The postman always used to ring eight times

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 648453.ece

Graham Stewart: Past notes

Britain’s postal service is in crisis. With industrial action crippling deliveries, it seems that the only things being posted at the moment are losses. While postmen are mislaying 14 million letters a year, the Post Office has been losing £4 million a week. Now that customers are turning to rivals or to e-mail, the Royal Mail’s supremacy is threatened as never before.

It is 372 years since King Charles I, scrambling around for new means of raising money without involving bothersome politicians, hit upon the idea of allowing his subjects to use his Royal Mail. From that moment until relatively recently, the story has been one of innovation and expansion.

But the extent to which the current service differs from what was offered to our Edwardian ancestors could not be more marked. With the abandonment of the second post to domestic addresses, these days the postman only rings once.

By contrast, in 1914, a resident of Central London was accustomed to up to 12 postal deliveries a day. A seven-times-a-day service was offered to suburban households and this was also the norm in other main cities like Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle. Manchester’s postmen managed eight rounds daily. Even in Devon, the citizens of Exeter heard the clatter from the letterbox five times a day.

The result was that people could use the postal system in a similar way to how they currently use e-mail or text messages. Quick exchanges could be fired off, allowing for a running commentary of spur-of-the-moment thoughts and advance excuses for turning up late for lunch, dinner or the theatre.

The Post Office not only had a monopoly control for the delivery of all letters and parcels in Britain (which by 1914 had reached 5.9 billion items a year). It also had the monopoly for the newer means of communication: telegrams and telephone. It did all this with a staff of less than 250,000 employees and made net revenue of £6.6 million. Profitability rose steadily thereafter, leading Viscount Wolmer, the Assistant Postmaster-General, to admit in 1932 that the postal service had become “the milch cow of the Treasuryâ€