Rowland Hill and the Penny Post

Some revolutions arrive on horseback and some arrive in the post. The ones that arrive in the post are harder to see at the time, because they wear the costume of administration: a counter, a queue, a small black square of paper gummed at the back. The men who make them are not generals but clerks and schoolmasters who have learned to add a column of figures and follow it where it leads. They are mistaken, by their contemporaries, for pedants. They are, in fact, the quiet engineers of the century.

THE SCHOOLMASTER'S ARITHMETIC

Rowland Hill was born at Kidderminster in Worcestershire on the third of December 1795, the son of Thomas Hill, a schoolmaster of mild reformist temper and uncertain finances. He grew up among slates and ledgers, was teaching by fourteen, and by 1813 was running Hazelwood School near Birmingham on the principle, then thought eccentric, that boys learn faster when they are not beaten. He retired from teaching at thirty-two on the proceeds of his textbook, Plans for the Government and Liberal Instruction of Boys in Large Numbers, took a seat as secretary to the Colonisation Commission for South Australia from 1835 to 1839, and in January 1837 published, at his own expense, a thin pamphlet titled Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability. He was forty-one. He had no standing in the Post Office and no friends in the Treasury. He had a column of figures.

The figures said this. The British postal service in 1837 carried seventy-six million letters a year at a graduated rate, charged on delivery, computed by the page and by the distance, so that a single sheet from London to Edinburgh cost the recipient one shilling and threepence, roughly half a labourer's daily wage. The poor did not write. The rich franked their letters through Members of Parliament and paid nothing. The middle paid for both. The actual cost of carrying a letter, Hill calculated by dividing the gross revenue of the service by its gross mileage, was a small fraction of a penny. Everything above that was the cost of computing the price. Abolish the computation, charge a flat penny prepaid by the sender, and the volume would rise to meet the new price. The Cabinet committee called him an enthusiast. He answered, in writing, that an enthusiast was a man whose arithmetic had not yet been understood.

THE LONG NORTHERN LIGHT

On the morning of the sixth of May 1840 the long northern light of a London May fell across the back office of the General Post Office in St Martin's-le-Grand, and across the proof-sheets brought up the previous evening from Perkins, Bacon and Petch of Fleet Street. Twenty past eight. The sheets lay in stacks of two hundred and forty, one million printed in the first run, the ink still smelling faintly of the press. On each small black rectangle, the profile of the young Queen by William Wyon, taken from the City of London medal of 1837. At the foot, in small letters, the word ONE PENNY. He had been Secretary of the General Post Office, on a salary of £1,500 per annum, since the passage of the Postal Reform Act on the seventeenth of August 1839. The Act was his. The Office was not yet his; the senior clerks regarded him as a civilian intruder set down among professionals, and he knew it.

Outside, in the courtyard, the queue had begun to form before seven. The Post Office estimated it at three hundred persons by nine, and growing. Merchants from the City, clerks from the legal quarter, a few country travellers come up by coach, and at the head of the line, by his own statement, the Dundee merchant James Chalmers, who had argued for an adhesive stamp in his own 1834 pamphlet and now stood waiting to buy the first sheet of the thing the argument had made.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

He sat at the desk with the pen in his hand and the proof-sheet under it, and he considered, for a few seconds, what it was he was about to do. The argument in the Cabinet committee since January 1837 had been that the reform would bankrupt the service. The argument was wrong by a factor he had computed and recomputed: four in the first decade, thirty by the end of the century, if the projection in the Treasury memorandum he had submitted in January held. Seventy-six million letters last year. A hundred and seventy million this year, he was prepared to wager. Two billion by 1900. The figures, set down in his hand on Treasury paper, looked like the figures of a man who had lost his sense of scale. They were, he believed, the figures of a man who had at last acquired one.

What he was about to sell across the counter was not, he understood, a piece of paper. It was the abolition of distance as a tariff on speech. A labourer in Manchester would write, for a penny, to his daughter in service in London, and she would write back for a penny, and the letter would not be refused at the door for want of one and threepence. A widow in Cornwall would have news of her son in the merchant marine at Liverpool. A clerk in Edinburgh would court a girl in Bristol by post and marry her by post, and the country, in writing at a volume the previous century had not written at, would become, in some quiet incremental fashion, a different country. The reform was the public good of the century. The country had not yet understood that. He stood, took his coat from the back of the chair, and went out to the counter at five to nine.

THE FIRST SHEET

The counter was deal, scrubbed, ink-stained at the edges. The clerk on duty stepped aside. Chalmers, in a dark coat with the Dundee mud still on his boots, laid down a sovereign and asked for a sheet. Hill counted out the change, set the sheet between them, and signed the day-book. The first transaction of the Penny Post was recorded as one sheet of two hundred and forty Penny Blacks, one pound sterling, at nine o'clock in the forenoon of the sixth of May 1840. Behind Chalmers the queue moved up one place. By the close of the working day the counters at St Martin's-le-Grand had taken in £2,500 in penny stamps, and the same scene, with smaller queues, was being played out in every head post office in the kingdom.

THE OBJECTORS' ROOM

The chairs in the Cabinet committee room had, two and three years earlier, contained the men who had said the thing could not be done. Lord Lichfield, the Postmaster General of 1837, had described the proposal to the House of Lords as the most extravagant scheme it has ever been my fortune to read of. The Secretary to the Treasury had calculated that the revenue would collapse by three quarters and never recover. The senior clerks of the Post Office had submitted, in writing, that the public would not pay in advance for a service it had been accustomed to pay for on delivery. None of these men were in the building on the sixth of May. They had been overruled in committee, outvoted in the Commons by a majority that surprised everyone, and quietly removed from the room in which the decision was finally made. The reform had been carried, in the end, by the Radical members and by the petitions: two thousand of them, signed by half a million names, laid on the table of the House in the spring of 1839. The country, before the country knew it, had asked for this.

THE COUNTRY IN WRITING

The volume of British post doubled in the first year and quadrupled by 1847. By 1850 it stood at three hundred and fifty million letters. By 1900 it had reached two billion, the thirty-fold increase Hill had projected on Treasury paper in the winter of 1839, achieved within his stated horizon. The Penny Black itself was withdrawn from sale in February 1841, the standard black cancellation ink being illegible on a black ground, and replaced by the Penny Red; the Black became, by accident of its short life, the foundational item of the modern collecting hobby and the most recognisable small object of the nineteenth century. Every postal system in the world, in the half-century that followed, copied the form: prepaid, adhesive, flat-rate, sender-borne. The Universal Postal Union of 1874 was the international ratification of what had been settled across a deal counter in St Martin's-le-Grand on a Wednesday morning in May.

Hill was knighted at Windsor on the fourth of June 1860, given a Parliamentary grant of £20,000 at his retirement from the Post Office in 1864, and buried, on the public petition of the British Philatelic Society, in the nave of Westminster Abbey on the fourth of September 1879. The memorial bust in the cloister carries, by his own request, a single line from the 1837 pamphlet: he gave a parcel of paper into the hands of every man, woman and child in the country. The original printing-plate of the Penny Black lies, under glass, in the postal collection at Mount Pleasant. The plate is iron, hand-engraved, the edges worn smooth where the press took it. A small object, the size of a ledger-book, in which a country learned to speak to itself.