not getting the greatest material benefit at little cost, and that it was not with them entirely a question of more bread and butter and less work, is pretty well proved by the risks which postal agitators have run and the sacrifices they have cheerfully made. It has never been an easy matter for a man to demand his just dues in a Government office. The attitude of mind towards the subordinate staffs in the Post-Office has not essentially altered since the days when they publicly hanged men for letter-stealing. That was only a little more than sixty years ago, and if the asperities of administration have been somewhat softened of late years, it is only through the force of public opinion, and because the men have learnt lessons of appeal which render it almost impossible for officialdom to persist in methods of repression for any length of time. It is because the liberty of the working-classes has been so enlarged that they can no longer withhold a modicum of it from postal servants. But there is not wanting the evidence to show that something of the same spirit which, in the olden times, sent working-men to the hulks and penal servitude for attempting to band themselves and their mates together for the purpose of safeguarding their few interests from a greedy and rapacious employer was alive still until quite recently, even if it has altogether died out to-day. The postal servant seeking to better his position or daring to complain still labours under far greater disadvantages than the mechanic or the handicraftsman. A postman, a sorting-clerk, or a letter-sorter, if he be dismissed from his employment cannot pick up his bag of tools and offer himself to the next workshop, for the simple reason that he has no tools, and his trade is one of such a peculiar nature that it is wanted nowhere outside the Post-Office. Nor is a telegraphist much better off in that respect. Dismissal from the service has generally meant very much more to the postal official than to the ordinary artisan. He not only lost his immediate source of livelihood but his future prospects, his hopes of a pension, towards which he had contributed, his character and everything were gone, and he had to face the world afresh and take his stand in the battle of life against those with every advantage over him. And dismissal was particularly easy in the earlier times, when a suspicious and malignant officialdom could construe the smallest sign of disaffection into insubordination. Thus it will be seen it was no child’s play to engage in agitation twenty or thirty years ago, and the men who did so evidently did not enter into it for the love of the game altogether. There must have been something very rotten in the State of Denmark when men were goaded into what was to them desperate methods, and with so many odds against them, just for the sake of improving the conditions of their servitude. It shows that they must have felt their grievances keenly; it shows that in some degree at least that spirit of resistance to wrong and injustice to which we owe so much animated and sustained them throughout. In those days postal agitators stood almost alone, receiving very little sympathy from the press or the public, and equally as little assistance from the various trades unions, simply because postal grievances, which have always been difficult of understanding, were much more so then, and because it was difficult then to make people believe that men in permanent Government employment could have grievances of any kind. That the trades unionists of the country were slow to rally to their assistance or to proffer them practical sympathy is better now understood and made allowance for, for postmen and letter-sorters were not readily recognised as a separate craft by the various unions of ordinary artisans; they could claim no trade kinship with them; they were neither this nor that, but a sort of ugly duckling in the legitimate brood of artisanship.

Fortunately a more intelligent understanding and a better feeling now exist, and has existed for some years past. But even to gain this simple recognition that a postal official with a grievance battling against wrong was a man and a brother entitled to admittance into their ranks, was not easily obtained even when they sought it. Even the men themselves were chary of accepting the position of professed trades unionists, and it was many years before the objections associated with declared trades union principles and methods were waived by the men of the Post-Office. The fact is they remained for long uncertain as to their exact relationship to the general industrial and labour movement. There was some amount of mutual distrust between outside trade organisations and combination in the Post-Office, and both parties failed to see distinctly what there was in common between them. It must be admitted that despite their awakening so far, the postal agitators still preserved something of that reserve which may have been easily mistaken for pride or perhaps priggishness; and, indeed, felt that an open connection with trades unionism might damage their chances of redress, and alienate the support and sympathy of the few public men on whom they relied. Besides, it has to be considered that the trades-union doctrine was not sufficiently accepted to be yet accounted respectable. But all that is now past; it has been rendered both respectable and respected by almost universal acceptance, and postal agitation owes not a little to it. And if postal agitation owes more to the spirit of trades unionism than the latter does to any postal effort, then, to claim no more for it, perhaps trades unionism has no reason to feel ashamed of its poor relation who fought a battle in its behalf years ago. They maintained its principle within that most unlikely and unpromising of places, a Government office, against hostile officials who were backed up with inexhaustible reserves and the best artillery.

That the solid advantages gained through agitation have not even up to the present day fully compensated for the sacrifices made, the time, the trouble, the energy, and the money expended on it, can perhaps be freely admitted. Yet the same holds good of every other movement of higher pretension, social and political. Men with a purpose count the moral advantage as well as the material gain. If only considerations of this nature had always weighed in the past, our Merrie England would to-day be divided into slaves and slave-owners.

To its credit be it said then, that postal agitation has not been altogether confined to capturing the enemies’ cattle, or to striving for yet a bigger share of the loaves and fishes. It has only had to discover its duties and responsibilities to immediately lay claim to them, and to strenuously assert its right to fulfil them. It has always maintained the principle of combination as a principle, while it has long and persistently protested against the exclusion of postal servants from the full enjoyment of civil rights and the untrammelled exercise of the franchise. It has lost few opportunities of championing the cause of the weak against departmental intolerance, and silently and unseen it has often stayed the hand of official persecution at the very moment it was raised to strike. It has triumphed ultimately where often it has seemed to have failed. It has fought for and won the one right accorded to every free-born British citizen who was not a postal official—the right of free speech and open public meeting.

When, as an unpretentious little organisation, numerically weak and modest in its programme, it was first started by a few London postmen and letter-sorters, it was doubtless prompted principally by the very human desire to improve their own workaday lives and to benefit their wives and children. It need not be claimed that they were animated by any higher or nobler motive.

But as time went on, “new occasions taught new duties,” and as the sphere of their operations almost insensibly widened, so they readily accepted the responsibilities attaching to their character as the wing of a forward movement.