The Quizzing Blog: The General Post Office of Regency London

In doing the research for the November Academe class on ‘A Day in the Life at a London Posting Inn’ I kept getting sidetracked into dealing with the post due to how posting inns handled the Royal Mail coaches. Since the research on the post didn’t really fit into a workshop on London inns, here’s some basic information on London’s General Post Office (the GPO) and a little bit on the post.

Almost all letters end up in London at the GPO. The ‘Bye Post’ took letters from one town to another on the same post road, while the ‘Cross Post’ took letters from one town to another on different post roads. (‘Bye’ or ‘by’ being an ancient word that could mean either ‘near’ or ‘around’, and ‘cross’ meant using a cross-road that crosses a main posting road.)

LOMBARD STREET

During the Regency era and up to 1828, the GPO was located on Lombard Street. The section below of Horwood’s 1819 map from RomanticLondon.com shows Lombard Street and the GPO at No. 11 (marked by a red dot). Getting the mail coaches lined up to collect the post in the evening made for considerable traffic.

The GPO began as the ‘General Letter Office’ in Threadneedle Street, moved to Bishopsgate, and then that building burned down in the Great Fire of 1666. In 1678, the General Post Office took over what had been the mansion of Sir Robert Vyner in Lombard Street (In Masters of the Post: the authorized history of the Royal Mail, Duncan Campbell-Smith mentions Vyner as a banker ruined by his loans to Charles II, and that, over time, the GPO expanded to other buildings on the south side of Lombard Street, “…from Abchurch Lane to the east and Sherborne Lane to the west”.). The government bought the property in 1705, and there the GPO stayed until the new GPO opened on September 23, 1828.

The Lombard Street Post Office was built around a courtyard with access via a gate. The building included rooms for clerks upstairs in the garrets, and the senior staff got the better rooms below that (it had been a mansion) with other rooms for the guards who looked after the mail on the Royal Mail coaches. Guards were required to be sober for work and wear their livery (more on them in the November workshop). The building also housed the staff needed to maintain both the building and provide meals for those who lived here—it took long hours to keep up the schedules of the post, with multiple deliveries in London every day, Sunday excepted.

The mail went out every evening from London and came into the city every morning. The image below shows the very busy sorting room in 1809 from Ackermann’s Microcosm of London.

Lombard Street itself had a long connection with banking and trade, being close to the Bank of England, other banks, insurance offices, and the Royal Exchange. Lockie’s Topography of London (1810) lists the street as: “Lombard-Street, Gracechurch-St.—at 24, the fourth on the L. from London-bridge, it extends to the Mansion-house.”

In addition to clerks and guards at the GPO, there were the “Letter-Carriers” (the official name, but also called ‘bellmen’) who walked the streets, ringing a bell to let folks know you could hand him a letter. Campbell-Smith writes of the GPO, “The main entrance was an imposing gateway which opened into a courtyard…. Adjacent to the entrance was the sorting room for the Inland Office, with steps leading down to the basement. Here the humble letter carriers came and went with their bags and bells.” The print below of a letter-carrier is from the Postal Museum and dates to 1820. An 1805 print by W.H. Pyne in Costumes of Great Britian is similar, except the letter-carrier wears boots. As with guards, only the hat and coat are the required livery provided by the post office.

The Postal Museum website notes, “It wasn’t until 1793 that a postman’s uniform was issued to London General Post letter carriers to celebrate Queen Charlotte’s birthday. Again, this uniform was dominated by the colour scarlet. It consisted of a scarlet tailcoat with blue lapels and cuffs, and brass buttons with the wearer’s number, a beaver hat and blue waistcoat…. The trickle down of uniforms beyond London was a slow process. Letter carriers in principal provincial cities were not issued with uniforms until 1834. In 1837 the London ‘Two Penny Postmen’ were issued with a cut-away blue coat with a scarlet collar, a blue vest and a beaver hat.”

It was possible to have a letter-carrier stop at your house to drop off and pick up letters (a good tip would ensure good service), and The Post-Office Annual Directory (1814) puts in an ask about this:

It is further respectfully and earnestly requested of Persons receiving Letters, that they will not detain the Letter-Carriers at their Doors longer than can be possibly avoided, as all, in general, are alike anxious to receive their Letters, and every one is entitled to the fame Consideration in a regular and speedy Delivery.

In other words, don’t invite the fellow in for tea, a drink, or other refreshments—just tip him and let him get on with the work. A few extra coins at Christmas time was appreciated, but the post office kept trying to frown on that.

