Sir Rowland Hill(1795–1879)

Rowland Hill was born at Blackwell Street, Kidderminster, Worcestershire, on the third of December 1795, third son of Thomas Wright Hill, a schoolmaster of the Birmingham and Kidderminster Unitarian schools, and Sarah Lea of Wolverhampton. He was raised in the family-school household, taught at his father's Hill Top School at Birmingham from his twelfth year as a junior pupil-teacher, and from 1819 to 1833 was head of the family's enlarged Hazelwood School at Edgbaston, the progressive educational establishment that became known across the Whig and Radical world for its self-government constitution and its abolition of corporal punishment. He published with his brothers in 1822 the foundational pamphlet Plans for the Government and Liberal Instruction of Boys in Large Numbers Drawn from Experience, the central English-language text of progressive school reform of the early nineteenth century.

He left teaching in 1833 to take the secretaryship of the South Australian Colonization Commission (the body that planned the foundation of the colony of South Australia under Edward Gibbon Wakefield's systematic colonisation theory) and held the post 1833 to 1839 in parallel with his postal-reform work. The Post Office of the 1830s was a public scandal: postage rates were charged by distance and by the number of sheets, were paid on delivery by the recipient, ran to one shilling and threepence (the equivalent of roughly a day's labourer's wages) for a single sheet from London to Edinburgh, and the system therefore confined regular correspondence to the well-off who could afford it and to the parliamentary franking class. The Treasury's annual returns showed Post Office revenue declining year on year through the 1820s and 1830s as the smuggled-letter trade and informal hand-carrying displaced the official mails.

He published in January 1837 in his forty-second year the pamphlet Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, the small thirty-six-page work that set out the central architectural proposal of the modern postal system. The proposal had three parts: first, that the postage rate be made uniform across the country regardless of distance; second, that the rate be made very low (the famous penny per half-ounce); third, that the postage be prepaid by the sender by means of either an adhesive label or a stamped envelope. Hill demonstrated by detailed Treasury arithmetic that the volume increase from the lower rate would more than compensate for the per-letter loss in revenue, and that the prepayment by sender would eliminate the cost-of-collection that consumed a quarter of the existing Post Office's running cost.

The proposal was carried by the Whig ministry under Lord Melbourne over the opposition of the Postmaster-General and the Tory peers, was enacted as the Penny Postage Act of August 1839, and the Uniform Penny Post came into operation on the tenth of January 1840 across the United Kingdom. The first prepaid adhesive postage label in the history of any postal system, the Penny Black (showing the head of Queen Victoria), was issued on the sixth of May 1840 at the Treasury's stamp office on the strength of Hill's design. The Penny Black is the most-collected single postage stamp in philately, holds the record for the highest auction price ever paid for a single postage stamp, and is the type-example of every adhesive postage label in every country in the world.

Postal volume increased from seventy-six million letters annually in 1839 to a hundred and seventy million in 1840 and three hundred and forty-seven million by 1850; the Post Office revenue had fully recovered the lost per-letter rate by 1855. He served as Secretary to the Postmaster-General 1846 to 1854, Secretary to the Post Office 1854 to 1864 (the chief executive office of the Post Office), reorganised the British Post Office from the inside through that decade, and was knighted as KCB in 1860. The Penny Post architecture was adopted across the next thirty years by every postal administration in the world (the Universal Postal Union of 1874 codified it as the international standard) and remains the operating principle of the modern postal system. He died at Hampstead on the twenty-seventh of August 1879 in his eighty-fourth year, was buried in Westminster Abbey beside George Stephenson, and his statue stands on King Edward Street outside the General Post Office at St Martin's-le-Grand in London. The Hill name in modern world communications carries the weight of the pamphlet of January 1837.