History of the Royal Mail in the Kingsbridge Area U3A LHG 15 Jan 2014 Introduction Topic Page Introduction 1 In preparing the talk I have used various sources of Origins 1 information. I have a number of books including Mail Coaches 2 Fairweather’s ‘Salcombe and Neighbourhood’ first The Railway Era 4 published in 1897 and Anne Born’s ‘History of The Great Blizzard 5 Kingsbridge and Salcombe’. I also have material The Postman 5 Delivering the Post 6 photocopied by the Resource Centre at the Charges 7 Cookworthy Museum. But of course the internet is Christmas Cards 8 an essential tool and that is where I started reading Postcards 8 about the history of the Royal Mail — which brings Post Boxes 9 me to this (held up rubber band). The Postman in the Modern Day 10 I picked it up from my driveway the other day, Delivering the Mail 11 something I do quite regularly. If you Google ‘Royal What of the Future? 13 Mail rubber bands’ you can read all about it! Briefly, rubber bands are used to put together bundles of mail in the sorting office. In 2011 it was estimated that postal workers got through 2million bands a day. Now from time to time there are complaints about postmen discarding rubber bands on the ground and this is a statement issued by the Royal Mail in response to one such complaint a few years ago: “Royal Mail emphasises it instructs staff to re-use and not abandon rubber bands and the colour has been changed from brown to red so they are easier to spot and retrieve. Red ones are also designed to be more bio- degradable than the previous brown ones to lessen their environmental impact. To its knowledge no staff had been fined for rubber band littering.” Recently (2014) I found this item in the newspaper: “A retired teacher has shamed Royal Mail as a litterbug by spending 3 years picking up almost 3,000 rubber bands dropped by postmen and women in the streets around his home in Hale, Greater Manchester. Keith Neal sends a bundle back each year for recycling. A spokesman said that Royal Mail regularly reminded its staff to avoid littering.” You can find more on the internet! Origins Postal systems have existed in Britain since Roman times. In a Roman Fort at Vindolanda near Hadrians Wall in Northumbria archaeologists carried out excavations in the 1970s. They found amongst other things, letters written in the 1st and 2nd century AD. They were wafer-thin sheets of wood about the size of a large postcard and a carbon-based ink had been used for writing. One letter (see right) was written and sent by Claudia, the wife of the commander of a nearby fort to the wife of the commander at Vindolanda, inviting her to her birthday party! So there is nothing new under the sun! 1 Of course, in the distant past most letters concerned military matters and affairs of state. Briefly: Henry VIII established a Master of the Posts. Elizabeth I created a Crown Monopoly so that only officially appointed people could carry the post. James I (VI of Scotland) created a Royal Postal Service between London and Edinburgh to retain control of the Scottish Privy Council. He is attributed with coining the term Royal Mail. Significant changes occurred in the reign of Charles I. In 1635 he made Royal Mail services available to the public with postage paid by the recipient. Major routes were established between London and other places. Letters were carried between staging posts by mounted post-boys and delivered to the local postmaster. The postmaster would take out letters for his area and hand the rest to another post-boy to carry on to the next post, i.e. letters were carried from post to post. Postmasters along the route had to supply horses and there was a charge of 2½d per mile plus a conveyance tariff. This was paid by the recipient and it was a lucrative business for the postmaster. It was slow and could be ‘fiddled’ and so some postmasters became wealthy but the system was unchanged for 150 years. The next major improvements came in the mid-18th Century. Ralph Allen postmaster in Bath realised some post-boys were delivering items of mail without declaring them (i.e. pocketing the money) so he introduced a ‘signed-for’ system to prevent malpractice. He also improved efficiency by not requiring all mail to go via London. But most important, he proposed the idea of using mail coaches to carry the mail faster and further. Mail Coaches The first mail coach ran from Bristol to London in 1784. It travelled at night and took 16 hours instead of 38 hours. The following year there were 10 mail coach routes including one between London and Exeter. Eventually mail coaches also made journeys between post towns outside London. The average speed was 7/8mph in summer and 5mph in winter but with the improvement in roads, these times also improved. Mail coaches were rather like stagecoaches but had a special livery including the sign Royal Mail and the Monarch’s cipher. 2 The Post Office employee on board also had a smart uniform which included a scarlet coat with gold braid. He was the armed guard and had 2 pistols and a blunderbuss. He sounded a horn to warn other road users and toll keepers to let the mail coach through. He had a timepiece to record time of arrival and departure at each stop because times were not standardised until the railway era. In towns and villages where the coach was not due to stop, the guard, having sounded his horn, would throw out bags of letters to the postmaster. At the same time he would snatch from the postmaster outgoing bags of mail. (Did the coach slow down I wonder!). Passengers were allowed to travel on a mail coach instead of the stage coach. Initially 4 passengers were carried inside the coach but later one more was allowed to sit outside next to the driver. The number of external passengers was increased to 3 with the introduction of a double seat behind the driver. No-one was permitted to sit at the back near the guard or the mail box. The mail coach travelled faster than the stage coach but whereas the stage stopped for meals where convenient for passengers, the mail coach only stopped where necessary for postal business. The journey could be quite rough in places and passengers had to get out and walk if the coach was going up a steep hill to avoid straining the horses. The contractors organised fresh horses at stages along the route, usually every 10 miles. An unusual event occurred in October 1816 when the Exeter coach, while on its way to London, drew into the Pheasant Inn on Salisbury Plain. The leading horses were attacked by a lioness which had escaped from a travelling menagerie. The passengers took refuge inside the inn and eventually the owner managed to capture the lioness but not before she had killed a dog. Letters were not the only items carried by the mail coach. A local example concerns George Montagu who lived in Kingsbridge from 1798 to 1815. After leaving the army (and his wife) he moved to Kingsbridge and set up home with Eliza Dorville, his “friend in science”. He became a notable naturalist studying seashore life and birds and identified a number of species for the first time. Montagu’s Harrier is named after him but is no longer seen in Devon. Montagu was introduced to Robert Anstice who lived in Bridgewater. They shared an interest in birds and struck up a correspondence. Before long Anstice used the mail coach to send birds which he had shot for Montagu to study. 3 But then Montagu persuaded Anstice to send live specimens because he had made a duckery at the bottom of his garden in which to keep them. Thus the mail coach on occasion carried 7 Shelduck, a cormorant, a stork and others. But the system of transport was not straightforward. The mail coach from Bridgewater only ran to Exeter and another coach ran from Exeter to Ivybridge. Then the mail would be transferred to a mail-cart travelling to Kingsbridge. This is the story of the swan: 7th October 1807. Robert Anstice wrote to George Montagu “a hasty letter to announce to you that the wild swan is in my possession and I shall send it to you by mail coach. I mean to pay half a crown to the guard to Exeter and to send on a ticket to the landlord at Ivybridge to do the same with the guard there should the bird arrive in good order to his hands”. 11th October GM to RA: “Thanks for the valuable acquisition of the Bewick Swan which arrived safely. It did not feed at first but now eats heartily with the other ducks”. According to James Fairweather’s book of Salcombe and Kingsbridge, in 18thcentury Kingsbridge there was much annoyance about the poor postal service but representations to the Postmaster General were ignored. As indicated, no mail coaches came to Kingsbridge so collections were made from Ivybridge on horseback or by horse-drawn mail-cart. By the late 18th century mail was also brought from Totnes 3 times a week with 1d charged for each letter delivered. In 1798 there was one mail per day from Ivybridge, except Tuesdays! At last in 1805 new arrangements were in place and one mail was delivered to Kingsbridge each morning and one was despatched each afternoon.