Читать книгу A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day - H. G. Swift - Страница 6

BEGINNINGS OF COMBINED AGITATION—THE COMPULSORY SUNDAY LABOUR QUESTION—FIRST PUBLIC PROTEST AT EXETER HALL.

That the spirit of discontent in the Post-Office manifested itself so far back as over half a century ago, will probably somewhat surprise most people outside the postal service itself. Possibly even farther back than that, some traces of discontent and effort at agitation might be found; but in those obscure days, however the working conditions of the service may have justified it, all such effort must have begun and ended with a few individual insubordinates, whose names are buried in oblivion and the official records. But it has to be remembered that in the earlier days of the Post-Office the very conditions under which the members of the working staff were introduced into the service almost precluded the possibility of organisation for the redress of grievances. Indeed, it may be well understood that in the pastoral days of the good old times—when life went slower, and when there was an absence of that feverish rush and hurry so characteristic of the present everywhere, and of the Post-Office in particular—postal officials were the happy inhabitants of a sort of Sleepy Hollow. In a word, probably there was little discontent in the earlier days, owing to the system of appointment by patronage. At least, there could have been very little open and avowed discontent, and much less could it have been organised.

As a survival of the system in vogue in the old twopenny-post days, the greater part of the working staff—that is to say, those subordinates who afterwards came to be described as the manipulative part of the machinery, were for many years after the introduction of the penny post recruited from those in whose behalf some influence had been exercised or invoked. Many were the sons of old servants of the aristocracy, others the sons or relatives of the dependants of M.P.’s, of Justices of the Peace, of lawyers, and public men more or less eminent. Every notability who could exercise any influence with the postal authorities, or with those who were en rapport with the powers that were, had their nominees. It was then next to impossible for a mere outsider, whatever his merits, to obtain employment under the Postmaster-General without this golden talisman. This system, so general in the earlier days, has been adverted to only in order to show one reason for there being so little discontent openly manifested, and to explain why agitation did not assume an organised form till later in the century. For however slow may have been the times, doubtless the conditions of the postal service were not even then so Arcadian as to stifle entirely the feeling of discontent in some. But the system of nomination by influence and patronage, and what in these days might be called by the uglier name of nepotism, was better calculated to foster a feeling of dependence in the majority, and one of grateful loyalty in many. This, too, it has been already pointed out, was in the days when the principles of trades unionism were little studied and little understood, even so far as they had taken root in the minds of the working-classes. Combination in any shape or form was in fact little sympathised with by those whom it sought to benefit, and in Government offices particularly would have been anathema to the authorities, or, at any rate, received with fear and aversion.

While the good old principle of “looking after Doub” prevailed extensively in every other Government office, it was almost paramount in the Post-Office; and this being so, it would be surprising to find anything but a state of stagnant contentment existing among the working staff. If not exactly a state of stagnant contentment, the readiness to assert a principle, and to resent encroachment on existing rights and privileges, would certainly not be forcibly in evidence. Whatever official wrongs, if any, they may have been subjected to at the hands of their superiors, they showed no willingness to be awakened to a sense of them. The tide of Chartism beat in vain against the grim walls of the Post-Office; the fluctuations of trade disputes, strikes, and lock-outs interested them only in a casual way, if at all; while the bare idea of organised opposition to the wishes of the authorities, however arbitrary, would have spelt downright treason. They were recruited from a class of men who, if they had not always been brought up in the paths of virtue, had always gone along the line of least resistance, which was that of conventional respectability. Once in the Post-Office, they had a character to keep up, and they were not as other men who had to work for their living with dirty hands. They felt that their Queen and country had reposed a confidence in them by selecting them for the responsible position they held. They were something midway between lawyers’ clerks and menials of the royal household. They doubtless felt they were very superior persons, though their wages were meagre and their uniform scanty; but the authorities were like unto little gods to them, and so they took it for granted that Heaven had established a natural gulf between them. Still they were the children of patronage, and of fathers whose only ambition was to see their sons settled in a Government situation; for a Government situation was for their sons the Mecca and the goal of those people who always kept good and paid proper respects to the parson and their rent regularly to the squire. And when the sons got there they felt they were a chosen few, invested with a caste and a distinction which entitled them to hold their heads a little higher than the people living in the same street. The consciousness that his neighbours occasionally pointed him out as the “gentleman who works in the Post-Office” more than atoned for his inability to wear fashionable clothes and a top-hat like his superiors.

This system of patronage as a means of rewarding the deserving relatives of old servitors and sworn retainers by drafting them into the General Post-Office, though it would not be tolerated in these democratic times, yet is reminiscent somewhat of the good old days when such things were only right and proper in every department of the State, and when it was taken for granted that Government situations were only the just reward of faithful service rendered elsewhere to the heaven-born men of power and influence in the State, and created for them to prove their generosity. Such a system is perhaps therefore saved from utter condemnation by just a suggestion of poetry about it, recalling the earlier coaching days, when the bond between master and servant was often one of intimacy and mutual obligation; and perhaps it would not be difficult to say a good word for it. It showed at least that whatever the failings of those in power and those in high places, whatever their attitude towards the working-classes generally, however they may have sniffed contemptuously at any suggestion of Chartism, or at all attempts at combination among the masses, they were not always unmindful of their moral duties towards their own dependants. Willingly enough they paid their obligations, and rewarded services rendered by quickly pushing the applicants into the service of the State. They felt that they had discharged the whole duty of man when they had done this; they had provided the son of a deserving old family servant, of an influential constituent, or of a good paying tenant, with a berth for life in a Government office, and, what was more, had proved their importance in being able to do so.

