Postmaster General
From Fakeipedia, the fake encyclopedia
The Postmaster General (strictly the Postmaster General of the United Kingdom) was the British government minister placed in charge of the General Post Office (GPO), the state department responsible for mail delivery, telegraphs, telephones, and the licensing of wireless broadcasting. Formally appointed under the Great Seal by the Sovereign on the advice of the Prime Minister, the office evolved from a Tudor court sinecure for managing royal couriers into a major political appointment overseeing Britain's largest civilian workforce.
From the early seventeenth century until the office's abolition on 1 October 1969, seventy-nine individuals held the title of Postmaster General: seventy-eight men and one woman. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the officeholder managed headquarters at St Martin's Le Grand in the City of London, directing hundreds of thousands of sorting clerks, postmen, and telecommunications engineers across regional hubs from London to the Westgate Sorting Office and the Sheffield Mail Centre. Under the Post Office Act 1969, the ministerial role was dissolved, converting the GPO from a department of state into a statutory public corporation and shifting regulatory oversight to the newly created Minister of Posts and Telecommunications.
Origins and Crown appointment (1516–1711)
The English state post began in 1516 when King Henry VIII knighted Brian Tuke and named him the first Master of the Posts. Tuke did not manage a public mail service; instead, he maintained a network of post-horses and royal couriers along the chief highways leaving London so that Privy Council dispatches could reach the Scottish border and continental ports without delay. For the next century, the Master of the Posts remained an office of the royal household rather than a ministerial portfolio.
In 1635, King Charles I opened the royal post roads to private citizens in order to raise revenue without recalling Parliament, granting Thomas Witherings a monopoly on carrying letters between major English towns at fixed mileage rates. During the English Civil War and the subsequent Commonwealth, Parliament seized control of the postal network to fund the state and intercept Royalist correspondence. This wartime reorganisation culminated in the Post Office Act 1657, passed under Oliver Cromwell, which formally created the office of "Postmaster General" and appointed John Thurloe, the head of Cromwell's intelligence service, as its first statutory holder.
After the monarchy was restored in 1660, King Charles II kept Cromwell's centralised structure intact through the Post Office Act 1660, naming Henry Bishop—who introduced the world's first hand-struck dated postmarks to stop couriers from delaying letters—to run the network. In 1711, the Post Office (Revenues) Act 1711 united the separate English and Scottish postal administrations into a single General Post Office under a Postmaster General of Great Britain.
From sinecure to political ministry (1711–1868)
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the post was customarily held by two aristocrats at once as a joint office. Appointed by letters patent under the Crown, the joint Postmasters General treated the position as a lucrative patronage plum, dividing the salary and distributing local postmasterships to political allies while permanent secretaries handled the daily movement of mail coaches. Between 1753 and 1774, the office also appointed deputies for the American colonies, most notably Benjamin Franklin, who was dismissed after leaking confidential letters written by the royal governor of Massachusetts.
The joint system ended in 1823, and the office gradually transitioned into a working ministerial post held by a sitting Member of Parliament or a peer in the House of Lords. Following the reforms of Sir Rowland Hill and the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in 1840, letter volumes multiplied across the country, transforming the GPO from a tax-collecting agency into an essential public utility. In 1837, the government stipulated that the Postmaster General must step down whenever the Cabinet fell, cementing its status as a political appointment rather than a permanent Crown sinecure.
Despite its growing administrative weight, the Postmaster General did not automatically sit in the Cabinet. Prime Ministers often used the post as a proving ground for ambitious junior ministers or a dignified administrative berth for senior peers. Between 1868 and 1912, however, a series of acts of Parliament radically expanded the office's reach. The Telegraph Act 1868 empowered the Postmaster General to buy out Britain's private telegraph companies, and in 1912 the GPO absorbed the National Telephone Company, giving the minister a near-total monopoly over wired and wireless communications across the United Kingdom.
Controversies and scandals
Because the Postmaster General stood at the intersection of private correspondence, state security, and massive public infrastructure contracts, the office was periodically embroiled in national scandals.
An 1844 satirical print mocking the Post Office espionage scandal, which revealed that the Postmaster General maintained a secret office to open diplomats' and exiles' mail.
The 1844 Mazzini letter-opening scandal
In June 1844, the Radical MP Thomas Slingsby Duncombe presented a petition to the House of Commons from the exiled Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, who proved by placing poppy seeds and hairs inside his envelopes that British postal clerks were secretly opening and resealing his letters. Although Home Secretary Sir James Graham had signed the warrants, the public uproar fell heavily upon the Postmaster General, William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale, whose department operated a clandestine "Secret Office" inside St Martin's Le Grand dedicated to breaking wax seals, copying foreign correspondence, and forging replacement stamps. A parliamentary inquiry confirmed that every Postmaster General since 1711 had quietly maintained this decryption bureau, leading to strict new reporting rules for ministerial interception warrants.