The ground floor at Lombard Street held the Foreign Office for overseas mail. While unrelated to Whitehall’s Foreign Office, the GPO still had “spy” duties. As noted in an article on ‘The Secret Dept. of the Post Office’, “One of Britain’s most powerful tools against external and internal threats was the Secret Department of the Post Office and its Deciphering Branch. Established in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Secret Department was located within the warren of buildings that comprised the headquarters of the General Post Office on Lombard Street at the centre of the City of London. It was financed off-the-books from secret service monies controlled by the Secretaries of State and omitted from the Post Office’s accounts. The agency was expanded during the first half of the eighteenth century in line with the demand for its output to the extent that by the late 1730s the interception, opening, copying, and decryption of correspondence was undertaken on an almost industrial scale.”

Another article, ‘Seals and Surveillance. The Post Office in the 19th Century

or: Minding your Beeswax’, has Jo Hockey writing, “By the C19, opening, copying and resealing had become a routine procedure, given the volume of letters presented to the Secret Office, and from 1798 the budget was increased to facilitate Napoleonic War surveillance work.” (Jo also covers methods to recreate seals so no one ever knows the seal was broken and the letter opened and read—clever stuff!)

This means Francis Freeling, who served as Secretary of the Post Office from 1797 until his death in 1836, was overseeing state espionage, and as Campbell-Smith notes the man ran the post office as “almost a personal fiefdom”. Campbell-Smith writes, “When peace was finally declared in 1815 and hundreds of letters trapped in Paris since 1803 were at last posted on to the City, Freeling sniffed at suggestions they be delivered free of charge. Anything less than the full going rate, he said, would be a breach of the law.” Freeling was all about the post office making money. He wrote, “To make the Post Office revenue as productive as possible was long ago impressed upon me by successive ministers as a duty which I was under a solemn obligation to discharge.”

Freeling became Sir Francis (baronet) in 1828, and under him the Post Master Generals of Regency years were: Earl of Sandwich 1807-1814, Earl of Chichester 1807-1823, Earl of Clancarty 1814-1816, and Marquess of Salisbury 1816-1823. The drawing below of Sir Francis Freeling dates to c. 1830 to 1834.

Freeling had difficulties handling the reforms coming to the post after 1830—a lot of folks hated the complexities and cost of mailing a letter. Postal reforms would eventually lead to the first postage stamp (the Penny Black) in 1840, but let’s get back to Regency London.

THE TWOPENNY POST

There were actually two postal systems within London—the General Post and the Twopenny Post (the cost went up to three pence for some areas, but the name stuck).

There were also penny posts set up by numerous other towns across the country—and the post was getting complex in the Regency era (every town had their own hand stamps and marks were often hand written, which is actually what makes collecting stampless covers fun in modern times). As Campbell-Smith writes, “The accumulated jumble of penny posts and general posts, free deliveries and double charges, distance tables and weight allowances, incremental pennies here and halfpennies there, had complicated the steadily rising cost of sending a letter to the point where even the clerks of Lombard Street had trouble keeping track of the system.” For now, let’s focus on London and its Twopenny Post and General Post.

The Twopenny Post began as the Penny Post in 1680. As mentioned, in London and across England various local postal systems sprang up and some were often taken over by the official post office, but others sprang up again and again. (This was similar to how local banks could offer their own currency—things were less tightly regulated.)

The Postage Act 1801 came out with an increase in fees (thanks to Freeling who loved increases) so in the district of what was previously the Penny Post, whether it was a local letter or one passing to or from the General Post, it was now 2d (Tuppence). The name was not made official until the Postage Act 1805.

The GPO handled both services in London, and there were also ‘receiving offices’ (usually shops or taverns) around the city for both. (Postal boxes for a letter drop aren’t invented until the 1850s.)

For the Twopenny Post, The Post-Office Annual Directory (1814) notes:

THERE are two principal Offices; one in the Post Office Yard, Lombard-Street, and the other in Gerrard-Street, Soho; and there are numerous Receiving Houses for Letters both in Town and Country.

There are Six Deliveries in Town Daily (Sundays excepted) and Three in most Parts of the Country; and the General Post Letters are dispatched to the Country Letter-Carriers for Distribution the same Morning of their Arrival in London.

From most Parts of the Country Letters are dispatched to Town Twice a Day.

The Time by which they must be put in for each Delivery, and the Time by which each Delivery should be completed by the Letter-Carriers, both in Town and Country, is as follows:

But they may be put in for each Delivery Three Quarters of an Hour later at either of the Two Principal Offices, and an Hour later at that they are to be delivered from, which may be known thus: Gray’s Inn Lane, High Holborn, Chancery Lane, and all its Avenues, the Strand, Narrow Wall, Lambeth Marsh, the Asylum, and all Parts to the Westward, are in the District of the Gerrard Street Office, and the Remainder in that of the Lombard Street Office.

A wise caution is given about not mistaking the two posts:

Letters for Parts within the Limits of this Office, are frequently, by Mistake, put into the General Post, by which Means they are unavoidably delayed; it is therefore recommended, that they be put into the Two-penny Post-Offices, or Receiving Houses, in order that they may be regularly forwarded by their proper Conveyance.

