When Sir Rowland Hill got "the sack"

I was in a National Trust bookshop last week. I always enjoy looking for books and found some that interested me. My dad found a couple of books that he was interested in too. They were Punch 1843 and Punch 1844. I had never heard of Punch before but my dad told me that it was a popular magazine that took an amusing view of news stories. I have discovered that it was founded in 1841 and the books my dad picked up contain all the best bits from the year before. I looked through it and there is some very interesting and detailed artwork in it. My dad was reading the 1843 book and he came across these pictures. He showed me them and asked me if I knew anything about Rowland Hill. Well, I know that he was something to do with the Penny Black but I didn't know much more. These pictures are interesting and I will come to them in a moment, but first I want to state the key facts. As I thought, Sir Rowland Hill was the inventor of the Penny Black and founder of the Penny Post. Changing the postal system was all his idea, although I don't know if he thought it would impact the entire world in the way it did. Sir Rowland's changes were revolutionary and made sending letters cheap for everyone. Before the Penny Post sending a letter was expensive and for a working class person could cost a day's wages. After it, anyone could send a letter anywhere in the UK for just a penny.

So you would think that everyone thought the Penny Post was a great idea? Wrong. We all know the Penny Black was released in May 1940, but did you know that Sir Rowland had also created pre-paid enveloped called Mulready envelopes? A lot of people made fun of them. It seems some of the people behind it were stationers - people who made and sold stationery - who thought they would lose out if the Mulready envelopes were successful. Apart from these vested interests, there were others who objected. Lord Lichfield, a Whig member of the House of Lords, called the Penny Post a "wild and visionary scheme". There were even people in the Post Office itself who didn't like the very idea of a Penny Post. Willian Leader Maberly, secretary to the Post Office, sad that Sir Rowland's idea "appears to be a preposterous one, utterly unsupported by facts and resting entirely on assumption".

Some MPs thought the Penny Post would bankrupt the Post Office. Some wealthy people seemed to object to poorer people having the freedom to write more. And some just didn't like Sir Rowland. Sir Rowland was appointed by the government to oversee the Penny Post. This made sense, but when the new Conservative government was elected the following year the new Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, clearly wasn't a big fan of his. A lot of people at the Post Office also didn't like the changes, or the way Sir Rowland was running things, and wanted to go back to the "good old days". There were a lot of traditionalists who didn't think someone who was just a school teacher should be running the Post Office.

In 1842 Sir Rowland was dismissed by the Conservative government. The Conservatives had never supported the Penny Post and used an argument about finances as an excuse to replace him.

The pictures from Punch show this. They are two sides to a "Penny Post Medal" that Punch had made up, and clearly they were on the side of Sir Rowland. The first picture shows Sir Rowland in 1840. Punch shows "the triumph of Rowland Hill". It describes postmen as "genii" (a wonderful word!) and "benevolent distributors of records of hopes, affections [and] tenderest associations". How nice! But the other picture - "the obverse" of the "medal" - shows "Britannia presenting Rowland Hill with the sack". Punch explains what is happening in this picture. "Sir Robert Peel no sooner get into place than, in reward for the services of Mr Rowland Hill*, he turns him from the Post Office." It then criticises people who "long for the good days of ninepenny, tenpenny and shilling rates" and accuses them of "delicate bigotry". Ouch! It has taken me a long time to write this and I've been working on it for a few days. I wanted to share these fantastic drawings which made a really important point about a historical event. At the time no-one knew if the Penny Post was going to survive, especially when the government was so critical of it. It did survive and Sir Rowland later became secretary to the Post Office, but the writers and artists at Punch had no idea how things were going to work out. When a lot of people wanted to see the Penny Post fail, Punch defended Sir Rowland's idea. Well done, Punch! It is always good to discover more about history and I have learned a lot more about Rowland Hill. But I think this is important for other reasons.

A lot of us seem to think the Penny Black was invented and everything was wonderful afterwards. That isn't true. There were lots of people who didn't like change and wanted to turn the clock back. There were many reasons why some people didn't think the Penny Post would work, and why other people didn't want it to work.

There are people around today who don't want to see any changes. They want things to be the way they have always been, even though really everything is changing all the time. In the 1840s it was people who didn't want ordinary people writing to each other. Today there are people who see changes to our postal service as a threat to how things should be. Maybe it is stamps with QR codes? Maybe it is new clever postboxes that are solar powered and have barcode scanners? Maybe it's postal services in countries like Denmark deciding to end letter deliveries? Or maybe it is more people using online postal services? I am 13 years old but I have heard a lot of older people talking about how their hobby is in danger and I don't think it's true.

The way postal systems work will keep changing. What was good in 1840 isn't necessarily good in 2025. If Sir Rowland Hill was alive today I don't know what he'd think of the modern postal service but I am sure he would support innovation. And if the writers at Punch were alive to day I don't know what they'd make of it all either and maybe they wouldn't be saying such lovely things about email servers and WhatsApp as they did about postmen, but I am sure they would welcome they way that modern technology makes communication cheap. Changes don't threaten philately. They only threaten the way we have done things before. I've said in another article that postal history is still being made. Most philatelists are people who are interested in the past, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be interested in the future. None of us should want postal services to be the same as they were maybe 20 years ago (or more!). Philately will change too and that's good. There are already new areas of collecting, and so many types of labels and stickers. Not everyone will like them, but then again not everyone likes First Day Covers or Miniature Sheets. I don't think philately will die but I believe it will evolve. I think that's what makes it so exciting. Sir Rowland Hill had no idea that his brilliant plan would create millions of philatelists, but it happened! I am sure the next 185 years will be as fascinating as the last! PS: Thank you to my mum and dad for helping me with this. I really wanted to write this article but found it quite hard. They helped me to plan it out and say what I was thinking. I hope you think it was worth the effort. * Sir Rowland Hill wasn't knighted until 1860, so at the time the book was published he would just have been Mr Rowland Hill.