Hill · 1840
Rowland Hill and the Penny Post
On the morning of the sixth of May 1840, at the front counter of the General Post Office in St Martin's-le-Grand in central London, the postal clerk at the head of the queue sold to a Mr James Chalmers the first sheet of the Penny Black, the world's first prepaid adhesive postage stamp, designed by Sir Rowland Hill, the principal architect of the Postal Reform Act of August 1839. The stamp, a black engraving of Queen Victoria's profile by William Wyon, cost one penny and could be used to send any letter under half an ounce to anywhere in the United Kingdom. Until that morning, the British postal system had charged the recipient on delivery at a graduated rate by distance and weight that placed a one-page letter from London to Edinburgh at one shilling and three pence (about half a day's labourer's wages in 1839). The reform collapsed the cost to one penny flat-rate, prepaid by the sender. The volume of British post almost doubled within the first year, quadrupled within seven, and increased thirtyfold by 1900. The Penny Post is, by every careful judgment of the historians of communication, the foundational modern mass-communication reform of the nineteenth century and the template for every later postal system in the world. Rowland Hill was knighted in 1860 and given a Parliamentary grant of £20,000 at his retirement in 1864.
It is twenty past eight on the morning of the sixth of May 1840, in the small office at the back of the General Post Office in St Martin's-le-Grand in central London, in the long northern light of a London May. He is forty-four years old. He is Rowland Hill, born at Kidderminster in Worcestershire on the third of December 1795, son of Thomas Hill the schoolmaster, schooled at his father's small school and then a schoolmaster himself at Hazelwood School near Birmingham from 1813 to 1827, retired from teaching at thirty-two on the proceeds of his school-textbook Plans for the Government and Liberal Instruction of Boys in Large Numbers, secretary to the Colonisation Commission for South Australia 1835–39, and, since the passage of the Postal Reform Act on the seventeenth of August 1839, the appointed Secretary of the General Post Office (the senior administrative position of the British postal service, on a salary of £1,500 per annum).
He has, on the desk in front of him, the proof-sheets of the Penny Black, brought up from Perkins, Bacon and Petch the engravers in Fleet Street the previous evening. The stamp, a black engraving on a single black-ground rectangle, shows the profile of Queen Victoria in the City of London bust by William Wyon of 1837. The denomination, one penny, is at the foot. The first printing of one million sheets (240 stamps to the sheet, 240,000 sheets in the first delivery) has been completed in the previous week. The counter sales begin today.
He thinks: the argument in the Cabinet committee since the publication of my pamphlet in January 1837 has been that the reform will bankrupt the Post Office. The Cabinet committee has been wrong. The Cabinet committee has been wrong by, on my calculation, a factor of about four in the first decade.
He thinks: the volume of British post in 1839 was about seventy-six million letters. The volume in 1840, on the back of the penny-flat-rate, will be about a hundred and seventy million. The volume in 1850, on the back of seven further years of penny-postal market-clearing, will be about three hundred and fifty million. The volume in 1900, by the projections in the Treasury memorandum I submitted in January, will be about two billion.
He thinks: the political consequence of the reform is the communicative consequence of the reform. The country will, in the next decade, write letters at a volume the previous decade did not write at. The country will, in writing, become a different country.
He thinks: the reform is the public good of the century. The country has not yet understood that.
He goes out of the back office to the front counter of the General Post Office at five to nine. The queue of customers is, by the report of the Post Office for the day, about three hundred persons. The first customer at the head of the queue is the merchant James Chalmers, who has come up from Dundee for the opening of the penny post. Hill, by the tradition, sells him the first sheet personally.
The Penny Post went into general operation on the sixth of May 1840. The volume of British post doubled in the first year, quadrupled by 1847, and reached two billion items by 1900 (the fifty-fold increase Hill had projected in 1839, achieved over sixty years). The Penny Black was withdrawn from sale in February 1841 after the problem of the standard black cancellation-ink not being visible on the black stamp (replaced by the Penny Red); the Black is, in the collecting market, the foundational item of the modern stamp-collecting hobby. The original printing-plate of the Penny Black is in the British Postal Museum at Mount Pleasant, London. Sir Rowland Hill was knighted at Windsor on the fourth of June 1860, given a Parliamentary grant of £20,000 at his retirement in 1864, and buried (by the public petition of the British Philatelic Society) in Westminster Abbey on the fourth of September 1879. The memorial bust in the cloister of the Abbey is, by the inscription, in his own quoted words from the 1837 pamphlet: He gave a parcel of paper into the hands of every man, woman and child in the country.