Times for the Twopenny Post going to the Country were:

GPO RATES OF POSTAGE

The Post-Office Annual Directory (1814) lists the following rates under the General Post Office information:

ALL Double, Treble, and other Letters and Packets whatever, (except by the Two-Penny-Post,) pay in Proportion to the respective Rates of Single Letters; but no Letter or Packet to and from Places within the Kingdom of Great Britain, together with the Contents thereof, shall be charged more than as a Treble Letter, unless the same shall weigh an Ounce, when it is to be rated as Four Single Letters, and so in Proportion for every Quarter of an Ounce above that Weight, reckoning each Quarter as a single Letter.

Letters to Soldiers and Sailors, if Single, and in Conformity to the Act of Parliament, are chargeable with one Penny only.

You can see from the above where it starts to become complicated, and why someone might easily want to not pre-pay a letter to avoid having to face this confusion of weights, and this doesn’t even consider the Scottish Wheel Tax! (As noted by the Great Britian Philatelic Society, the “From April 1801 rates within Great Britain were based simply on the distance a letter was carried within the mainland, regardless of whether it crossed the border between England and Scotland. This method did not apply to letters between Britain and Ireland until 1827.” In 1813 the Post Office were allowed to charge half-pence on mail carried in a coach with more than two wheels over roads in Scotland. This continued to 1839. The photo below from the Great Britian Philatelic Society shows a stampless cover from 1822 from Glasgow to Edinburgh with multiple enclosures, total weight 6 oz. so the postage marked is 14s 1/2d and stamped “Add 1/2″.)

The Post-Office Annual Directory is useful in that it lists all the principal post towns and villages across Great Britian and ‘Foreign Packet’ ships with dates for sailing.

There were multiple deliveries of the post in London with the following information given of when a letter had to be received for it to go out in the next post:

But they may be put in for each Delivery Three Quarters of an Hour later at either of the Two Principal Offices, and an Hour later at that they are to be delivered from, which may be known thus: Gray’s Inn Lane, High Holborn, Chancery Lane, and all its Avenues, the Strand, Narrow Wall, Lambeth Marsh, the Asylum, and all Parts to the Westward, are in the District of the Gerrard Street Office, and the Remainder in that of the Lombard Street Office.

The directory also offers these cautions about sending letters pre-paid to foreign parts:

The Public have the Option of Paying, or not, upon the putting in of any Letters for Parts within His Majesty’s Dominions; but with all Letters for Parts out of His Majesty’s Dominions, the full Postage must be paid at putting in, without which they cannot be forwarded.

To prevent Mistakes, Persons paying the Postage of Letters on putting in, are advised to see them stamped “Paid” before they leave the Office. No Letters or Packets exceeding the Weight of Four Ounces can be sent by this Post, excepting such as have first passed by, or shall be intended to pass by, the General or Foreign Mails.

If prepayment was required, such as to foreign lands, and you sent a letter with insufficient postage, it ended in the Dead Letter Office.

DEAD LETTERS

A ‘Dead Letter Office’ (DLO) had existed for some time within the postal system, centered at the GPO, Lombard Street. An excellent article on ‘The Dead Letter Office and Undeliverable Mail prior to Post Office Reform’ by Ken Snelson and Bob Galland published in the ‘Cross Post’ (Great Britan Philatelic Society) notes:

• Letters to ‘Deceased’ persons were sent in the next return [to London] to the DLO.
• Letters which were ‘Refused’ or where the addressee had ‘Gone Away’ were held for a week before being sent in the next return to the DLO.
• Letters where the addressee was ‘Not Known’ were advertised for a week in the Post Office window before being sent to the DLO.
• Letters that were to be called for at the Post Office, if ‘Not Called For’ within a month were sent in the next return to the DLO.

The terms ‘Deceased’, etc. were written on the envelopes in red ink to indicate the ‘true reason’ for non-delivery. These terms were retained for many years and later in the 19th century handstamps were used…   An Act of 1711 (9 Anne c.11) provided that the Postmaster General be permitted to open undeliverable or dead letters. By 1716 these letters had become so numerous that an officer was specially appointed to check them.

In 1811-13 a “Returned Letter Office” (RLO) was set up, and wrappers were used by the DLO to return these letters (they might be opened to find a return address). The article goes on to note, “A handstamp with an ‘R’ in a circular frame of about 25mm diameter has been recorded on a number of returned items in the 1808-1811 period.”  Also, for the Pennypost, “…all letters returned by the Letter Carriers after three days were returned to sender if the address could be found. The return was ‘gratis’ or free.”