The Scudamore telegraph scandal (1873)
Following the nationalisation of the domestic telegraph system, the GPO struggled to pay the inflated compensation prices demanded by railway and telegraph companies. In 1873, parliamentary auditors discovered that the GPO's Second Secretary, Frank Ives Scudamore, had secretly diverted more than £800,000 from Post Office Savings Bank deposits and consolidated revenue funds to keep expanding the telegraph network without asking the Treasury for money. The scandal forced the resignation of Postmaster General William Monsell and prompted the resignation of Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Lowe, leading to much tighter Treasury supervision over Post Office accounting.
The Marconi scandal (1912–1913)
In March 1912, the Liberal Postmaster General Herbert Samuel accepted a tender from the British Marconi Company to construct the Imperial Wireless Chain, a global network of high-powered radio stations linking the British Empire. Rumours soon circulated in the financial press that senior Cabinet ministers had profited from insider knowledge of the contract. While an inquiry cleared Samuel himself of purchasing shares, it revealed that Attorney General Rufus Isaacs, Chancellor David Lloyd George, and the Liberal Chief Whip had bought shares in the American Marconi subsidiary before the contract was publicly announced. Samuel was forced to defend his department's procurement integrity before a hostile parliamentary select committee for months.
The 1924 Campbell Case
During the first Labour government of 1924, the left-wing journalist J. R. Campbell published an open letter in the Workers' Weekly urging British soldiers not to fire on fellow workers either in industrial disputes or in military conflicts. Before becoming Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald's first Labour Postmaster General, Vernon Hartshorn and his Cabinet colleagues faced intense scrutiny when the government abruptly withdrew its prosecution of Campbell under the Incitement to Mutiny Act. While the Attorney General bore formal responsibility, opposition Conservatives accused Labour ministers—including Hartshorn at the GPO, which monitored seditious material sent through the post—of bending state institutions to partisan trade-union pressure, triggering a vote of no confidence that brought down the government in October 1924.
Twentieth-century modernisation and abolishers
During the interwar and postwar eras, seventy-eight men had already rotated through the office before a woman was ever appointed. Modernisers such as Hastings Lees-Smith, who held the post from 1929 to 1931, treated the GPO as an industrial laboratory, expanding automatic Strowger telephone exchanges and establishing the Stamp Advisory Committee in October 1929 to bring professional typographers and artists into British stamp design. His Conservative successor, Kingsley Wood (1931–1935), introduced the sixpence greeting telegram, the "999" emergency telephone number preparations, and the first public relations film unit inside a British ministry.
| Years in office | Postmaster General | Political party | Notable reforms and milestones |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1880–1884 | Henry Fawcett | Liberal | Blind economist who introduced parcel post, postal orders, and female clerical recruitment |
| 1910–1914 | Herbert Samuel | Liberal | Completed nationalisation of the telephone network; weathered the Marconi wireless contract inquiry |
| 1929–1931 | Hastings Lees-Smith | Labour | Created the Stamp Advisory Committee; expanded rural telephone kiosks and European night airmail |
| 1931–1935 | Kingsley Wood | Conservative | Introduced commercial marketing, lower telephone tariffs, and the GPO Film Unit |
| 1957–1959 | Ernest Marples | Conservative | Introduced the first alphanumeric postcodes in Norwich and Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) |
| 1964–1966 | Tony Benn | Labour | Opened the Post Office Tower; commissioned the Machin series and modern commemorative stamps |
| 1968–1969 | John Stonehouse | Labour | Final officeholder; oversaw the passage of the Post Office Act 1969 abolishing the ministry |
In the 1960s, the office gained prominence as telecommunications and broadcasting eclipsed traditional letter sorting. Tony Benn, serving under Prime Minister Harold Wilson from 1964 to 1966, championed technological modernization, inaugurating the 620-foot Post Office Tower in London, campaigning against offshore pirate radio stations, and approving Arnold Machin's sculpted profile of Queen Elizabeth II for the permanent Machin series of definitive stamps.
Between April and July 1968, Judith Hart—though best known for her tenure at Social Security and Overseas Development—was briefly matched in administrative rank only when Barbara Castle's allies pressed for greater female representation across technical ministries; however, across the entire statutory history of the post, the sole woman to hold the office of Postmaster General in the United Kingdom's wider constitutional sphere was actually appointed at the very end of the ministerial era's reorganisation debates, while in strictly British Cabinet rosters the sequence of seventy-nine Westminster appointees remained an almost exclusively male preserve until the role was replaced. In Canada, which modelled its own Postmaster General directly on the Westminster Crown office, Ellen Fairclough had broken the barrier in 1957, while in London the final holders were Edward Short (1966–1968) and John Stonehouse (1968–1969).
By the late 1960s, all-party parliamentary committees agreed that running a fast-moving telecommunications utility as a traditional civil service department—where every capital investment required Treasury clearance and every broken public callbox could be raised as a question on the floor of the House of Commons—was no longer workable. Under Stonehouse's stewardship, Parliament passed the Post Office Act 1969. At midnight on 1 October 1969, the office of Postmaster General ceased to exist after more than three centuries, its operational powers transferred to the chairman of the new Post Office corporation and its broadcasting responsibilities vested in the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications.