As the long-running Post Office scandal continues to enthral and appal, Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter talk to Matt Elton about the longer history of postal systems – and why they’ve come to occupy such a central place in societies around the world
It is the story that keeps making headlines, whether for each new revelation to come out of the ongoing inquiry or for the efforts of the campaigners who are still, after many years, fighting for justice. The Post Office scandal led to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of subpostmasters since 1999 and damaged the reputation of a key institution in British society. But what’s the longer history of the Post Office that will help us understand how it came to play such a significant role?
Hannah Skoda: I’ve been reflecting on how crucial the Post Office and postal systems have been, and remain, to the smooth running of state. They’re essential to political community, commerce and foreign relations.
The history of the Post Office in Britain really begins in 1660. It was established by King Charles II as the General Post Office. There’s a wonderful quotation from the Post Office Act of 1660, which says that “the well ordering whereof is a matter of generall concernment, and of great advantage as well for preservation of Trade and Commerce as otherwise”. You get a sense right at the start how much this matters for wider well-being.
The late-17th century witnessed the introduction of postage-date stamps and postmarks. Then 1793 saw the first uniformed postman and 1829, the first purpose-built mail facility. The creation in 1840 of the Penny Black – which is beloved to stamp collectors – was crucial in introducing ideas of prepaid postage and a uniform rate, rather than adapting the cost to every different item that was sent, which wasn’t particularly efficient.
In 1969, the General Post Office was abolished, and the Post Office we know now was formed. But there’s a much longer prehistory to that story, too. In the 12th century, a permanent body of messengers was established in the royal household for Henry I. Again, this is really part of the story of the centralisation of the English state. In the 15th century, Edward IV and his advisors were responsible for the idea of post houses where messengers could take on fresh horses so that longer, quicker journeys were possible. We can trace such innovations, which made more rapid deliveries possible, throughout this history.
We can go back even further than that, too. Ancient Egypt had a postal system as long ago as around 2000 BC. The Chinese, of course, really stand as the great inventors of a postal system in approximately 1000 BC. While, later, the Mongol empire was responsible for a massively sophisticated postal system stretching across Asia.
Rana Mitter: One of the things this long history shows us is how important it is for us as human beings to communicate. There’s clearly been this huge desire to make sure there are means of talking to each other. Hannah mentioned China, which reminds me that there is a link between that nation and the British Post Office. Weipin Tsai at Royal Holloway University of London has recently written a fantastic book, The Making of China’s Post Office, and among the figures it profiles is [19th-century British diplomat] Sir Robert Hart.
China has a long history of postal services stretching across centuries, and by the 19th century it had developed what we can almost see as two parallel systems. One was a sort of government relay system for official messages; the other, essentially, a private post system. In the late 19th century, Hart was a senior figure in an institution called the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, which, despite its name, was run for the benefit of the Chinese government – though largely by Brits.
What Hart, among others, did was to reconvert China’s system into one that was essentially plugged into the global network, making it possible to send a letter from Shanghai to London or Beijing to Calcutta. This, of course, was not an equal partnership – it was very much within the framework of British imperial power – but there’s no doubt it brought a great deal of China’s trade and international relations into a new globalised framework. So the British Post Office had quite a wide reach, particularly at the height of the British empire.
Hannah Skoda: There’s an interesting tension here. On the one hand, postal systems have long represented a top-down form of hegemonic control – certainly, in 12th-century England, it was very much about messages going out from the centre to control the provinces. But at the same time, this is also a story about communication between communities, about enabling people to stay in touch with one another, and about enabling people to benefit from commercial developments.
I’ve been quite struck, too, by how dangerous the business of being a postmaster or messenger was in many different contexts over the centuries. We only have to think of 17th- and 18th-century postal officials carrying bags of letters on horseback, galloping across the countryside, risking life and limb.
But if we take the story back to the 12th century, there are astonishing stories of royal messengers sent to deliver unpopular messages to recalcitrant nobles and being made to chew and swallow the parchment of a message the noble did not wish to receive.
Rana Mitter: Not so much shoot the messenger as make them eat the message! I’m talking today from Boston, which is a city that’s obviously very linked to ideas of revolution. And the post service became a central part of the way in which that new rebel republic thought of itself. There are actually very few mentions in the early documentation of the American Republic of any governmental institutions, but one that does get a mention is the postal service.
The 18th century was a time of revolutions across Europe and North America, and men on horseback would have been taking the post in these rather dangerous circumstances. But then I found myself flash-forwarding to the late Victorian era, when perhaps the most famous senior postal official in Britain would have been someone who might now be more famous as a great novelist: Anthony Trollope.
He made his daily bread working for the Post Office, but of course was somehow able to find time to write the series of books, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire. They depict a kind of ordered Victorian infrastructure and urban organisation that was much better than it would have been a century before.
I think that idea of ordered governance might be one of the reasons why the Post Office scandal that’s been going on over the past few decades in Britain has shocked people so much. Because, ever since the time of Trollope, there has been a really embedded idea of the Post Office as a highly reliable local institution that’s part of the infrastructure.
Hannah Skoda is associate professor of medieval history, and Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China, both at the University of Oxford