Georgian
Among the more unexpected treasures in the Leigh archive is a bundle of papers that tells the story of the post. The documents themselves relate to the Post Office in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they trace a service that evolved over many hundreds of years before it reached the familiar form that older residents of the village will remember. How the papers came to be copied out is a small story in itself: they were written up on card cut from Morleys' crepe nylon stocking packets, and it was Frank Hawkins who researched Leigh history in the 1950s who preserved them. Hawkins worked at Morleys in London, so the humble packaging of his employer's hosiery became the unlikely home for a record of royal messengers, mail riders and long-running disputes over pay.
The idea of organised postal communication is far older than most people suppose. Under Roman rule, Britain featured a network of messengers transporting post across the country, and after the Norman conquest messengers were again at work, carrying both state and private correspondence. By the 1550s a recognisable system had taken shape: postmasters were stationed every twenty miles along the major routes, ready to pass letters onward from stage to stage. The state was keen to keep control of this network, and in 1609 the carrying of letters by private operators was banned. A decisive moment came in 1635, when Charles I established a general postal service open to the public, and the machinery of the modern Post Office followed soon after: Oliver Cromwell established the General Post Office in 1653, and in 1660 Henry Bishop was made the first Postmaster General.
Even so, the service available to ordinary people remained limited for a long time. Penny posts existed in London and in some provincial towns, but a national penny post, charged at the same rate regardless of distance, was not introduced until 1840. Free delivery to individual houses across the country came later still, only after 1860. Royal Mail itself remained in public hands for most of the period covered by these papers; its partial privatisation occurred only in 2014, long after the events recorded in the archive.
The heart of the collection is a run of correspondence from the early 1790s, and the earliest document is dated 18 August 1792. At the General Post Office, the key figures were Francis Freeling, who served as Secretary, and Lord Walsingham, who held the post of Postmaster General. The subject of their correspondence was the mail route that ran from Sevenoaks through to Tunbridge Wells and Lamberhurst, and in particular the man responsible for it in the Tonbridge area, Mr Sprange.
The GPO had sought to replace Sprange, and the correspondence of 31 January 1793 shows how the matter was handled. Rather than dismissing him outright, the authorities increased his pay, though not by the full amount he appears to have wanted. The dispute had a sharper edge, however, because Sprange had been withholding revenue that was due to the GPO, and by the time the accounts were examined his pay arrears exceeded fifty pounds. A further note from Freeling, dated 1 July 1793, kept the file moving.
The summer of 1793 brought a new complication: the threat of an army camp. Sprange requested another clerk to help him cope with the expected volume of camp mail, and he could point to precedent. A similar army camp had occurred in Tonbridge back in 1780, and Bagshot had experienced a comparable occurrence, so the Post Office knew from experience what a sudden influx of soldiers' letters could do to a country office. A note marked Brighton, dated 8 July 1793, reported that the camp had not yet been formed, but the preparations went ahead regardless. One reassuring line in the papers records that the Duke of Richmond's letters could be delivered as usual, camp or no camp.
The practical arrangements were settled in a note dated 9 July. The allowances were set at three shillings and sixpence for Tunbridge Wells, with one shilling and sixpence for Tunbridge town itself, and Sprange's own allowance was confirmed at six pounds per mile per year. This figure represents a real improvement on what the mail carriage had previously earned: pay had been increased from four pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence to six pounds per mile, and the increase was backdated to 1790, which softened the blow of the earlier dispute considerably.
Not everything in the file concerns money. In October 1793, Lord Walsingham queried a way bill, the document that tracked a mail rider's journey. The bill showed that the rider had left Sevenoaks at half past nine in the morning and travelled twenty miles to Croydon, but the Croydon postmaster had written the arrival date imperfectly on the bill. On examination, the arrival time should have read twenty past one o'clock, and the discrepancy that had caught the Postmaster General's eye turned out to be a clerk's slip of the pen rather than a delay on the road.
The last document in this eighteenth-century sequence is dated 19 October 1793, and with it the file closes. One final glimpse of the period's postal world rounds out the picture: outside London, it fell to local postmasters to arrange coaches for royalty when they travelled, another of the many small duties that made a country post office far more than a place to buy a stamp.
Taken together, the papers copied onto those stocking-packet cards give a vivid sense of how the post grew from a Roman messenger network into a national institution, and of the very human quarrels, clerical errors and wartime preparations that filled the ledgers along the way.