Her Majeity's Mails
IT was on July 24th, 1784, that " His Majesty's Postmasters-General, being inclined to make an experiment for the more expeditious conveyance of letters by coach," ordered the first road-trial between London and Bristol. Within eighteen months the mail-coaches had knocked sixty hours off the London-Edinburgh run, the day of the drunken, dilatory, mounted postboy was done for ever, and a brief age of glory and perfection had dawned. A network of hard, smooth roads covered the kingdom, with neat mail-coaches galloping along them at ten miles an hour, soon to be decked with garlands to carry through cheering villages the news of Trafalgar, Salamanca, Vittoria and Waterloo, and to stir the pen of the enraptured De Qttincey into " Horses ! Can these be horses that bound off with the action and gesture of leopards ? " Aesthetically, it is the climax of the history of the British Post Office, though the imagination can still kindle to the sight, on a foreign airfield, of a Comet's smooth flank emblazoned with the crown and the posthorn that denote that on board are Her Majesty's Mails.
Professor Howard Robinson, an American scholar, in following up with a shorter general history his detailed classic of 1948 on Britain's 'Post Office, outlines with an enviable clarity the historical development from Henry VIII's appointment of his Clerk of the S;gnet as Master of the Posts to Palmer's mail-coaches, and from the coaches to the Comet. Inevitably, three hundred pages covering three centuries and a half of history haVe to be crammed with fact, but professor Robinson misses few opportunities of being entertain- ing and even p:cturesque. 1 could have 'wished, though, that that fabulous character, 131:nd Jack of Knaresborotigh, had not been disguised, almost, under his formal name of John Metcalfe, and dimnissed in one brief reference. His work for the turnpike trusts lv-Iped to pave the way--quite literally--for the age, of the mail-
coach-, and his achievement is all I he by virtue of his physical disabIty.
No•sooner-had the railways taken over the mails than we are at Rowland Hill's revolutionary reforms, and Professor Robinson disentangles the clotted controversies of the times and makes an interesting—almost an exciting—narrative of them. It is salutary to realise that not everything that Rowland Hill claimed for uniform penny postage was proved in the event ; it took thirty years from its introduction for the Post- Office's revenue to reach again the figure of 1839. From here on, with the vast expansion not only of the volume of Post Office traffic but of the kinds of business in which it engaged and of the methods of transmission, the chronicle must carry a heavier burden of statistics. But the author's narrative remains clear, as well as comprehensive, and it is good to learn that even since the war the British Post Office has been a pioneer, as it has been so often in the past. The sixpenny air-letter, begun as a war-time service for the Forces and continued for civilian mail to foreign countries, " has since been generally adopted by postal administra- tions the world over."
Professor Robinson establishes, with learning and without any exaggeration of his evident enthusiasm, the claim he makes in his preface that " the British Post Office is one of the most outstanding, if not the most important Post Office in the world today." His book would be a useful addition to any sixth-form library of social
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