Rowland Hill’s postal reforms

Before 1840, the British postal system was highly complex and very expensive. Letters were charged by distance and the number of sheets of paper they contained. Normally, the charge was paid by the recipient. As a result people often ‘cross-wrote’ their letters to save money.

Cross-written letter, 1815 (2015-0004)

However, a large number of items travelled free, especially a certain number of letters to and from Members of both Houses of Parliament, and things such as newspapers. There were also a lot of anomalies and a number of local systems with different charges. The system was widely abused and ripe for reform.

Items uploaded for the Postal Museum display panels, etc.

After the Napoleonic Wars postage rates were high. They were designed as a tax to raise revenue. A typical single letter from Dublin to London would cost 1s 3d – a lot of money in those days. Two sheets of paper doubled the cost, three tripled it.

Then in January 1837 Rowland Hill published his pamphlet Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability. He had no doubt that the source of trouble lay in the complexity of the charges and the mixture of paid and unpaid letters.

Rowland Hill’s booklet Post Office Reform, 1837 (POST 23/214)

His solution was prepayment. The charge should be low and uniform and he recommended that it be 1d up to one ounce in weight. No mention was made initially of the method of prepayment. Later that month he suggested the use of stamped covers, an idea put forward before by Charles Knight.

After a campaign by Robert Wallace a parliamentary Select Committee was appointed with him as chairman to look into postal charges with a view to reducing them without loss of revenue.

At the same time, in early 1838, a private Mercantile Committee on Postage was set up, consisting of merchants agitating for lower postal rates. Hill was a member of the Committee and Henry Cole was made its Secretary. Cole threw himself into organising petitions and arranged for a newspaper, The Post Circular, to be published as a propaganda sheet for postal reform.

Wallace published the final report of the parliamentary Select Committee in March 1839 recommending most of Hill’s ideas but with a uniform 2d rate. This resulted in a lot of activity and some action was demanded of the Government.

Public pressure meant that Lord Melbourne, the Liberal prime minister, promised a bill in favour of uniform penny postage. This was passed and given the Royal Assent on 15 August.

It enabled the reduction of postage rates to a uniform penny regardless of distance but measured by weight. Free franking would be abolished and prepayment would be in the form of stamped paper, stamped envelopes and labels, though this would not be compulsory.

Rowland Hill was appointed to the Treasury to oversee the implementation of his ideas, with Henry Cole as his assistant.

At the same time a competition was announced, later called the Treasury Competition, to invite the public to suggest the best plan for ‘covers’. Some 2,600 entries were submitted, most of which have not survived.

Several included samples of ideas for prepayment. Some of these were names already well-known such as James Chalmers. Charles Whiting, the printer of material for the Mercantile Committee, also produced a number of designs printed by the Congreve bi-colour method.

These needed to be designed with security uppermost in mind. The covers and envelopes were created by William Mulready with an imperial design which was widely caricatured when it was issued and had to be withdrawn.

Postal reform was an immediate success. The number of chargeable letters in 1839 had been only about 76 million. By 1850 this had increased to almost 350 million and continued to grow dramatically. Revenue was initially cut but with the increase of letters it soon recovered. Adhesive postage stamps were gradually introduced throughout the world. With the change to charging by weight envelopes became normal for the first time.