Going Postal: Why the standardisation of the British Postal System was so important to the Bevans

You only have to look at the Bevan Family Archive section briefly to realise that the letters are being written through a time of great change in the British postal system; charting a movement away from a very simple sheet of paper, folded and sealed with wax, through several manifestations ending eventually with what we would now recognise as a stamp and envelope. These changes were part of a much larger movement in the nineteenth century towards a standardised, easy and affordable way to send and receive mail in Britain.

 

The postal system, which has existed in some form from as early as the 11^th century, had up until the reign of King Charles I been used exclusively by the royal family, hence the name Royal Mail. It was Charles who extended the use of the service to the public but the massive increase in demands on the postal service resulted in several immediate problems.

 

The post office had an enormous and abrupt increase in customers and many people began to complain about letters being delivered late or not at all. As a result, in 1660 the Postmaster General Henry Bishop created the Bishop mark, a stamp which showed on the outside of the envelope what date the letter had been sent. This was the first step of many towards a more controlled and regulated mailing system.

 

However the dream of the post office as we know it today, pre-paid stamps, envelopes and postage fees calculated on weight, belonged to Rowland Hill, who on 10 January 1840 released to the public a completely new system by which to communicate.

 

Before Hill’s reforms, as you can see from the Bevan’s letters written before 1849, correspondence was generally written on a single sheet of paper, folded (usually three times) and then sealed with wax and stamped with a postmark. In the early nineteenth century the public would pay a rate calculated by the distance travelled and the number of sheets used: ‘the whole process was very time consuming and expensive’[1]. This explains why in the letter of 21 June 1834, we see Charlotte Bevan trying to cram as much information on to one sheet as possible, to avoid paying to send another (see image). This practice of writing on a sheet and then turning it through ninety degrees before writing again, so called cross writing, was a common practice prior the mid 19^th century.

 

Rowland Hill believed the established system to be unnecessarily inefficient and extortionate and he ran a public competition in 1839 for suggestions of types of adhesive labels and stamped paper and he used the resulting submissions to develop the Penny Black, the first standard British stamp, and these along with some pre-stamped wrappers, or envelopes, went on sale on 6 May 1840. After the imposition of Hills new postal reforms, the paper sold was much thinner and therefore weighed less, the price was also no longer dependent on the distance the letter had to travel and so postage became much more reasonable and many people could afford to write as much or as little as they needed. Over the next forty years the Post Office produced several new innovative ways to send mail, William Mulready was commissioned to produce a series of pre-stamped envelopes (see image[2]) and his intricate designs speak to the artistic manner with which these new developments were approached.

 

 The Bevans, it is clear, employed the stamp from its inception and they used several different kinds over the years represented in the archive. One of the most interesting archive images to study, in terms of stamps and their usages, is that of 24 November 1856. This uses three different kinds of stamp on one envelope, due to it being a ‘registered letter’ (or what we now call a recorded delivery). The most commonly seen stamp in the archive collection, and in fact at this time, is the Penny Red. This was the postal service’s second attempt at a standard public stamp, the colour being changed from black to red-brown colour in order that the cancellation stamp could more easily be seen. The Penny Red was so successful that it became Britain’s longest running stamp (1841-1879). This particular envelope also holds an embossed One Penny stamp that would have been pre-printed on to the envelope and the slightly more unusual Six Penny stamp, which was originally developed to pay the postage rate to Belgium.

 

These new developments to the postal system enabled the Bevans to transfer important documents at a safe and standardised rate, this kind of ‘registered’ postage was non-existent only 20 years previously. You can see from dates associated with the later letters that the Bevans corresponded more frequently once the new system was established and, upon looking at individual communications, that many were sent with only a little text in them (for example, 26 November 1856).

However the effects of the standardisation of the British Postal system becomes most clear when we look at the letters written about the death of Robert Malcolm Dewar. His death, which was sudden and unexpected while he was abroad with the navy could now be discussed by his closest family members and they could remain in touch and informed as more details of his unfortunate illness and untimely death were delivered. There is, in this era, a new-found ability to feel close and in-touch with those friends and family that could not easily or cheaply be reached beforehand. This new postal system was the first step of many towards a modernity in which any loved one is only the touch of a button away.

 

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