As the numbers of letters to return increased, a new “Return Letter Office” was set up, and Snelson and Galland write, “The process of setting up the RLO, started in 1810, was completed in 1813…. From this date to 1832 the wrappers used bear the designation ‘Retuned Letter Office’ instead of ‘Dead Letter Office’.”

The Post-Office Annual Directory also includes a warning about not sending gold or rings in the post (as in putting them under a seal), and a recommendation to cut in half bank notes or “Drafts payable to Bearer” and sending them in two parts and letting the receiver know about this for “greater Security of Letters in general”, and that the post office isn’t responsible for any losses. This was a wise precaution for while highwaymen were no longer common in the Regency era, thefts of the mails and stages continued with thieves going after the mails that were inside the Royal Mail coaches (often an inside job).

1828 MOVE

As the number of letters in the post increased (the Royal Mail of the era only took letters—packages had to go by a carrier service), Parliament passed the City of London and Westminster Streets and Post Office Act 1815, and set up a commission to find a new, larger location. In 1818, a site of two acres north of St. Paul’s was purchased and cleared of existing buildings. Robert Smirk was hired as the architect and construction began in May 1824 in St. Martin’s Le Grand. Below a section of Horwood’s 1819 Map of London shows the site marked out for the new GPO, with the old Bull & Mouth changing to face from Bull & Mouth Street onto St. Martin’s Le Grand.

Campbell-Smith writes of the design for the new GPO, “His neoclassical lines appealed to the Treasury; they also met the call in Parliament for a public building that would look suitably august, without resembling a prison or hospital. Smirk’s General Post Office encased a cavernous central hall, two storeys high, running from a portico at its front entrance through to the rear of the building.” It included the latest gas lighting inside and fashionable Portland stone on the outside.

The 1829 print below by James Pollard is titled, ‘A North East View of the New General Post Office, with the Royal Mails & Carts preparing to Start’. The carts carried mail to inns handling the western routes, primarily to Gloucester Coffee House and the New White Horse Cellar, both in Piccadilly—more on these inns in the workshop.

As noted by the Postal Museum, “Situated on the east side of St Martin’s-Le-Grand it was Grand by address, grand in design and become known fondly as ‘The Grand’ by its occupants. The new building housed the Postmaster General, The Secretary and his administrative staff together with the main sorting offices for mail for London, the provinces and overseas.”

Sadly, that building was demolished in 1912-13. We do, however, still have Dublin’s General Post Office, which opened in 1818 and is still in use today. The engraving below shows it c. 1830, looking suitably Georgian with its neoclassical portico.

REFERENCES

Masters of the Post: the authorized history of the Royal Mail by Duncan Campbell-Smith

The Dead Letter Office and Undeliverable Mail prior to Post Office Reform’ by Ken Snelson and Bob Galland – https://gbps.org.uk/information/downloads/journals/cross-post/pdfs/Cross%20Post%20Vol%2014%20No%201%20(2011).pdf

Horwood’s 1819 Map of London at RomanticLondon.com – https://www.romanticlondon.org/maps/fullscreen/layer/26/#13/51.5084/-0.0795

Lockie’s Topography of London: giving a concise local description of and accurate direction to every square, street, lane, court, dock, wharf, inn, public-office, &c. in the metropolis and its environs, including the new buildings to the present time (1810) by John Lockie – https://archive.org/details/lockiestopograph00lockiala/page/n7/mode/2up

The Secret Dept. of the Post Office – https://www.1723constitutions.com/the-context/the-jacobite-threat/charles-delafaye/espionage-lodge/

‘Seals and Surveillance. The Post Office in the 19th Century or: Minding your Beeswax’ in which Jo Hockey – https://www.wssociety-heritage.co.uk/seals-and-surveillance-the-post-office-in-the-19th-century/

The Post-Office Annual Directory (1814) – https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101041607647&seq=3

Great Britian Philatelic Society – Letter Rates 1801 to 1839 – https://www.gbps.org.uk/information/rates/inland/great-britain-1801-1839.php

Postal Museum – https://www.postalmuseum.org/blog/190-years-of-londons-post-office-quarter/

BIO

Shannon Donnelly’s writing has won numerous awards, including the Indie BRAG Gold Medallion, a nomination for Romance Writer’s of America’s RITA award, the Grand Prize in the “Minute Maid Sensational Romance Writer” contest, judged by Nora Roberts, and others. Her writing has repeatedly earned 4½ Star Top Pick reviews from Romantic Times magazine, as well as praise from Booklist and other reviewers, who note: “simply superb”…”wonderfully uplifting”….and “beautifully written.” Her Regency romances have been awarded the Indie BRAG Gold Medallion and the Bookseller’s Best award for best novella. Her latest Regency, Lady Lost, set in Paris 1815, finishes the ‘Regency Ladies in Distress’ series and is available at multiple online bookshops.