H. G. Swift

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The success of the meeting from the first moment was beyond all expectation. If any had fears that the men would be too suspicious of attending a gathering of this kind within the precincts of the building, and under the shadow of the department, they were mistaken. Almost directly the despatches were finished, and the duty done with for the night, they swarmed in from every part. From every other branch in the building—for the General Post-Office is a nest of branches, like a Chinese puzzle-box—and from outside offices they swarmed up the stairs and through every means of entry. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A superintendent might either call a man with a ready excuse a downright liar to his face, or he might, in his desire to be strictly official, display such an utter want of feeling as to be guilty of conduct almost bordering on brutality. It was the vogue of one official of this period to regulate everything strictly according to rule. He thought himself too loyal a servant of the department even to exercise that little discretion vested in him by his superiors. ”

“ As Liverpool had taken a prominent, if not the leading part in the first telegraphists’ agitation, and again in 1881, so once more, in the case of the postal clerks, was Liverpool to produce the man and show the way. The deplorable condition [239] into which the postal service had fallen, so far as their working environments, their prospects and pay were concerned, roused one or two individuals among the postal clerks here to seek about for a remedy. The cries of discontent, and the calls for redress from other distant places, came to their ears like inarticulate voices in the night. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was the tremendous enthusiasm usual with those newly awakened to a sense of their long-suffering, and the realisation of things they were yet entitled to have and to hold. There was much determination expressed, but as yet no plan to proceed upon. It was a great meeting, a splendid cohesion of kindred particles too long held asunder, but as yet there was no proposition before them. Then it was that young Clery stepped into the breach, and proposed the heroic method of ignoring the postal officials by addressing a protest to Parliament, or lying right away to the Lords of the Treasury. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Through the whole of the stormy and exciting periods, the strike of the telegraphists in 1870, the upheaval of the postmen and sorters two or three years later, and the recurrence of fierce agitation among all other postal bodies during the few years following, the postal clerks, undisturbed, pursued the even tenor of their way. That they had grievances goes without saying; but there were influences that held them in check; and they did not realise the grievances they suffered from so acutely as a body that they could be drawn easily into the vortex of agitation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even Heald of Manchester, one of the strike agitators, and a man who had suffered for his temerity on that occasion, took the view that to form a trades union of telegraphists would be to forfeit the support of the public, whose interests were so closely allied to those of the department. In this year of 1881, when trades unionism recognised as such reared its head among every class of labour and was not ashamed, they as Government servants did not deem it wise to inscribe so much as its name on their banner. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One evening, in his quiet simple manner, the blind Postmaster-General presented himself at the General Post-Office unannounced and asked to be taken over the sorting department, and to have things explained to him. The scene was one of bustle and confusion; and the dull roar and the clank of stamping machinery, and the movements of hundreds of [127] men in a confined space, filled the overburdened air. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whatever excuse was to be made for the East-End sweater, openly and professedly exploiting juvenile labour, there was none such to be made for a Government department like the Post-Office.
So indifferent to the barest claims of humanity had the officials calling themselves the authorities now become that the men could barely call their souls their own. If they were allowed an ownership over their spiritual being, that was only to suit theoretical requirements, but in actual fact their personal liberty was more circumscribed than ever. ”

“ 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 department had scored; but it had not entirely scotched the serpent of discontent. If the silence and inactivity of the men were thought to indicate contentment and a cheerful acceptance of the situation, the authorities were mistaken. Nowhere but in a Government department, either in England or Russia, could such a state of things exist. In no English workshop, where men had a trade in their hands and a kit of tools to call their own, would they have submitted for so long to the treatment meted out to them. ”

“ The postmen seemed so determined on following the dictates of the Labour Union, and so enamoured of an outside leader, that for the time Dredge, their quondam secretary, seemed forgotten. The manifesto which had heralded the birth of the Postmen’s Union invited them practically to come and have their grievances redressed by men not in the service, who could not be dismissed for speaking up for them. ”

“ These arbitrary dismissals destroyed the last vestige of confidence in the Tory party for some years to come among the letter-sorters. If the men had been dealt with merely for signing and sending forward a memorial, there was no justification for such harsh punishment. There would have been no justification for any kind of punishment, beyond the refusal to accede to their request. But it was rendered too patent to every one that it was seized on simply as a pretext for taking a revenge for the part they had played in the recent agitation. ”