Still, whatever may have been the abuses attaching to such a system, the State was to an extent the gainer in getting men of good character, with a good certificate of family respectability, and, moreover, men who were guaranteed to go for any length of time without winding up, who were warranted never to become discontented, but always to remain faithful and loyal, well satisfied with the position in which it had pleased God and their patron to place them.

With the rank and file of the postal service composed of such men, brought in under such conditions, it is not surprising that discontent never raised its head, and that many a grievance went unredressed because it was silently endured. Nor is it surprising that the Post-Office, garrisoned by such an army sworn in in this manner, was almost the last citadel that it attacked with any degree of success. It would have been too dangerous for any man to have attempted to bell the cat in those days, and however strong may have been the desire in some, without the support and confidence of their fellows it would have been sheer official suicide to have taken the first step. They were men calculated to endure much. Petty official tyranny to such men meant no more than mild discipline. A grievance with them was but an evanescent thing, felt to-day, forgotten to-morrow; for they had a stake in the Post-Office. To express discontent would be to court certain dismissal, and that would have meant much to them, while it would mean the betrayal of the good, kind patron, their father’s master or landlord, whose powerful influence had placed them there. Indeed, it is easy to understand that no man would have felt himself either a spy or a renegade to principle in secretly or openly denouncing the rash fool who would endeavour to organise a meeting of protest against his superiors. Such were the conditions and such the temper of the men of the postal staff that must have long obtained prior to the fifties and sixties. From the introduction of the penny post in 1840, which practically organised the Post-Office on a new basis, there is no evidence of combined discontent worth recording till the early fifties, though through that period of eighteen years or so the leaven of discontent was slowly but surely working, till a desire to make their wants known at last became manifest.

Yet only a few years after the institution of the penny post the indoor working staffs and the letter-carriers were both given grave cause for dissatisfaction by the extension of Sunday labour. Whatever protest they may have made of their own accord counted for little; but it is interesting to find that so early as 1848 an influential and public-spirited section of the community took up the matter of compulsory Sunday labour on behalf of the aggrieved postal servants, the sorting-clerks and others, and publicly expressed that dissatisfaction which Government servants dared not themselves utter too openly.

At that time it was contemplated by the authorities to compel two attendances on that day as on other days of the week, and to abolish entirely for postal servants in London the distinction between the day of rest and ordinary working days. This was the origin of that question of compulsory Sunday labour in the Post-Office, which was to continue for thirty years and more as one of the prevailing causes of dissatisfaction to thousands of men. On the 8th October 1849 a great mass meeting was called at Exeter Hall to protest as strongly as possible against this desecration of Sunday. The meeting was convened in the interests of postal servants themselves as much as in furtherance of the Sabbatarian principle, and there is little doubt that the men of the Post-Office who were the principal objectors to the new regulation, were behind the scenes aiding and abetting in the success of the movement. A writer in the Patriot newspaper of that year, and one evidently familiar with the Post-Office machinery, drew a vivid picture of the possibilities of Sunday labour in the Post-Office. This article in the Patriot, probably from the pen of the first avowed discontented postal servant, did not a little to further the memorial for the cessation of the practice, which was afterwards drawn up by the Sunday-School Union, and forwarded to the Lords of the Treasury. The action of the authorities was denounced as sacrilegious, arbitrary, and tyrannical, by a number of clergymen and others speaking for the aggrieved men, while Rowland Hill, the postal reformer, the “Father of the Penny Post,” came in for a large share of hostile criticism, his name being repeatedly hissed at the Exeter Hall meeting. If the audience hissed Rowland Hill, they as loudly cheered the postal servants on whom this new official imposition was to be put, directly it became known that, to their honour, they had respectfully but firmly declined to submit, and that when the sheets for their signature went round the large establishment only two men could be got to sign away their birthright for the little extra pay. The name of the Queen was invoked to prevent this iniquitous violation of the “Pearl of Days.”

The memorial was forwarded to the Treasury; and the request for an interview with Lord John Russell to support the prayer of his memorial, met with only a curt refusal through his secretary. There the matter ended, so far. The Post-Office had its way, and compulsory Sunday labour in the Post-Office became an established, and in the minds of many, a disgraceful fact; to prove, however, a source of further trouble later on, and to provide one of the most substantial excuses for agitation during the next thirty years. Yet the comparatively feeble agitation by proxy, set on foot then in 1848, did produce, nevertheless, some little result; and on March 18, 1850, a Parliamentary paper was issued to show the “results of the measures recently adopted for the reduction of Sunday labour in the Post-Office.”