The Post Office is facing the biggest shake-up in years But Bristolians weren't too happy about the last one either.
Bristol's influential merchants had had their way, the modern system of letter delivery to every household in Britain at the same price may never have got off the ground. The idea of a reliable postal service goes back to the days of the great empires of Persia and Rome when good communications were vital in holding together far flung provinces.
In Britain, both merchants and universities had their own private networks but by the time of Elizabeth I it was obvious this was not enough. Elizabeth banned private posts to foreign countries and James I gave his postmaster general a monopoly over inland mail as well. But it was Thomas Witherington, quaintly named Postmaster of England For Foreign Parts under Charles I, who reformed the postal service, enabling a letter to get from London to Edinburgh in just six days and establishing a charging system based on distance.
It was left to Bath postmaster Ralph Allen to come up with a plan for cross country posts which didn't need to go through London and he made a lot of money out of it. The growth of trunk roads and mail coach services - the idea of other another Bath entrepreneur, John Palmer - speeded up delivery, but the government piled on postage rates to help finance the wars with the French.
By the time Rowland Hill came along in 1837 with his plan for common postage rates for the whole country according to weight and not distance, and with a minimum rate of 3d, the postal system was beyond the reach of ordinary folk.
Other cities had been campaigning strongly for postal reform: Bristol didn't think it was necessary The city's two Tory MPs both opposed such newfangled ideas; the Chamber of Commerce was more concerned with speeding up delivery than cutting postage rates, and the corporation and Merchant Venturers expressed no opinion at all. Even the local press was luke warm and, curiously, more concerned about the loss of tax revenue caused by Rowland Hill's penny post. When it was adopted in 1840, the Bristol Journal thundered: 'How long is the revenue of this once powerful country to he entrusted to the hands of nincompoops who are now wasting it ?'
Interestingly, it was a Bristol surgeon, John Estlin, who organized a testimonial fund for Hill in gratitude for his work on postal reform. Some £13,000 was raised with £300 coming from Bristol.
The penny post was a remarkable success with the number of letters posted rising from 90 million in 1839 to 679 million in 1864 -more than enough to make up for the initial loss in tax revenue. In Bristol alone, weekly mail rose from 46,289 letters in 1841 to 158,490 by 1864.
The new railways superseded the mail coaches, but Bristol lost out to Milford Haven and Liverpool on its bid to become the mail station for Ireland and America, possibly because of its continuing apathy about the whole business.
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