The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

There had been postal reformers before Rowland Hill. First of all in time and distinction was Witherings, who lived in the middle of the seventeenth century. He became Master of the Posts in 1637, and he introduced a far-reaching system of postal rates, which before had been extremely casual and excessive. He made the Post Office a paying concern. He created the Post Office as we know it to-day. Then there was Dockwra, who established a penny post for the London district which existed 120 years. Only in the price had this reform any relation to Sir Rowland Hill's scheme, which was based on the idea that a uniform charge should cover any distance travelled. Dockwra's system was of course limited to short distances. Another great name in Post Office history is Ralph Allen, the Postmaster of Bath in 1719, who organised a system of cross posts all over the country. And in the first chapter I mentioned the achievements of Palmer, who established the mail-coach service. Rowland Hill was born in 1795 at Kidderminster, and he began life as a schoolmaster. Very early he showed great talents as an organiser: his bent was towards mathematics, and he became secretary of Gibbon Wakefield's scheme for colonising South Australia. In this capacity his attention was specially directed to the abuses of our postal system. He approached the study of the system as an outsider: indeed until after his reform had been carried he had not been inside the walls of the General Post Office. He collected statistics, and it was the discovery that the length of a letter's journey made no appreciable difference to the cost of that journey which led him to think of uniformity of rates. He showed, for instance, that the cost of the mail-coach service for one journey between London and Edinburgh was about £5 a day. He then worked out the average load of the mail at six hundredweight, the cost of each hundredweight being therefore 16s. 8d. Taking the average weight of a letter at a quarter of an ounce, the cost of carriage over the 400 miles was 1/36 part of a penny. Yet the actual postal charge was 1s. 3½d.